America Is Older Than China: Observations On the World's Lived Culture

Most of us still think about different cultures by imagining the way they were in past centuries. When we think of Chinese culture, for example, we think of ancient East Asian architecture, Kung Fu, and Confucius. However, in most places around the world, our associations are no longer accurate, they're outdated or misinformed nostalgia or kitsch. Modern Chinese architecture now consists largely of boring concrete boxes, very few Chinese know anything about Kung Fu, and Confucius is just a mascot who supported feudalism in pre-Marxist empires. Even modern Chinese food is now defined by flavors and staples that were imported from the American hemisphere. The Chinese culture we recall from Disney's 'Mulan' is dead and buried. 

While some less developed places around the world have retained much of their old traditions, most middle to upper income nations have lost continuity with their histories. They've modernized, which means they've Westernized (which now means they've Americanized). While many have searched for an "alternative modernity," no large scale workable model has emerged. Contemporary Chinese culture is not an alternative modernity so much as an underdeveloped alternative Americanization, the aging remnants of communist culture are trying desperately to delay their displacement.

In this sense, America is culturally and institutionally among the oldest countries in the world. If you walk around modern China and point to any aspect of society you'll likely be gesturing towards something that came from America. Why do the overwhelming majority of Chinese people wear sneakers? America invented sneakers and made them cool. Why do they wear t-shirts and jeans? America. Why do they buy cars? American status symbol. Why do they build skyscrapers? They're a symbol of American modernization. Why do they use cell phones? American innovation. Why do they watch films and TV shows? America popularized them. Why are they addicted to social media? Facebook started that. Almost all the road signs, fashions, university campus designs, city planning, business concepts, beverages, advertising, music styles, economic models, household furniture, sports, technologies, health habits, theories, and nearly everything else originated somewhere in the West... and likely in America. While writing this, I stumbled across a relevant quote from Chinese scholar Frank Tsai:

"Think about what goes on in the head of an ordinary white-collar worker during an ordinary day...  During the course of a normal day, that person might drive to work and fight the traffic, or he might hail a cab and be tempted by ads he hears on the radio or sees on other cabs.  He might work in marketing for a large multinational company. He might take the elevator to the 50th floor and look down on a cityscape full of skyscrapers and cars and people, seemingly all in a rush to the future. All of these elements of our contemporary lives were in place in America 80 years ago. The Empire State Building was completed in 1931. In the 1920s and 1930s, the United States already had fully-developed industries in mass advertising and communications (radio), U.S. multinationals selling standardized mass consumer products already had offices across the globe (P&G), and of course the streets were already jammed with cars. Little to none of this existed in China 30 years ago. Certainly a comparison between China and America of 30 years ago using the above methodology would show America to be the older country."

America is also among the oldest countries in the world in terms of institutions. The United States' constitutional form of government was the first of its kind and subsequently copied to some degree by most of the world's countries. America's modern military and its organizations and theory are the standard that nearly every country seeks to copy. American universities like Harvard are among the oldest in the world and they set the standards for modern universities. In contrast, China's oldest continuously operating universities were founded by Christian missionaries, who were often from America. Almost nothing in China predates the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921.

In this sense, America is far older than China. America's modern culture has continuity with the past. Its internal logic is self generating. If you ask why Americans wear bluejeans, there's a very clear historical reason for it, and that reason is rooted in the history of America. Jeans are not some imported consumer item that dropped out of the sky from a misunderstood foreign land. Jeans, in America, are a self generated object that can be traced to a definite past. Levi's is not just a random brand name but an actual person who did something of substance in 1873. This kind of logical continuity is impossible to imagine in most of the world. Most Chinese people, for example, simply imitate styles and practices with absolutely no concept of where they come from or what they were originally meant for. There is no logical difference in most Chinese people's minds between wearing bluejeans to the gym or the office or to bed as pajamas. In China, most of the logic behind objects and ideas has been lost because they arrive to China as random imported things with no native source. Another interesting fashion example is the American high school varsity jacket, a fashionable accessory in East Asia where it has absolutely no connection to high schools or sports.

Fashion is among the most obvious examples, but this same phenomenon can be seen in every aspect of life. The global norms surrounding technology and modernity were everywhere established first in America and the broader West. The logic and theories and norms are thought-out and practiced first in America before being exported to the rest of the world where they are then merely copied without being understood. In this sense, America is the historical forerunner, the country that first theorized and established what became modern people's everyday lived culture.

One might respond that America produces the outer culture of objects but not the inner cultures of nations. I disagree. Confucius has been totally replaced by the consumerist individualism and rights based status that China's population now strives for. Ancient Chinese cultural values have been almost completely forgotten. Christianity, largely spread by American missionaries, is now China's largest organized religion. Deep in their hearts, China's youth have no connection with ancient Confucian hierarchies, but they have plenty of opinions about LGBT issues and women's rights. Their minds are contained within the dialectics of the American culture wars.

Strangely, America has become the last "real" culture, the last culture that operates according to its own self generated and consistent logic. If you ask Americans why they oppose racism they point back to centuries of slavery and "all men are created equal" before moving forward to segregation and applying this history to the contemporary world. If you ask Chinese about racism, they almost always point to the American experience of race relations... because Chinese people think in forms given to them from another society. American culture is the "real" lived culture of the world's people. Its norms are the standard setting norms, and its values are the measuring rod of other values and customs. Chinese people don't wear ancient hanfu in their daily lives because it contradicts the American values of convenience and utilitarianism (or at least those are the values Chinese people summon when justifying their clothing choices). 

One might object to my thesis by pointing to the remnants of dying cultures or the lifestyles of those living in undeveloped countries: Japanese people wearing traditional clothes on Sundays, for example, or Muslims following their own internal civilizational logic based on religion. These exceptions are real and important, but they're the exceptions that prove the general rule: Americanism has been replacing almost all other cultures around the world. The reason Japanese need a special day for traditional clothing is that people do not wear it anymore in their everyday lives, and almost every non-Muslim now views Islamic culture as backward, abusive, violent, and low-status precisely because America has defined the standards of modern civilization in ways that contradict the Islamic worldview.

My primary point is one that I think most people have already intuited at some point: our ideas about different cultures are outdated. We still like to differentiate cultures by characteristics that existed centuries ago, while, in reality, the world is converging. Most Americans hate the idea that America is actually destroying the world's diversity. The world is becoming Americanized, and American culture has now become the universal culture. America is rapidly becoming the world's oldest culture because, in erasing all other cultures, it slowly makes itself the last continuous culture still standing. When we think of different cultures today, what we're usually thinking about are dead and dying cultures. The real lived culture of the world is increasingly only American. 

When it comes to lived culture, America is older than China.

I was inspired to write about this topic after stumbling into an argument between Chinese and Koreans about which country a particular thousand-year-old clothing style "really belonged to." Some Chinese students angrily informed me that Korea was trying to "steal" their culture by claiming a particular kind of robe belonged to Korea. They pulled out their phones and preceded to show me various renderings of the controversial clothing item. I was shocked by their vitriolic passion, and the more I thought about it the more absurd the entire episode seemed to me. These students were not fighting for "Chinese culture" but rather a specific accessory from a long dead culture that had no relevance to their own lived culture. All of the students in question were wearing t-shirts, sneakers, and basketball shorts. They were showing me pictures of this historic item on devices that were either iPhones or wannabe iPhones. What they were fighting over was not their culture but something that no longer existed... something that had not influenced their own lived culture in any way. This kind of cognitive dissonance was astonishing and strange to me, and I had to write something about it.