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Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

I'd be interested in seeing what the arguments in the actual book are. I recall reading something about this before, that pointed to evidence that more diverse groups are less happy and have more conflict. And that people in general like being part of a group of similar people and having a group identity, humans being tribal creatures.

Anyway I'm not sure he's claiming western culture is homogenous. But it does seem like there is a cluster in culture space that is "western" and we don't have a better label for it.

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I'm interested in what that would be. From a northern European perspective, we have strong cultural ties to the US (given that we were part of the whole colonization thing). Yet there are politicians there that question women's rights to abortions quite seriously, argue from the basis of religious rather than scientific conviction, oppose music and art and vaccinations and climate science on the same grounds that I find to be culturally much closer to hard line Islamic clerics than the culture in my immediate vicinity. So I'm not really sure if you can define that cultural cluster in a way that a majority the people in it would accept it.

Those are political values not cultural ones. And surely conservatives exist in Europe to? Perhaps there are fewer of them and they don't have the political power they do here, but conservatives exist in every country.

Of course, but that's neither here nor there. Those are not classical conservative views. The point is that you would be hard pressed to find a definition of Western culture that excludes hard line Islamism unless you also include important parts of the contemporary western political discourse.

In a conversation about the death of the west, you express shock that there remains some vestige of Christian morality, and without a hint of irony.

It's interesting that the things from xorcist's post that I think you are calling vestige of Christian morality - being anti abortion, music, art, vaccinations and science - have almost nothing to do with the teachings of Christ or much to do with morality. I'm not sure how you'd categorise those - perhaps a witch doctor style veneration of mumbo jumbo over reason for political purposes. Kind of, you must believe my smoke and bones cure all or you are an evil heretic, type stuff.

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