Yeesh. What a mess. People load up the word culture with lots of extra meanings. When people like Steve King talk about cultures or civilizations, what they really mean is races–that much is pretty obvious to everyone. But adding these meanings is easy to do even without his special brand of malice. People can equate cultures and countries (American culture vs. Canadian culture, when Seattle honestly has a lot more in common with Vancouver than it does with Tallahassee). People can equate culture with history, where, for example, societies can be thrown into turmoil by events, but the culture of that society is not necessarily chaotic.

And talk of comparative cultures is an anathema to pluralistic ideals–where it is just assumed that culture will end up a mish-mash, ideally taking the best from each and continually re-making itself into a greater whole. Sure, there’s something about every culture (no matter how you define it) that sucks. The idea of pluralism is that we learn from each other and everyone benefits, and the world sucks a little less over time. But not everyone accepts pluralistic ideals–in fact the last election was in many ways a wholesale rejection of pluralism and a return to naked identity politics.