John Cleese criticised for saying London no longer an English city - Sensationalist Headlines

I don't live in the UK nor do I really know all that much about John Cleese beyond what I've googled so I'm going to make a couple of assumptions and say that, for the sake of argument, London is vastly different from other large cities in England and that John Cleese is a lefty. I'm putting these at the front of my posts because I'm really hoping people will actually read it and not make a response saying that I'm calling John Cleese a rightwinger. The problem with making statements like "London isn't an English city" and "I prefer my culture over others because their culture practices XYZ" (in this case, female genital mutilation (as opposed to the much more enlightened male genital mutilation )) is what while some fellow liberals and centrists/non-commital types might have the nuance to understand what he is saying, comments like these are going to be co-opted by people who have a vested political interest in attacking things like diversity and Islam, or even just immigrant populations generally. This isn't just me making shit up, you can literally just go through the replies of what he is saying. Now I'm not saying that he shouldn't have the right to speak his mind but I think public figures have a responsibility with how they use their position and platform to make sure that their views aren't twisted and used against themselves or others. A lot of people in this thread who I doubt are right-wing or nationalist themselves have made excuses and explanations and provided context and nuance to Cleese's words, and it would be nice to see that coming from him. I never really liked this argument because it feels like it infantilizes the only person with any agency in this scenario. I can't speak to the UK, but in the US I would take serious contention with all three of these being "cultural values". In fact, the factions of the American political sphere that most identify with the idea of "culturally American" are the ones most frequently pushing back against things like human rights and freedom of speech.

I wouldn't blame Cleese in this case as often times, places like Twitter will actively surround you based on keywords with people and accounts that most identify with those keywords. Even if those keywords are banal at most. In addition, as smart as the man is, he has openly admitted that he's terrible with technology.

I'm a little confused by that tweet about culture, is he implying then that whatever culture tolerating female genital mutilation is taking over in London?

The problem with this tweet is that people who usually say stuff like this have way more right extremist views and say things like this to project a popular opinion to edge viewers into more extreme views. John Cleese is definitely a liberal and Monty Python was thee most liberal media during its time but he's saying things that a lot of alt-right boys would say so it is easy for the liberal side of outrage culture to throw him in the right extremist side of the venn diagram.

I think John Celese deserves the benefit of the doubt here, but you have to be deliberately obtuse to just take that sort of statement at face value. Nobody says that sort of thing in vacuum.

If you're suggesting that all it takes for someone to become a right wing nationalist is for someone to tell them how stupid their ideas are then I'm not sure there was any preventing it in the first place.

No, its more like isolating and repeatedly attacking someone over a period of time will push them in to more welcoming circles which will then in turn corrupt them. You're just presenting an incredibly reductionist view on the matter.

One can just as fast deride western culture as backwards because of male genital mutilation. It's all very easy to look at another culture, see all the things that are bad at a glance and say "See, we're superior!", when you don't actually make the effort to learn about that other culture on any meaningful anthropological level, or look critically at your own culture. The truth is that modern western culture is fucking full of human rights violations, bad-faith manipulation of the press, and its share of free speech clamping, but more to the point comes with its own hefty problems like valuing the amassing of capital for the upper echelons of society above, and at the expense of, the ability of most of the population to access food, housing, education, and healthcare. Truly learning about a culture, talking to people from that culture, learning their perspectives and the roles that their practices serve in society, finding what practices are problematic and cause harm, that's a valuable endeavor. Critically looking at cultures like this can help make social change for the better. But that's not what's going on here. What's going on here is a racist dickwaving contest of trying to feel better than the rest of the world. The effort to find which culture is on the whole "better" has never been anything more than a way to demonize people that live differently from yourself.

The primary culture of countries like Sweden and Switzerland, while still having issues, are pretty easy to argue as being better than the primary culture of a county like Saudi Arabia, or the culture of the Southern U.S.

Circumcision isn't very common in Europe, it's more America and Canada which have adopted it as a standard. Over here it's mostly Jews who are circumcised.

Sure, there are problems in all walks of life, but the attitude that just because one example has problems means its no different to another example that also has problems is wrong. Its like saying that the Democratic Party is as bad as the GOP. The Democratic party absolutely has problems, a lot of them, but they pale in comparison to the staggering, horrendous problems of the GOP. You can't go A = 2/10, B= 7/10, neither A nor B = 10/10 therefore A=B. It just doesn't work. But the issue does get more complex because there absolutely is nuance and matters of scale to the issues and a fair degree of relativity to the matter. But that only goes so far before becoming unreasonable, you can't just go, "Everything is subjective, nothing matters." because that can be used to excuse any behavior no matter how negative.

