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Comment by gffrd | Hacker News Reader

Yikes, really?

And what do they fear the impact of this to be? (Honest question)

My fear is that culture of my people will be assimilated and co-opted. My culture is thousands of years old, and we've survived plagues, war, and murder.

I'd like to transmit this culture to my children as I feel it's valuable.

I wager though that if we grabbed a person from your culture from two thousand years ago they would find many differences comparing their experience of the culture with yours. It's inevitable that it will change and adapt over time. The only completely fixed culture is the one that has no participants any more.

Of course we've adapted and learned from our experience. But it's done by us and for us.

Unless invited, it's reasonable to reject others imposing their values on our culture.

> it's reasonable to reject others imposing their values on our culture.

I do agree with this sentiment for all cases with a caveat (for any given culture)

- Protection of individuals must be improved/maintained. Racism and queerphobia are two obvious examples that many of us would do well to move on from within our own cultures, and will lead to youth rejecting the culture that they are raised in (in my experience)

This doesn't need to be _forced_ on any given culture, but it will be the end result, as if a given culture refuses to drop baggage that youth find unacceptable it will eventually die.

This take is largely driven by my analysis of conservative's who claim to worship Christ, but I think is generalizable across cultures.

Unfortunately, the surest way to kill a culture is to make it irrelevant. By that I mean, it has to be information that's incorporated the current cultural context, not just the context as it was when the custom arose.

Teaching children history and customs is great -- it informs how they live within society. But forcing them to only heed the customs of the culture back then makes them ill equipped to survive in today. That's many times more so in a multi-cultural society, as everyone's culture goes into the so-called melting pot.

I have respect for where I come from, but that knowledge alone is absolutely not enough to equip me for living in today's world. My parents (and many others) say it all the time "when I was X it was different ...". Yeah. It was.

Edit: to emphasize my sincerity. No disrespect intended and I hope non-taken.

What happens if your culture is assimilated and co-opted?

Cultural change. Loss of their political power. Less consolidation of capital.

^ this is a good summary.

E for more detail: Most individuals who feel this way fear at least one of these greatly, and may or may not fear the others. The people I am thinking of mostly fall in the "cultural change" category. See (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33924352) for one example.

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