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.

Culture is when a bunch of people start living in an ecology for a significant period of time and grow habits and ways of living in general, for the most efficiency. And it changes as the surrounding changes, as the external people around that culture change. Like how Japanese samurais started using guns in wars instead of sword. Weirdly however, modern #multicultural 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 how the Norse went extinct because they refused to give up their European farming culture in Greenland, instead of adopting sea-hunting techniques. And then there were Hindu folks opposing the British ban on Sati dah 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.

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

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.

Well, Japan is being an idiot. Even the regular Japanese know it. 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. So this whole practice is on the verge of ending even in Japan. Otherwise 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 Japan abide by every rule. Not everyone will agree on the same thing. Japan has that luxury because it is a powerful group in comparison to Makah. You might be having the age old thought, "Isn't this suppression on the Makah then?" Yes. It is. However, suppression isn't always a bad thing. I trust that the reader realizes this much.

Again, it's not a matter of "SHOULD". Get your head out of that academic ethics gutter.

Let's rewind back to might-makes-right. To make you understand, I am gonna use a very pure and universally loved line in this grey thought process. "With great power, comes great responsibility." Ever wondered why that is the case? It's not because power literally brings some kinda abstract invisible responsibility. It's 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. The majority that actually keeps the world running with its system. Makah doesn't run the world. They have never wielded that power. Their culture doesn't have the same weight on this matter as the rest of the world. What Makah is doing with their culture is unfortunately the disorder in the present world order. A disorder always brings consequences for the actor, be it good or bad.

If the Indians from back in the Sati Dah ritual days had grown themselves into the central node in the world system, then maybe Sati Dah would have been acceptable. If 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 nobody wants to risk an order for some fringe outlier.

And lastly...

Well, we all can see what can go wrong if you let the minority move around limitlessly without making them comply to your canonical order. Take a look at present day Europe. Not everything can coexist, because that's what made each culture distinct in the first place.