Ah, the sweet sound of unquestioning loyalty to a political side

I find fences uncomfortable but you're welcome to stay on yours.

We're not talking about a political party, we're talking about a fucking culture. As in, the sum values and practices of 10 to hundreds of millions of people. The entire endeavor of trying to decide which culture is 'better' is a fundamentally ridiculous one because to even comprehensively understand all relevant aspects of a culture, even YOUR OWN culture much less one you've never lived in or maybe even been to is completely impossible. It's like asking whether the world in 2019 is on the whole better than, or worse than, the world in 1980. The truth is that no answer you give could be a meaningful answer to the question because a human being is simply not capable of understanding all aspects of human activity around the globe right now, much less forty years ago. I'm not saying all cultures are just as good as each other, I'm saying that even asking the question of whether one culture is better than another is completely meaningless and comes from a bad-faith and uncritical effort to demonize people. You just go ahead and bring me a list of every single positive and negative aspect of Swiss culture, and every single positive and negative aspect of Saudi Arabian culture. We'll both be dead before anyone can fully understand those cultures well enough to write a comprehensive list.

I was mostly poking fun at the fact that not once have I seen or heard yikes denote an opinion that wasn't kneejerk as fuck.

To sit at your computer, see a couple of news and wikipedia articles, never speaking to someone of a culture of interest, never visiting that country, never reading up on modern anthropological texts, never spending any time of your life living there, to only have a vague idea of how people actually live in these countries and what systems shape them, and then say that you know enough about these millions of people and how they live that you can say that their culture is worse than another one, is mind-bogglingly ignorant.

I agree on account of studying anthropology but Certain cultural practices are incompatible with an integrated society

The idea that criticizing or contrasting cultures is out of the question is absurd. Yes people follow any given culture. They aren't a part of the equation though. People change their cultures, they are not bound to them, culture is not intrinsic to the person. Cultures are not god-sent, untouchable and all-important. They are the sum of customs and practices, and those have an impact on the world. Those can be measured, criticized, evaluated, studied, and rebuked. They are not above reproach, they are not infallible. It says nothing of the people, thats frankly straw-manning to suggest such. And to suggest you need an exhaustive list of every element of frankly anything to make a statement about the quality of it is further absurd. Its nigh impossible to fully detail the aspects of anything but we can still make statements on the quality of those things. We can judge a meal, we can judge a legislative policy, and yes we can judge a culture. And frankly, a refusal to do so allows the harmful elements of cultures to fester and damage the people within them. Practices of racism and bigotry in the Southern U.S. culture for instance.

You can judge a practice, you can judge a THING that people are DOING, you can judge an individual element or practice of a culture, criticize it, and look for a solution (like I said before, my posts aren't that long, I dunno, read them), you can contextualize it with other coherent elements of that culture to try to understand it better, but to then try to make some sweeping statement that one entire culture is better than another entire culture is utterly meaningless. You can say, this cultural practice needs to change, this element of the culture is bad, but when you make a statement that this entire culture is worse, you're not making a meaningful criticism. "The Southern US is worse than the Northern US" is not a helpful step to stemming bigotry or understanding the United States. "Racism and bigotry in the Southern US is a problem" is where you start, not with meaningless "these people are better than these people" grandstanding.

As I said, this is not at all relevant and is not what is being said, this is just a strawman argument. Do better. I did read them, better than I think you are reading. Cultures are a sum of their parts, and as said and you just reiterated, those parts can be criticized, compared, judged, and whatever. And that extends upwards to the culture itself. Solving the problems is an entirely different matter, and not is what is being discussed. Stay on the topic at hand. This isn't about solving cultural problems and its not about one group of people being better or worse than another. Again. People are not bound to their cultures and their cultures are not intrinsic to them. People are not their cultures. So quit trying to divert to other matters and just stick to what is actually being argued here.

Intolerance to vile practices is not a bad thing. You practice it yourself, constantly. You just want to use it as a tool here.

