That said, do you think it's important to preserve these traditions?
I don't think it's important to preserve traditions
for the sake of preserving traditions, m'self, or in preserving traditions whole cloth. There's no inherent value to a historical record or long running behavioral/cultural patterns; they're incidental and arbitrary, the results of accident rather than construction (though, of course, successive accidents can produce very practical outcomes.). If there's practical aspects to keeping
parts of it around, then...
good. Keep those parts, and do remember context can be important. But don't keep dirty water in with the baby, as the saying goes. Ideally we want a tub full of nothing but babies and no bath water at all, but if nothing else we want to minimize the bath water/baby ratio as much as possible.
The overall goal of cultural intermingling, t'me, is to steal every bloody useful thing from every bloody where and throw every bloody thing else to the curb. Tradition is no reason to hold on to detrimental behavioral patterns or to cleave to means and methods that are obviously inferior to other methods. Similarly, that a particularly beneficial behavioral pattern is associated with a particular cultural base is no reason to
not utilize (as an individual, as a group) that behavioral pattern, and we shouldn't be letting obviously useful means and methods (even if they're only conditionally so based on geographic area or whatnot) drop off the chart just because they're practiced by people with relatively (relative to our own norms, anyway) funny names. We should definitely be more aggressive about thoroughly recording and documenting useful cultural bits and bobs and figuring out how to integrate and utilize them.
As a whole, though, I don't think culture genuinely matters. At all. What's important is the individual memetic components considered
in aggregate to
be culture, and those should be considered on their own merit before the worth of the aggregate is considered relevant (if it's relevant in the least). Insofar as multiculturalism goes, I think it currently does a better job than most things of facilitating that process, by dint of encouraging a lot of different cultural groups to get into fairly close contact and interaction, giving the memetic transfer, interaction, and competition a better environment to occur. I wouldn't necessarily say it's a good idea to keep dying cultures alive, though -- if it can't keep up, loot the body and let it die. Opinion of nationalism should be obvious from that, ha. The aggregate is pointless, and considering it to be of some kind of comparative merit is equally so.
As to th'concept of cultural blending causing a reduction in... something. Innovation? Interesting variations on the theme? Brought up earlier. I call bullshit. I read fanfiction, alright? If there's ever a situation where you're dealing with an insular, largely homogeneous memetic base, that'd be it, especially for older and more established fan bases. A great deal of innovation and interesting variations on the theme occur anyway. When it comes right down to it, even within a particular memetic aggregate you've got a great deal of individual moving parts, and the combinations they're capable of are tremendous. I think that it's more likely than not that, when it's all said and done, we're going to have something more vibrant and active in that sort of sense than anything more distinct separation is allowing to happen. Providing we don't fuck it up,* at that point we'll have all the best moving parts and all the less-than-best-but-still-good ones, too, and whatever structurally necessary bits associated with those. What we'll be able to make from that should be pretty bloody impressive.
Is my 2˘, anyway.
*This is probably the "big if", though. Maybe if we just don't screw it up
too badly, heh.
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Topic: Multiculturalism & Nationalism, obstacles to coexisting? (Read 19114 times)