[ittekimasu]

That is a very astute observation. Those of us who've seen secular humanist tenets of "rights", being cynically used for all sorts of geopolitical ends, will realize how easy it is to excite folk with such talking points.

People don't realize the dangers of such universalist notions.

[einhverfr]

And of course there is no cross-cultural empistemology that allows us to know which rights are universal, so they always become an excuse to power.

[ittekimasu]

Indeed. Worse yet, those alien to this sphere, are not even aware of this lack of understanding - which is probably why it is so destructive, culturally, for colonized peoples.

I would've hoped those in "social sciences" would work to rectify such issues, but in their new garb of post-modernism, they've yet more become the new priesthood.

[einhverfr]

Indeed. The only reason I can see the other side to this is that I have been married to a woman from a Indonesia for over a decade now. It has been a long process to understand the cultural differences. And I have enjoyed studying anthropology quite a lot.

The one thing that does save things a little bit is that Westerners are usually so out of touch that there really isn't much room for us to do much that doesn't just effectively turn into disengagement. But even that poses real problems. I do my best to help engage in dialog on both sides of very culturally bound issues in order to try to foster some room for dialog through disagreement but getting Westerners in general (and Americans in particular) to accept that an issue like abortion or same-sex marriage is dependent on culture and other cultural institutions (such as how family relates to the economic order) is virtually impossible.

That also gets to what is wrong with multiculturalism in the US, namely that it is being pushed by people who hate culture generally.

[ittekimasu]

> That also gets to what is wrong with multiculturalism in the US, namely that it is being pushed by people who hate culture generally.

I couldn't agree more; this'd have been okay had US not been so powerful geopolitically, but alas. You'll probably enjoy the tapestry around L. Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter" given in "God and Gold".

(http://www.cfr.org/religion/god-gold/p13990)

[einhverfr]

Looks fascinating. The abstract dovetails on Hilaire Belloc's "The Servile State" in interesting ways. Belloc argued that the key to the success of the industrial revolution in the UK was the confiscation of Catholic church lands under Henry VIII because this created destitute masses that could be exploited in the factories. So to Belloc, Protestantism as a political system was the key to understanding the economic problems of Capitalism.

Thinking about Belloc's thesis a bit more, you have a parallel to the Confiscation of the monasteries in the US, and that was the liberation of the slaves. One can think about slave-based agriculture in the Antebellum South as increasingly industrialized (and even increasingly exploitative as a result). And the civil war not only empowered corporations with large military contracts but also in its resolution provided them with destitute masses pushed into the wage labor system. As I usually say, all racial oppression in the US has been economic in both ends and means.

But in both cases, the religious landscape evolved to match the economic landscape. And the ideological landscape quickly followed. In some rural parts of the US it is still possible to have a discussion about common good, even with people one politically disagrees with. But in the cities, it is all about individualism and rights and any questioning of the in-group orthodoxy gets one labeled as "the enemy."

It took me actually living in Indonesia for a number of years to grasp the depth of difference there. And one of the things that is worth repeating often is that when third worlders speak of first world problems, they don't regard these as trivialities. Indonesians and Malaysians don't want to become like Americans and grow old alone. To those in the third world[1], they have already rejected what Americans and British hold to be (paraphrasing Thatcher) without alternative. I now count myself in the same category.

[1] using the term in the original sense, namely countries which reject both Anglo-American capitalism and Soviet/Chinese Communism. I sometimes refer to Sweden as third world for this reason also, though it is far more Capitalist than others.

[kome]

I reply to this just to say thank you! (and to save the comment for future reference)