Cultural leveling

Cultural leveling is the process by which different cultures approach each other as a result of travel and communication. It can also refer to "the process by which Western culture is being exported and diffused into other nations”. Cultural leveling within the United States has been driven by mass market media such as radio and television broadcasting and nationwide distribution of magazines and catalogs. Some of these means and effects are considered artifacts of the Machine Age of the 1920s and 1930s. Today the interactions between countries worldwide have allowed the opportunity for intercultural dialogue. Countries world wide have undergone a form of cultural leveling. Some countries being more open to it than others. Japan, for example, has assimilated Western styles of dress and music into a blend or Western and Eastern Cultures. Today, due to the crossing or travel and communication with time and space there is just about no “other side of the world” anymore, giving us the inevitable result of what is known as cultural leveling.Eclecticism and cultural leveling both share a similar ideology in the separation of culture from human nature creating the potential risk or enslavement and manipulation. Cultural leveling is notably present in minorities instead of large cultures driven to aspire wealth and there’s more commonality present in minorities. At times countercultures and subcultures may pose as a resistance to cultural change within society. Local cultures did diffuse across each other in earlier times as material items hence influencing a change in the cultural atmosphere. These diffusions have been part of most significant cultural changes in recorded history. To convey how fundamental the loss of diversity and the subsequent leveling have been, many sociologists such as Daniel Lerner amplified the opinion through the phrase “the passing of traditional society.”

Baku (2009), asserted that Relativism enables diverse cultures to coexist. Meanwhile, cultural leveling eliminates the cultural differences that make a person unique. Further more there has seen to be a “commercialization of cultural exchange: that of cultural eclecticism and that of cultural leveling.” Cultural leveling results in the standardization of behaviors and lifestyles which sets out to create the danger for losing the significance of cultures and traditions of different countries. Danger lies within cultural leveling such that indiscriminate acceptance of types of conduct and lifestyles. In this way one loses sight of the profound significance of the different nations, of the traditions of the various people, by which the individuals define himself in relation to life’s fundamental questions.

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