Culture follows power, so declining Western dominance erodes Western culture’s reach

Evidence

My idea is that European and then American interest in the Orient was political according to some of the obvious historical accounts of it that I have given here, but that it was the culture that created that interest, that acted dynamically along with brute political, economic, and military rationales to make the Orient the varied and complicated place that it obviously was in the field I call Orientalism. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 71 (#complicates, via linked claim)

We say “dominant,” not “determined,” because it is always possible to order, classify, assign, and decode an event within more than one “mapping.” But we say “dominant” because there exists a pattern of “preferred readings,” and these mappings both have the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them and have themselves become institutionalized. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 802 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: American cultural dominance persists while older Western cultural powers decline — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 36; Modernization strengthens indigenous cultures and weakens Western dominance; Western universalism persists even as Western relative power and cultural appeal decline — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 488 (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Culture, not merely power, dynamically created Western interest in the Orient #complicates (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 71
• Culturalization treats culture as frozen and divorced from power structures #complicates (0.78)
• Cultural dominance operates through preferred readings, not determination #complicates (0.76) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 802
• Culture-clash arguments foreclose the possibility of non-Western progress #complicates (0.74)