You know what? Since someone asked & I've got the time, let's talk about cultural homogenization.

Both what it is & how it happens, & ultimately what it does & how it affects us all as humans.

I'll include some links to further reading at the end. So, let's get to talking!

First off: what is cultural homogenization?

To us a very academic interpretation, it is the process by which local cultures are transformed or absorbed by a dominant outside culture.

It goes part & parcel with globalization, or so many Western scholars would argue over.

On a global scale, you can see it in the way Western cultures & especially American culture is imported over other cultures. Such terms for that variety of homogeneity include McDonaldization, Westernization, Americanization, but really at its core it's a form of neo-colonialism.

And really, there's a lot of examples you can find on this even going back just a hundred years or so. The way British culture & customs were imposed on their colonies, the way local traditions, rituals, habits, & even language were suppressed.

Because that's its entire goal.

By spreading this one culture around & making all other cultures resemble or bow to it, it robs us of unique differences & cultural heritage.

In the case of capitalist cultural homogenization, it aims to get rid of the diverse in favor of making it common & consumable.

American capitalist cultural homogenization is especially toxic because it seeks to replace the real with the fabricated.

Unlike Spain or India or Japan or China, America's "culture" has mostly been manufactured only in the last hundred years or so & it's based on lots of lies.

The Founding Fathers, the idea of the US policing the world for freedom, even as far down to as the food we all like.

And it makes sense, because homogeneity ultimately breeds this sort of stale, uniform stereotyping that keeps a status quo & is used to bludgeon the unconformed.

And, more often than not, the unconformed are the diverse, are the Indigenous, are the queer, are the disabled, are the unhoused.

Cultural homogenization says "this is what all culture should look like." Not just American.

All culture.

Erasure is the only end point for it.

And what does that leave us with?

Buildings that look the same. Stores that sell nearly identical brands of everything. A void of meaning & a culture of meaninglessness, built without care or concern or passion or interest.

You can look outside & spot where that's happened.

It's cookie cutter condos, the McMansions that all have garish but weirdly similar interiors, the fast food chains that are becoming indistinguishable in their exteriors, the way all charm from brand logos has been distilled into this weird, abstract yet very similar symbology.

Hell, you might not even recognize it at first until you consider all of these things beside one another. You might even think it's benign or for other purposes, that it's innocent.

It's not, & you mistaking it for that is the intention.

They'll always give other reasons.

Funnily enough, a recent & perfect example just happened at the school my mom teaches at.

Now, she's been at that school for almost 2 decades now & for the last 15 years, she & a colleague have held special Earth Day projects that all the kids can participate in & help with.

She would take them out, help them plant indigenous plants, explain why they're so important to the environment. They'd build trellises, flower beds to plant local fruit in, plant bushes in the front, make the parking lot look full of life.

Every year for 15 years they did this.

It became part of the culture at her school, something unique about it that only the students & staff who attended could participate in.

And those students & staff could come back, years after they left that school, to see their handiwork still standing, beautiful & proud there.

Well.

Last month the school got a new groundskeeper, who immediately destroyed all of it.

Barked over the flower beds, put poison in them to keep animals away, filled things with gravel, & tore down the trellises. Fifteen years of a school's culture gone in less than a week.

And there were plenty of reasons the groundskeeper gave to the principal after my mom & her cohort rightfully were saddened & angered he did that.

It'd save on maintenance.

They want all the schools to look similar so that if kids transfer it won't be a shock.

So many reasons.

But the thing is?

He wouldn't have had to take care of any of it, because the students did that & the plants were local. They easily survive this environment because they were made for it.

It wouldn't actually have cost him a damn cent to do.

You wanna know the real reason?

Because he didn't care & because now, anyone from the district can come & do grounds keeping because it looks & functions like all the other schools.

15 years of a shared culture, of memory, wiped out because maintenance guys just wanted an easier job & to not have to think.

That's what cultural homogenization does.

And if you're thinking 15 years is a lot... extrapolate.

How many years were Indigenous cultures on this land without colonialism?

How much of them & their cultures have remained in the scant few hundred years since colonizers came?

How many years were people stolen from Africa to help mass produce Western culture?

How long has the U.S. existed as a global superpower & how many countries did it force to start resembling itself in so many ways?

It's impossible to overstate the damage homogeneity has done.

And the byproduct?

It's going to the other side of the world & getting the same god damn cheeseburger you can drive ten minutes for where you live.

That's the point of it. Sure, it's familiar & it's accessible in that way.

But what was lost for that consumer convenience?

What 15 years was sacrificed so that you could walk into a building you've already been inside of a dozen times to order the same meal you've eaten almost as much?

What part of the local culture was destroyed so that you can order a Big Mac in Brazil?

This is the danger of it.

The last year has especially highlighted how important diversity is, not only just culturally but everywhere. Diverse ecosystems are important for the planet. Diverse hires are vital for success & creativity.

To have differences is one of the best things about being human.

Because it's through sharing & preserving our differences - our languages, our cultures, our histories, our customs, our rituals - that we preserve the many different ways we've approached various problems & found various solutions & even improved upon them with new light shed.

Cultural homogeneity represents the death of cultural heterogeneity.

It represents the death of difference.

It is the death of what makes us human.

And it is important, now more than ever, to embrace what makes us different & to not let more gardens be turned into gravel pits.

I promised some reading at the end, and it's all mostly from one author: Arjun Appadurai.

His is the most present & (vitally) really only work academically that's started to examine the negative impacts of cultural homogeneity.

Of his works I'd recommend the following:

Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy is probably his best known work & serves as a good foundation for his style of approaching this topic.

The Future as Cultural Fact & Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule are also good ones to pick up as well.

Anyone else with similar readings - especially from Indigenous scholars - is welcome to post them in reply here.