You literally brought up the point of how this kind of criticism is important because it prevents those cultural elements from 'festering and damaging people'. You framed this as being about solving the problem. If the goal of this framing device of which culture is better than other isn't meaningful criticism of coherent parts of a culture in the interest of better understanding people and finding solutions to problems, as you seem quite adamant that it is not, then it sounds an awful lot like it's meant more to drive wedges and make you look down on people with different lifestyles. And don't pretend that this isn't about groups of people being better or worse than another because it absolutely is. When you say "This culture is better than this other culture", you are inherently saying "this cultural grouping of people is worse than this other one, insofar as they practice this worse culture". Cultures are the sum of their parts, and your presumption that you know enough about ALL of any individual culture's parts (and we are talking about ALL of an individual culture's parts, that is the entire premise of this discussion) to make a meaningful call on whether its better than another one is incredibly conceited. Like what the hell do you know about the experience of an average individual's life in Saudi Arabia? How could you begin to presume that you understand what it's like to be an indigenous Sami minority in Sweden? How unbelievably arrogant do you have to be to say that you, having probably never even stepped foot in these countries (and do correct me if I'm wrong), can claim that you have a comprehensive understanding of all relevant cultural practices and social systems that comprise their cultures? You cannot, as a total outsider to a culture, presume to understand it to that extent. You scarcely have any idea what these people's lives are like and you're making meaningless value judgements on things you don't understand at all.

I'm sorry, which moral am I lacking conviction on here? Did I defend FGM at some point, or did you just sort of rush to that assumption by yourself?

London being culturally distinct is not the same as not being an English city. There is a conversation to be had about the differences between London and the rest of England (some good, some bad), but Cleese's phrasing is very... unfortunate. There aren't many flattering ways to read into it. Even the idea that London is too culturally different from the rest of England to count as English isn't great.

Yes, but this isn't about solving them in this discussion. Actually solving them or providing solutions has nothing to do with this conversation. So who cares, leave it the fuck out. No, its not. That is just you making things up because your argument holds no merit. The people don't matter in relation to criticism or judgement of a culture. Again, they're not bound to it, they exist without it. If you fail to understand this, this is your fault. No, thats not how that works. If I wanted to criticize people I'd criticize them directly. Like you, criticism over your ability to argue honestly on this topic. Its poor. If you read what I previously posted, I explicitly said its impossible to know all of those parts. And that you don't need to. Simple as that. I don't need to know the specifics of any individual's life. Because the individual does not matter. They are not the culture. The culture is not them. Culture and people are distinct. People may adhere to a culture, but that does not make them one in the same. You need to stop conflating them. Your failure to grasp such a basic concept is the core issue here.

This statement makes it abundantly clear that you have no knowledge of anthropology, you haven't looked at culture in any academic capacity whatsoever, and don't really understand what it means to even talk about culture at all. The idea that you can understand a culture without understanding the experiences of the people that make it up is completely contrary to the entire modern field of studying culture. You don't know what you're talking about.

Its really not, because they are distinct things. They absolutely have interplay, but they are separate functionally and conceptually. This is nonnegotiable. You do not get to argue otherwise. You're trying to moralize this by constantly diverting back to people, because thats the only way you see this coming out in your favor, but its not going to work. Better than you do at least, you haven't been able to argue on this at all without constantly trying to misrepresent the matter.

Have you read any anthropological texts, taken any courses, done any kind of academic research whatsoever into the study of cultures? Because if you had, you would know that understanding people is absolutely central to understanding cultures. This is the academic consensus. There is no culture without people, there is no study of culture without understanding the people that make it up. That's not misrepresenting the matter, that's what the most cursory bit of research would tell you. If you know nothing about the experiences of the individuals in a culture, your understanding of that culture is extremely incomplete. This is not misrepresentation, this is the entire field of cultural anthropology that you seem to know nothing about and don't care to inform yourself about.

either way, he shouldn't be attacked for his views. political correctness is toxic

Yes, actually. Thanks for asking. Yes, people form the culture, but they are not the culture itself. They exist without it, and that is the key. Criticizing a culture does not criticize the people because it is a different matter entirely from the people. The child is not the parents. The parents create the child and raise the child. But the child can be criticized without criticizing the parents. A particular culture is not intrinsic to any particular person, they can change, adopt different cultures, different practices and norms. So no, as you have fucking failed to fucking grasp, you can say a culture is bad without saying the people are bad because the people are not fucking bound to the culture.