Culture in Order

A friend of mine showed me a page from some magazine/newspaper/book (idk), which can be summarized as:

In 1999, the Makah, a tribe of about 1,500 on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, killed a gray whale. It was their first whale hunt in roughly seventy years, since they had stopped in the 1920s when commercial whaling depleted whale populations. The tribe's 1855 treaty with the United States explicitly guaranteed the right to hunt whales, and after gray whales were removed from the endangered species list in 1994, the Makah won federal permission to resume. Tribal leaders described the hunt as a cultural renewal, but protest boats, news helicopters, and television cameras surrounded it, and some Makah felt the attention drained its spiritual meaning. Animal rights groups, including the Humane Society of the United States, then sued. In 2002 an appeals court ruled the hunt illegal because federal regulators had not adequately studied its effect on the whale population. The case leaves open how to weigh treaty and cultural rights against animal rights and conservation, and it shows how small communities must deal with local, national, and international law all at once.

The Makah may have kind of won the battle in 2024, being allowed to hunt 25 Eastern North Pacific gray whales over a 10-year period. Yet the fundamental battle remains disputed and thought provoking. So I will be sharing my two cents about this and the broader implications here and there. I'm not looking at this through traditional cultural anthropology, rather through the lens of power realism.

Culture is when a bunch of people start living in an ecosystem for a significant period of time and grow habits and ways of living in general, for the most efficiency. Lots of interconnectivity between various elements in it gets made, which then reinforces into identity, yada yada. And it changes as the surrounding changes, as the external people around that culture change. Like how Japanese samurai started using guns in wars instead of swords. Weirdly however, modern multicultural minded folks treat unique cultures as something to preserve jailed in a crystal ball as it is. It doesn't work that way. Another famous example would be many Hindu folks opposing the British ban on Satidaha ritual.

This far it should be common sense that simply adding the label "Culture" to an action doesn't make it any special.

Then comes the concept of having rights to do something. Well, do I have the right to eat food? UN says it's human right to get food and shelter. What if I don't work a single day in my life? Will you feed me just because I have this so-called right? The answer appears if you ignore this word "right" and look deeper. Rights are not magic spells written in the sky; they are human-made administrative agreements enforced by power.

I am sure this idea of having rights serves its purpose on the systemic level to maintain at least some amount of balance in things. But it's not ultimately useful way to view things. Because, if the Makah get the right to "preserve" their culture by hunting whales, then the majority of Earth has the right to "preserve" their culture to not hunt whales. Makah is just the anomaly in the larger culture right now. They are trying to resume hunting whales and we are trying to make everyone stop doing so. It's a simple staightforward clash of two entities.

Now, some points people are likely to make in cases like this:

They are not going extinct cause we put a stop to it. The total ban works like a heavy pendulum being pulled with full force in the opposite direction of its movement to make it still for now. We will see what to do after the situation truly calms down.

Also, just for the record, between 2019 and 2023, NOAA declared an Unusual Mortality Event (UME) for gray whales, where the population dropped by nearly 30-40% (down to roughly 14,500) due to localized starvation, warming waters, and loss of sea-ice amphipod prey in the Arctic. This still made a clean-cut solution tough to arrive at while balancing the subjectivity of the broader situation.

Well, in Japan's case, it's just a traditionalist view among old folks + a vanity project run by stubborn bureaucrats and corrupt subsidies. Food in Japan is seen in two parts: as survival basic and as status symbol. You hunt a whale, you get status. The whale meat demand is not much in Japan. They have enough meat stored for a long time, if whatever demand there is persists in the first place. It doesn't even taste good, from what I have read from first person accounts. The texture is weird. This is a zombie industry right now. It would be stupid if they continue despite everything.

Japanese whaling system here is the larger scale version of Makah. Unfortunately the world cannot make the Industrial Japan abide by every rule. Japan has that luxury because it is a powerful group in comparison to Makah. "Isn't this suppression on the Makah then?" Yes. It is. However, suppression isn't always a bad thing, in general. I trust that the reader realizes this much.

I think, it's not a matter of "SHOULD" when we are dealing with a matter of such large scale and complexity.

Let's rewind back to "might-makes-right" (not saying it does necessarily). As the universally loved line goes, "With great power, comes great responsibility." But wait, why is that the case? Well, it's not because power literally brings some kinda abstract invisible responsibility. The mechanism runs the other way around. You can only maintain power if you are doing the minimum responsible work to feed your power.

The global majority culture agrees on not killing whales, as we can also see from the regular Japanese people's consensus. Apart from the taste factor, another significant reason for their loss of interest is because they have themselves connected with the internet. And that made them part of the global culture that has learned to think that killing whales is wrong, and that whales are intelligent beings, not mere food.

This line of culture makes up the majority, the culture that actually keeps the world running with its system. Today's world system didn't emerge from the line of culture which Makah folks follow. The global line of culture is the one that responsibly has been maintaining the world's balance / order. The world has shaped the culture and the culture has shaped the world.

If the Indians from back in the Satidaha ritual days had grown themselves into the central node in the world system, then maybe Satidaha would have been accepted. If that was part of the cultural line that kept the world's machine running. Not burning the widows would have been the disorder. And maybe then there would be a small group of people who would be against the order, and they would be suppressed. Because almost nobody wants to risk an order for an outlier. It's a risky and messy business.

So the minority has to face trade-off. Which party gets bigger say here, doesn't get decided by a verbal-mental "should". The one who has taken care of the order and then has gotten smoothly integrated with the world system, that party automatically gets the power to decide. That's the whole "should".

Just because a system exists somewhere, like the Makah tribe's culture, doesn't mean it is equal in weight as the global one. One should ask on what basis they want to treat every culture equally as compatible and functional in the larger machine.

And so the Makah naturally got no exemption from it. It can be interpreted that they understood that and then tried to integrate themselves through bureaucratic measures, running to the courts with reams of paperwork and regulatory reviews. Still it appeared that the majority was actually the dominant here. So they took the trade-off.

Sympathy is like the one dangerously strong loophole for legal systems, and there should be firewalls in place within the system to restrain this sensitive variable from interacting directly with the legal structures. No matter how valid the sympathy on a personal level may be. As no order survives by allowing endless subjective exemptions.

The world would be damned if every hundred years old treaty gets treated like holy scriptures.

"Me and my friends never broke a window, why are we not allowed to play baseball indoors?"

I don't expect this to be a foolproof writing. In fact, I can sense many left out parts of my thoughts, but I can't figure which one to include. If you want to contest the mechanics, feel free to email me.