Has the West Lost is Culture?

How does one begin to define culture? A politically transient, fluid, nebulous and characteristically subjective notion. As hard to grasp on to tangibly as smoke is; one sees it, smells it, tastes it and even brushes past it. It is undeniably there, yet often ephemeral in form. Separating ones culture from ones social history or politics is notoriously difficult; indeed, many regard the concepts as causally linked in intricate ways. Is culture merely an appendage of our political fabric ? As the quality and social structure of nation-states and polities takes on new forms, our culture can become both jeopardised and sharpened. The expansion of, or threat to/from, culture has been a fast-moving monolithic force propped up and propelled by globalisation. Thinking in particular of the West and it's own cultural trajectory, it is evident that we have undergone a major cultural transformation. Has the West lost its culture?

Defining what we mean when engaging in such a narrative is problematic, yet nonetheless important. What, in any case, do we mean when we say 'West', and crucially, what do we mean when we talk about a 'loss of culture' ? The historical trajectory of culture and social fabric has been catalysed and perpetuated by psychological attachments and the multifarious spirits and constitutions of peoples. The British Empire and its various offshoots gave rise to a permeation and exportation of cultural patriarchy in its most indomitable, insurmountable form. Those so-called classical British institutions that were propagated and expropriated the world over served to glorify and reify the fetishised powerhouses of the West; liberal democracy, free market economics, separation of state from monarch, public schools, parliamentary bicameralism, freedom of speech, democratic voice and, in many cases, an inherently Christian galvanisation of society and its structure, are just a handful of the homogenous cultural expansions that the British Empire sought to translate determinedly overseas.

Understandably, opinion and sentiment remain deeply divided as to what virtues the Empire truly exported in actuality; the abhorrent treatment of minority races and 'the wretched of the earth' that domineering Western colonial forces acted on were the dark and undignified products of an imperial expansion that was domestically held to be a generally pious and omnibenevolent one. 'I would annex the planets if I could'; this statement from Cecil Rhodes poignantly encapsulates the obsession and priority of British imperialism at the height of the British Empire. An obsession that overtly favoured a culturally Western monopolisation of the globe.

It is evident even on such a preliminary examination of Western imperialist traditions that the culture of the West, along with all the supposed existential benefits it exported to foreign territories, formed part of the binding roots of a cultural phenomenon that attempted to clone the 'greatness of Britain' on an international scale. But what were the essential attachments and appraisals that meant people were willing to die for king and country? How did other cultures become subjugated and subjected to a generally pejorative representation used to fuel the colonial fire of the West vs. the rest narrative? How did slavery, a key institution of colonial economies under British auspices - a practice so universally abhorred and resented in the modern era - go uninhibited for so long under a culturally Western surveillance, one that was claimed to be the very pinnacle and pantheon of liberty, freedom and democracy? Were plantations and serfdom the 'small' price to pay for the promulgation of western values across the world?

The legitimisation of colonialism from the point of view of the West was clearly underpinned by an eschewing of so-called primitive practices by 'alien' cultures, a perpetuated belief that these others needed saving, and above all, saving from themselves. Those in fetters under expansive cultural colonialism were far away from the apparent advantages of imperial domination.

Nonetheless, the contentious appraisal of the Empire as a godlike spread of Western liberalism still has its devoted champions. The cultural institutions of the West that became replicated abroad, such as the revered British education system, are still to this day worshipped as indispensable pillars of a culturally civilised people. Taking modern-day India as a clichéd yet illuminating case, the private schools and English-speaking institutions that were adopted as the cultural modus operandi of civil society still remain essential markers of a successful and mature polity for their people. Parliamentary democracy was also worshipped in such nations as India, where it too was promoted as the sign of a culturally free and thriving society. A further example, among a plethora of colonial subjects, would be Singapore; a nation whose institutions post-empire became almost a hommage to those British bodies that became all too familiar; public boarding schools with pedagogical English syllabuses to name but one.

