It’s not a real thang. The difference between, say, Norway and America is as big as the difference between Murica and China.
In some ways China and Norway are closer to each other than America.
In other ways, America is closer to China than Norway.
There is no western culture. It is a fucking sham.
Just look at Hollywood. The Chinese working class and the working class in the global south love it. Meanwhile Hollywood is dead in Europe because they can’t Relate to it anymore. That should tell you something.
Culture is infinitely more complex and layered than the stupid East west shit. Fuck.
When I say “the West” I’m referring to the imperialist powers - the US, France, UK, and their lackeys. I’m not saying they’re culturally homogeneous, although believe me, as an Australian, our culture is extremely American at this point.
I agree, it's for this reason that Japan was considered an honorary Western nation.
Well, I'd argue the opposite, there is. The european states, excluding the eastern ones, have been americanized to a huge extent. We wear jeans, drink coca cola, eat Mc Donalds and worship capitalism (not as much as the US though). We watch the same shows, use the same apps, and generally consume the same content as Americans do, with more regulations in some areas of course, but that's just a detail. We're to the USA what Greece was to Rome, a weaker neighbour that is incorporated into the Empire, in a way. And whenever we try and deviate from the USA, we simply imitate them.
Sure, an argument can be made that each European state is different because of obvious reasons (languages, history, and so on), but the older national cultures are actually struggling to stay alive and relevant against the American one. As an example, see Scandinavia's english proficiency, like, I was SHOCKED when they had an army poster in Sweden which was written partially in English. Languages are a great tool to foster national unity, and when languages die, nationalism fades away. Why do you think Israel and Ireland tried to revive Hebrew and Irish ? Why do you think Belgium is fractured as it is ?
In fact, I'm going to say this : if tomorrow, Canada, the USA, Australia, New-Zealand and the UK merged together, you'd get some resistance surely, but in the end, their fusion wouldn't really change anything to the daily lives of the citizens. Not the same could be said of European countries, because of the previously mentionned factors, but the European Union, in a way, is the death of national cultures through uniformisation, a new culture is replacing the old ones, most of it borrowed from the USA. If you wonder what I mean, look at the pervasive US influence in South Korea or Japan. Look at Kpop, the office culture, the talk shows, the unbridled capitalism and so on.
TLDR : Western culture exists, no matter how much we hate it. And unlike the neo-pagan redpilled traditionalist morons seem to think, it's not something worth defending at all.
You forgot the level of body modesty that younger Europeans now have. Absorbing American puritanical culture.
Thanks amerikkkka.
East/West isn't an entirely useless concept. If nothing else, the very fact that people use and talk about it means that it has meaning; after all, there's no real distinction between something real and something that's a social construct when talking about culture.
That said, there are a lot of people that are really unhealthily obsessed with the concept and take it to ridiculous extremes.
edit: and also to agree with another commenter, a lot of people use it in place of terms that would be more accurate.
I think the west IS a real thing. But it's not the overarching culture of European-influenced nations. Because that doesn't exist outside of a weak Pan-Europeanism that is about as strong as that of a unified Chinese culture that includes every minority nation. certainly it has almost nothing to do with the Settler states.
What the West is (or was) is the shared cultural values of the European ruling classes. The reason that the Russian, French, and English Courts all spoke French for centuries. The unified nature of art and music clearly tied to that.
Meanwhile the ordinary people had little to no exposure to that culture outside maybe the latest tunes from a hit Singspiel.
Meanwhile Hollywood is dead in Europe
As far as I'm aware, big Hollywood blockbusters are as big here as they're ever been. Well, sans the whole viral apocalypse thing slightly fucking things up for the movie industry
The west as a political block is absolutely a thing.
"Western culture" is a racist construct where some loser draws a big squiggly line around all the bits and pieces of culture that've been used to construct their country's origin myth and pretends that's a monolith instead of a bunch of cherrypicked nonsense from a bunch of unrelated peoples who either hated each other or didn't live at the same time.
I try to sprinkle it up a bit and use terms like Anglosphere, which is very useful when talking about imperialism, but I don't really know a better shorthand for "every country that has adopted capitalism and is naturally antagonistic to actually existing socialist states, or the general self-determination of developing nations." We used to have these really useful terms called the First World, the Second World, and the Third World, but *ahem* Western chauvinism has rendered them meaningless.
Yeah, none of it really captures the whole picture. I suppose that's not an accident, either.
Okay, how about this: Controls Bretton Woods, Gets Fucked Over by Bretton Woods. That's what east west means. WTO, IMF with some mix of NATO, G6 divide the east and the west.
The real West is India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_West
