The pseudo-activists of the Regressive Left say a lot of stupid things. I mean, it’s pretty much all they do aside from calling to censor things, trying to send people who disagree with them to prison and finding ways to avoid the real world. And it would probably be hard to even make a top ten list of the dumb things they say. But I think that the stuff they say about cultural appropriation has to be very near the top.

In case you’ve been living in a hole, cultural appropriation refers to any use or adoption of elements of one culture by people of another culture. The Regressive Left think that this is a really bad thing (though some of them, doubling down on stupidity, think it’s only a really bad thing if white people are the ones doing it). They claim that it is racist, imperialist and a host of other ‘ists’ that are their usual buzzwords for EVIL, mostly to show off how virtuous they are. That’s another thing they do: show off their self-righteousness to an extent that would make a Pharisee blush.

Some examples of leftist outrage at cultural appropriation in recent times has included getting really angry at Halloween costumes. They think it’s incredibly offensive that people dare to wear Mexican sombreros or dress as Pocahontas. Naturally, these costumes were banned on college campuses, which the Regressive Left has turned from places of free inquiry into totalitarian regimes.

They were also outraged about Katy Perry dressing up in a kimono. And at a museum doing an event featuring kimonos. And at a little girl having a kimono-themed birthday party. Even though the vast majority of Japanese people actually really like it when people admiringly use things from their culture. Did I mention that almost all of the Outrage Brigade so angry about sombreros and kimonos are white upper middle class kids?

They were also pissed off about toddlers dressing up as piĂ±atas. Even though as a Latino, I think it looks freaking adorable!

(This child is a racist menace to minorities! Quick, lock him up!)

But do these imbeciles have any kind of point? Is there actually anything wrong with cultural appropriation? I mean, real racism is bad â€“ and practically no one aside from a tiny handful of morons think otherwise. And some kinds of cultural appropriation might express a kind of racism if they play off of negative stereotypes.

You can definitely make an argument that a lot of Indian chief or Pocahontas costumes are a little ignorant. But of course no one thinks they’re meant to be accurate. Blackface is definitely based on negative stereotypes and has a racist history, so you could make a good argument about how blackface is a problem too.

But neither of those things are bad because they are cultural appropriation. They may be bad because they’re inaccurate or because they are meant to be insulting or mean-spirited. If we look at this subject from the point of view of history, cultural appropriation isn’t just not bad, it’s maybe the greatest thing humans ever invented!

When you look back at history you find that successful cultures and civilizations thrived BECAUSE of their ability to adopt elements of surrounding cultures. Many scholars of early man think this might even be what gave us the edge over Neanderthals. Studies of Neanderthal camps versus Cro Magnon camps show that Neanderthals were way more insular. The Neanderthals didn’t travel as far. Their tribes didn’t interact as much with other tribes. They didn’t do as much trade.

But our ancestors apparently did. Their camps were full of stuff that came from incredibly far away. There’s campsites in Siberia that had stuff from the Middle East in them! They did more trade, and they copied more technology.

We can see they copied culture too. There are designs and symbols that spread out among our human ancestors just like tools and tents and arrowheads did. So they were able to learn and grow faster. They were also able to adapt better to their environment because of that. Cultural appropriation might just be the reason why we’re still around and the Neanderthals aren’t.

All through history, the best and most successful human cultures engaged in cultural appropriation. Not just things like technologies, but artistic and religious and philosophical ideas. The ancient Romans appropriated philosophy and government from the Greeks. They appropriated technologies and trade systems and fashion from the Egyptians and the Syrians. They appropriated soap and pants from the Gauls â€“ and smelled better for it! And they got religious ideas from all these sources, including Christianity â€“ which was a cultural appropriation too.

The Chinese were great inventors and many surrounding cultures very willingly appropriated the Chinese inventions to their benefit. Not to mention the Chinese language, system of education and philosophies. But the Chinese were appropriators too! They appropriated Buddhism from India and this changed their whole society. They got hold of many Western ideas from the Silk Road. A lot of their mysticism from the Tang dynasty onward was enriched by ideas originating in Tibet. When China was open to importing and exporting culture, their civilization thrived. And whenever it became closed and insular, it declined. And when they got conquered by the Mongols, their new rulers appropriated Chinese culture for themselves, to their benefit.

We see this over and over again in all human history. The Persians got a ton of stuff from the Indians and the Greeks. The Arabs borrowed cultural elements from almost every society they conquered or traded with. As long as they were open to new ideas, the Islamic world thrived. But when the Ottomans refused to adopt new ideas from the West, they fell into a long decline. A lot of the mess we see in the Muslim world today is because modern Islamic culture deeply resists appropriating things from other cultures.

Culture is made up of ideas. And ideas are like a living thing, they want to reproduce and evolve. Culture needs to bring in new ideas to be healthy and wants to share its ideas with other cultures to grow. Sometimes these ideas get spread in an unfortunate way, by war or conquest. Other times it’s by trade or travel. Today we live in a world where culture can be spread almost instantly. Every culture can and should share the best of itself with the world and borrow all the best stuff from everyone else. And all historical scholarship shows that any society that puts barriers in the way of that exchange falls into decline. Cultures that appropriate tend to prosper. Cultures that stop appropriating fail.

Native American cultures engaged in a huge amount of cultural exchange with each other. There were many different unique cultures in the Americas, and when they were at their best and healthiest they engaged in all kinds of cultural trade. Most of the Aztecs’ culture was an appropriation of the earlier Mayan civilization.

But Regressive Leftists have never been very big on actual scholarship. That’s why they even attacked Wil Wheaton (himself a Regressive Left poster boy) for using the term “spirit animal,” claiming that he was culturally appropriating something from “Native American culture.â€ť Only, there’s no such thing as a single Native American culture. There are actually tons of different cultures native to the Americas.

And the idea of spirit animals isn’t just Native American. Almost every single culture in human history had this idea at some point in their past. Everyone alive today had an ancestor who believed in some kind of spirit animals. It comes out of animism, which was a way of spiritual thinking that seems to have spread to all human cultures very early in our history. It might have in fact been one of the very first forms of cultural appropriation and was so successful that every single religious philosophy in the world descends from it.

It’s actually incredibly ignorant to treat all Native American cultures like they were just one big blobby thing. But I guess the hypocrisy is lost on the kinds of idiots who think a kid in a piĂ±ata costume is the same as the KKK.

Speaking of which, you know who else doesn’t like cultural appropriation? Racists. Racists hate it when people embrace ideas and art and fashions from other cultures. The racists in the 1950s were talking about “jungle music” while trying to ban rock & roll because they correctly realized that rock & roll was a cultural appropriation of African American music. They knew that cultural appropriation threatened their ability to control culture. It had the power to make people more open. The KKK didn’t want that. The Regressive Left might say they do, but they really don’t either. They need a closed culture so that they can keep benefiting from racial and cultural identity politics.

You’d think that when you find yourself on the same side as the Klansmen who sent death threats to Buddy Holly you’d figure out that you’re actually the bad guys on this issue. But self-awareness has never been the strong suit of middle class, college-educated white kids.

Top photo by Getty Images

Kasimir Urbanski doesnâ€™t write on a specific subject; heâ€™s EveryJoeâ€™s resident maniac-at-large. A recovering Humanities academic and world-traveler, he now lives in South America and is a researcher of fringe religion, eastern philosophy, and esoteric consciousness-expansion. In his spare time he writes tabletop RPGs, and blogs about them at therpgpundit.blogspot.com. Follow Kasimir on Twitter @KasimirUrbanski.



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