Perhaps the greatest cultural exportation of the West, though, has been the English language. A shining example of a global lingua franca that has become duplicated and expanded throughout continents ; what clearer case exists of a cultural hegemonic proliferation than the linguistic permeation of a language along with all the social implications it carries for individuals? If language shapes thought and feeling, then the British tongue has undoubtedly been the most obvious shaper of identity and behaviour worldwide, an expansive vocabulary that reflects the fundamental forces of the sociopolitical dynamics that the West sought to export, a de facto commemoration of the great Western cultural movement that saw itself as the benchmark of modern society.

With all this considered, the so-called loss of culture that has long been explored in anthropology and sociology would seem perhaps far-fetched from the Western perspective; in the 21st century, we still see a predominantly culturally western media shaping the agenda and, to allude to a Chomsky narrative, manufacturing global consent. But then the negation of a loss of culture may not be as simple as to draw on current examples of Westen cultural institutions and corpuses for it to be explained. This would be a logical fallacy. Cultural identity and its implications are far greater than the sum of its institutional parts. Montesquieu famously claimed that climate is the first empire; the force that infiltrates so powerfully underneath individuals and society. However, he may have omitted cultural identity from his quasi-prophetic circumscription. It is culture and identity that binds people together, creates real and imagined communities across borders, divides provinces, perpetuates conflict, and it is culture for which people are willing to march on to the battlefield and proudly shed their blood. How can such a fluid and subjective idea have such real, concrete consequences?

People become heavily attached to their cultural identities; it is what provides them with a national raison d'être. A threat to culture is a threat to life. In the current geopolitical climate, what better example of the existential importance of culture than the so-called War On Terror in which East has been strongly pitted against West. The clash of civilisations that Huntington predicted as the prevailing dynamic of global forces has become scarily real. The threat of modern terrorist organisations has generally been perceived to be a battle of cultures, a stark conflict between opposing cultural organisms. Indeed, many of the actions of modern terrorist groups are often claimed to be justified through the lens of Western occupation in countries like Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

But the use of cultural identity as a contextualisation of actions of terror and modern warfare may be an untenable and naive one. Can something as semantically and socially contested as culture truly be sufficient a reason for objectively explaining contemporary conflict? With regards to the Western sphere, the forces of immigration, globalisation and internationalisation have become regarded as changing the cultural status quo; organisms which are perhaps for some beginning to erode the once unshakeable institutions that the cultural West revered, like raging waves gradually causing the cliff edge to recede.

If we stick with the political narrative of immigration and globalisation that lay at the heart of such political leaps as Brexit, the rise of UKIP and indeed, the rise of Trump, the loss of Western culture or the threat to it has perhaps been more of a concrete existential actuality than has formerly been recognised. All this talk of a Brexit vote amongst the elderly may have been propped up by a growing disenchantment with the cultural vitality of Britain supposedly crumbling under the pressure of migratory forces. The virtues of immigration and globalisation that have benefited the macro and micro economy have nonetheless been perceived by many as withering away our adored British traditions and customs; the rhetoric in this regard has long been one of 'integration', 'assimilation' and 'adaptation'. The narrative clearly assumes that the Western culture and systems have to be respected and adopted by immigrants if they are to bring utility. But why is this? How can such a vague notion of British culture be so adamantly used as the yardstick measure of successful or useful immigration? We often take for granted just how absurd the preponderance of one culture over another as the 'correct way of life' truly is. The strikingly Orwellian nature of the hegemonic forces of the West are all to reminiscent of the predictions made in 1984. Whether a nation like the UK can realistically preserve all of their cultural traditions and social identity in the modern era of expansive immigration and globalisation is contentious, to say the least.

What is lucidly clear is that now, more than ever, culture lies at the heart of a multitude of global dynamics and continues to be used as the prevailing explanation for issues as wide ranging as border administration to global wars on terror. So, has the West lost its culture? The answer I would in fact offer may appear crass and offensive to those deeply concerned with the erosion of our social identity; the Western culture, over recent years, has only expanded further.