Re: CHAT: better than others (late reflection)

BP Jonsson wrote:

> At 23:41 01.3.2000 +0100, Barry Garcia wrote:
> >In all seriousness, most Americans (at least in my experience) don't think
> >they're better than Canadians. It's just that the vocal ones are the ones
> >who do think they are better than Canadians.
>
> IME those vociferous ones think they're better than everybody else.  I heard
> Americans in Indonesia refer to the locals as "rats" <horror>.  I thought
> that was an Asians and the Vietnam war thing, but then someone told me she'd
> heard the very same in Belgium!  And we're talking *resident* Americans
> here, not tourists!
Looking down on the Other is a general feature of humanity, not a peculiarity
of any one particular people.  The French have a reputation for thinking themselves
to be culturally superior to all other peoples. The ancient Greeks, well, their
self-esteem was so great that they had a special word for all those funny people
that make bar-bar noises:  _barbaroi_  -- whence English "barbarian", of course.
The Chinese, too, called their own state the Middle Kingdom because, well, what
else could there be?  Europeans complain about American imperialism in Vietnam
and ignore their own (French) intervention in Rwanda recently, where as a result
hundreds of thousands died in a reign of terror.  It's the same all over the earth:
the vociferous ones set the tone of the society, and the quiet, thoughtful ones are
ignored.

The reason is simple:  it takes more effort, mental and social, to learn how to
see others as fundamentally similar to yourself  when those similarities are
rather abstract.  We take them so wholly for granted that it's easy to forget
them in the first place.  We are all subject to this law, to a greater or lesser
extent:  it is truly difficult to break oneself free of the mores of the society in
which one was raised, to become a Kantian cosmopolite.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: trwier
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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