A precedent post on hybridity, custodial duty, and the elites who want it both ways
The argument running through the recent threads is sharper than the usual India versus Pakistan braggadocio. It is a claim about high culture itself. A civilisation cannot demolish a man’s mosque and claim his high culture in the same breath. The two moves cancel. The elites on both sides of the 1947 line have been performing both moves for eighty years, and the contradiction is now visible.
What high culture is
High culture is the foundational settlement of values, ordinarily anchored in religion, that a civilisation runs on. It can be syncretic in formation. Plural ownership is harder to sustain, and most attempts eventually close into a single settlement or fracture into rival ones; some imperial frames (Ottoman, Mughal, the Republic of India itself) did hold the tension for longer than the simple model would predict. The point is not that plurality is impossible. The point is that plurality is unstable, and the instability is what generates events like 1992.
England is the cleanest worked example of closure. The English high culture is a hybridisation of Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and an absorbed Celtic remainder. Scotland and Wales sit inside the matrix without breaking it. The hybridisation closed; one settlement emerged.
Ireland is the test case in the negative. The same Anglophone substrate produced a different high culture in the Catholic south, and in the Catholic pockets of the north, because religion did the foundational work and religion would not blend. Two islands, one language family, two high cultures. Language is the medium. Religion is the substrate.
Ludwig von Mises, in Nation, State, and Economy, argued the related half. The nation is a speech community, but the speech community is shaped by what the school teaches and what the church says. Plattdeutsch villages on the Dutch border could have gone either way two centuries ago; the descendants would now be just as good Hollanders or just as good Germans, depending only on where the school and the church sat. Language carries national consciousness. The religious settlement decides which language wins.
Notre Dame: The custodial bargain Continue reading You Cannot Demolish His Mosque and Claim His High Culture