Monday, November 30, 2015

"Everything the World Has Culturally Appropriated from the West"

"In my research on cultural appropriation, I’ve uncovered a shocking truth, a great, unspoken crime against humanity, hidden in plain sight. It is the greatest, longest-running, and most heinous act of appropriation in global history."
The appropriation of Western Civilisation. 
Half-Pakistani in descent, I feel a personal sense of guilt at how non-western countries have unapologetically oppressed their fellow nations. I’ve therefore taken it upon myself to compile a list of all the things the world has culturally appropriated from the west, in hope that this injustice might one day be corrected. 
Philosophy 
Alfred North Whitehead described philosophy as “a series of footnotes to Plato.”
Architecture 
Look out at the skyline of any modern, non-western city, and you will find it looks strangely similar to a modern, western city.

Free Speech 
People are so obsessed by free speech that they’ll actually fight their own countries just to appropriate it. 
Due Process 
This is another western cultural creation that causes non-westerners to go into rabid fits of appropriation-addled hunger. Entire wars have been waged and governments deposed for the chance to appropriate these.

Political Ideologies 
Aside from Islamic countries, some of which are making a commendable effort to restrain themselves, most countries around the world have adopted a western political ideology of some kind.

Vaccines 
Country doctor Edward Jenner invented the vaccine in England, 1776. 
The Scientific Method 
Yes, science can be appropriated. As postmodern feminists tell us, science is just another cultural/social construct. And it’s one that’s been stolen from the west.

The Automobile 
Asian drivers might not have the greatest reputation, but the fact that they’re driving at all is down to the western invention of the car.

Video Games 
Have you ever been beaten by a Korean person at Starcraft? Now you can feel personally racially victimised. 
The Computer 
Every time an Indian worker answers a tech support call, they are stealing another piece of western culture. 
The Internet 
“This is for everyone,” said the British inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, at the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. A traitor to his own culture if there ever was one. 
Campus social justice warriors insist that the greatest victims of cultural appropriation are non-western cultures, like the Native Americans, Japan, and Mexico. No doubt, they would use some sort of intellectual contortion to claim that western culture can’t be appropriated. Something about “punching up,” or “culture plus power” no doubt. 
But looking through history, a neutral observer can’t fail to see that western culture is the most appropriated of them all. Other countries have been borrowing, imitating, and remixing western culture for centuries. 
And that, unquestionably, is a good thing. Look at what the Japanese have done with video games, computers, and animation. Look at the brilliance of Korean composers, trained in classical European music. Look at the industriousness of China. Western culture has enriched the world, just as non-western cultures have. It’s certainly possible to condemn it. But then, as demonstrated above, your arguments would look ridiculous.
Via Instapundit.

7 comments:

edutcher said...

Never forget automatic weapons.

Where would the Third World be without them?

ricpic said...

The Pakistani writes that "people are so obsessed with free speech that they'll fight their own countries to get it."

A Westerner would have written "fight their own governments" or "fight their own states," because it is also a western and only a western idea that state and nation or state and country are not synonymous.

deborah said...

What has the West appropriated from the East?

Chip Ahoy said...

Gunpowder, chief among our crimes.

The concept of paper money.

Silk.

Um, chopsticks.

Woks.

Kung Fu

Chicken Chou Mein

Chicken lo Mein

Shrimp Chou Mein

Shri ... you get the idea.

Egg rolls.

But not fortune cookies. Oddly, that's our invention.

Pagodas and lovely picturesque rock gardens

Confucius sayings, Charlie Chan movies, Hong Kong, Opium,

Tea. Nobody heard of the stuff until Dutch and British started bringing it back mostly to fill their hulls on return trips until a whole racing clipper ship thing developed for speed in rushing the tea.

Terraced agriculture.

Kites.

Bamboo.

These are the things we appropriated from the East off le haut de ma tête.

Odd, the idea of dragons develops independently.

You know what? One time I bought aquarium plants and set them up. Shortly after I was sitting in a comfy chair directly in front of the aquarium as a television when a water bug swam in font of me.

At the bottom of the tank following the edge where gravel meets glass, a bug like a black sinister millipede with extra sensory extensions segmented and moving rapidly and sinuously and exactly like a Chinese dragon in appearance and in movement. It was stunningly awful and in a snaky flash disappeared to the back behind plants. That was that.

A few days later a tiny blue dragonfly fluttered about the aquarium in the level of air between water surface and hood with its lights. It lived a few days and then died.

The insight was that is where Chinese get their idea of what dragons look like and how they move and of them being good luck -- from dragon fly larva. It's why their dragons differ from the Wests' even with Komodo dragons available for model. Look, this is MY f'n epiphany and I'll make of it what I will.

deborah said...

Cool story, Chip, good assumption.

Tao Te Ching

bagoh20 said...

Didn't the Inca have terraced agriculture?

Where was the idea of cultural appropriation invented?

That's right.

bagoh20 said...

How come that horizontal vagina never took off over here?