AOC Asserts That Our Culture Is ‘Thin’

Congressional Representative from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (often referred to as “AOC”) recently appeared at an international security conference in Germany.

Most of the conservative mockery of AOC’s remarks at that conference revolves around her nonsensical answer to a predictable question about Taiwan and China. However, I am much more concerned by her assertion that our culture of Western Civilization is “thin,” by implication fragile and unstable. (I have been unable to find a decent video of her remarks that is not accompanied by a lot of commentary that detracts from independent analysis of the remarks themselves.)

She continues her remarks with the truism that cultures evolve and change over time. But she makes it sound like those changes are radical and rapid. Her belief that our Western Civilization culture is “thin” leads her to assert that materialistic economies will break the culture. And that in turn, the “black and brown” “global south” should overthrow the “white” Western Civilization.

If Western Civilization were overthrown in North America and Western Europe, AOC would find herself missing a lot of features of her life as she now lives it in our culture. Features that are so deeply embedded in our culture that she doesn’t notice them. Features that she seems to take for granted but are not necessarily included in other cultures.

Once again, AOC demonstrates her ignorance (historical and otherwise).

Cultures are generally thick and deep. They do change over time. But those changes tend to be slow and build on all the layers of the pre-existing culture. People living in their culture often don’t recognize the extent to which culture influences everything they experience.

The Western culture in which we in the United States and Western Europe live (including AOC) is exceptionally thick. It is the product of thousands of years of work by our predecessors. The ancient Hebrews. The Hellenistic Greeks. The Romans. The Christian Church. The Enlightenment. Each building on its predecessors. We hope to make things better with each development. Yes, there have been setbacks along the way, but the firm foundation keeps development relatively stable. Even the seemingly major event of the American Revolution of 1775-76 was largely based on the “revolutionaries'” attempt to conserve the existing culture by opposing some then-recent departures from longstanding cultural foundations. They were not trying to reinvent everything.

One of my favorite things to note when reading the Old Testament of the Bible is the extent of continuity between the instructions given to the Hebrew people on how to live together in community and our cultural and legal expectations in 21st-century Western Civilization. Large parts of today's Western Civilization can be traced rather directly to the ancient Hebrews.

Western Civilization is very thick. If AOC really thinks our Western Civilization culture is thin, fragile, and unstable, she is even more ignorant than I thought. That said, if we intentionally abandon our Western Civilization and affirmatively allow another culture to take over, radical change can happen fairly quickly. But it would be an intentional act, not an inevitable or accidental result of normal changes and evolution.