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Cultural Chauvinism
Apr. 17th, 2016 11:12 amI am tired of cultural chauvinists who insist that every good value and every new technology comes from the “west,” apparently unaware of how much comes from elsewhere, while dencouncing everyone else for being cultural relativists.
No one is absolutely relativist, but it helps to be somewhat relativist, and to try to understand societies in their members’ terms. Especially if, like Boaz, you are an anthropologist.
Now as far as it goes many key technologies have come from the west, in the past couple hundred years. Part of that is because of the mutually-reinforcing coal-mining and machine-building industries in mid-modern Britain. Part of that is because of trade connections around the world. But to me, those seem like luck, rather than proof of “western” superiority.
And as for values, the important ones, such as freedom and equality, have never been unique to the “west,” and are under threat from anti-immigrant movements and other authoritarian movements in the “west.”
No one is absolutely relativist, but it helps to be somewhat relativist, and to try to understand societies in their members’ terms. Especially if, like Boaz, you are an anthropologist.
Now as far as it goes many key technologies have come from the west, in the past couple hundred years. Part of that is because of the mutually-reinforcing coal-mining and machine-building industries in mid-modern Britain. Part of that is because of trade connections around the world. But to me, those seem like luck, rather than proof of “western” superiority.
And as for values, the important ones, such as freedom and equality, have never been unique to the “west,” and are under threat from anti-immigrant movements and other authoritarian movements in the “west.”
