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I do not know if the culturalist opponents of the real world and its evolutionary trends, understood as Americanization by some and Westernization by others, can be described as rational. Confronted by the threat of Americanization, some defend unique "cultural values"...This is a dangerous situation, and the danger is enhanced by adherence to the principle of irresponsibility. It is dangerous because the (capitalist) system has reached a stage characterized by the monstrous power of its destructive capacities. As I said above, the system is capable of destroying human beings, nature, and whole societies.
- Samir Amin, Eurocentrism.
They certainly aren't rational here...
If you start from a culturalist critique and not a materialistic one, this is what happens.
I don't understand shit of the quote. What is "americanization" according to the author?
Essentially the extreme form of liberal ideology that the USA has exported across the world post WW2. The key defining factors are the reduction of social organisation to only two factors, liberty viewed as freedom of private enterprise, and private property. The second key factor that defines this Americanization being the ideological seperation (as the two concepts are in reality inseparable) of economic and political life, in which the free market regulates economic life, and the political life is seperated from it and reduced to voting for a candidate who defines the rules for political life. A low intensity democracy if you will.
Samir Amin later went on to write "The Liberal Virus - Permanent War and the Americanization of the World" to expand on this concept.
so the 'culturalist' opponents defy something modern and evolutionary, like lgbt rights, on the grounds it is 'americanization/westernization'. and the culturalists in the OP are defending anti-modern things in the guise of opposing westernization.
the problem i identify (and maybe he deals with this beyond the quote), is how we should know what is actually modern. because to return to lgbt rights, the suppression of them in the middle-east dates back to the nascent modernization programmes of states trying desperately to resist european colonialism. the very thing culturalists defend as invioable tradition was itself once the 'evolutionary' force.
It's actually dealt with in the preface/introduction of the book. Firstly culturalism is defined:
In this work, I propose a critique of what can be called "culturalism." I define culturalism as an apparently coherent and holistic theory based on the hypothesis that there are cultural invariants able to persist through and beyond possible transformations in economic, social, and political systems. Cultural specificity, then, becomes the main driving force of inevitably quite different historical trajectories.
Then modernity is critiqued.
Modernity is the product of nascent capitalism and develops in close association with the worldwide expansion of the latter. The specific logic of the fundamental laws that govern the expansion of capitalism leads to a growing l inequality and asymmetry on a global level. The societies at the peripheries are trapped in the impossibility of catching up with and becoming like the societies of the centers, today the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan. In turn, this distortion affects modernity, as it exists in the capitalist world, so that it assumes a truncated form in the periphery. The culture of capitalism is formed and develops by internalizing the requirements of this asymmetric reality. Universalist claims are systematically combined with culturalist arguments, in this case Eurocentric ones, which invalidate the possible significance of the former.
The crisis of modernity is itself the sign of the obsolescence of the system. Bourgeois ideology, which originally had a universalist ambition, has renounced that ambition and substituted the postmodernist discourse of irreducible "cultural specificities" (in its crude form, the inevitable clash of cultures). As opposed to this discourse, I suggest that we begin with a view of modernity as a still incomplete process, which will only be able to go beyond the mortal crisis it is now undergoing through the reinvention of universal values. This implies the economic, social, and political reconstruction of all societies in the world.
The universalist values (such as LGBT rights) got undermined and invalidated during colonialism, the only way to move forward is a redefinition of universal values from a non eurocentric point of view, not rainbow capitalism/imperialism.
and now i have made you reproduce & collate the theory for me! MUHAHAHAHAH I WILL NEVER READ A BOOK cultural invariants able to persist through and beyond possible transformations in economic, social, and political systems
i haven't read it put this way as a negative prescription, but yeah any theory of culture as immutable and not definitionally malleable is riding some mad essentialist/racialist horseshit.
By the end of next year an AI language model will probably be able to reconstruct the entire book because I will have quoted it so much lol.