There is a common school of thought which has arisen because of a massive logical fallacy. This is that because all people are equal, all cultures are equal and therefore all cultures are equal because they were made by people.
This is false. Some people believe that a preliterate society that still is hunting and gathering is as good as a modern industrial state. And the only thing I want to ask the people who seriously believe that is what have you been smoking?
Here’s the thing. If you really think all cultures are equal, go live in Afghanistan. I’m not telling you to go live in Afghanistan because I want you out of this country, I’m telling you to go live in Afghanistan because I know you wouldn’t like it there and after a week and a half removed from the First World or whenever you happened to see an honor killing you’d come back and admit to me I was right and you were wrong.
All people are… Well they aren’t created equal. But because fairness is advantageous to everyone we should pretend they are. The law shouldn’t differentiate between the smart and the stupid, the rich or the poor. Because our culture values the concept of equality. And this is right. Its not like stupid people should be jailed for murder while smart people should be let off the hook.
A culture isn’t a person. Cultures are institutions crafted by people, much like fighter jets. and, as we can empirically show some fighter jets are better than others, similarly some cultures are hands down better cultures for the well being of the members within them.
I never thought I’d say this, but serious disagreement with my thesis comes from over thinking the issue.
When we look at our history, we judge ourselves based on how we are today as compared to how we were in the past. We can all agree slavery was wrong. All slavery, not just ours, Roman, Greek, Egyptian was categorically wrong. It is wrong because you would not want to be a slave, and even more agregus than slavery itself was the fact that the distinctions by which some men were enslaved while others were not were based on nothing more than ignorance. . The argument which is made by some academics is, “Who says slavery is wrong? Isn’t your anti slavery ethos created out of your western values? The people who hold slaves don’t think slavery is wrong, and your demeaning them by dismissing them as savages.”
First, yes, my western values tell me slavery is wrong. That’s one of the great things about my western values.
Second, every slaver is not necessarily a savage, but is certainly savage.
And if you really want to keep arguing this with me I’m just going to come up to you with a bullwhip and my laundry and beat the fuck out of you until you admit to me that slavery is better off dead.
Or until you’ve done my laundry.
Either way I win.
There’s a word that liberals shie away from these days, and that word is evil. It gets hidden away in the wreak of moral relativism.
Here’s how this works. Murder, rape, human sacrifice and theft are all evil. Why? Because you would want none of these things to happen to you, and the infliction of pain for no larger goal other than ones personal ends is wrong.
This has a basis in logic and in empathy. If you had to watch a rape from beginning to end hopefully you’d feel sick. If you were raped you’d be devastated. Thus the first is the empathetic reason, it hurts us to see other people in pain, and second the logical. We don’t want to be in pain thus we stop rape and murder whenever possible because it is implicitly understood that its always possible the next person who is murdered or raped might be you or me.
A culture that allows evil within itself is by definition evil.
The United States isn’t perfect. We have problems. Too much rape and too much murder. But we’re trying hard to improve and the very fact we see rape and murder as serious problems to be dealt with rather than as a permissible status quo indicate we are moving in the right direction. Our own Societal improvement isn’t always as rapid as we’d like it to be and sometimes its slower than anyone with common sense can fathom, but it is happening.
The existence of cultures where rape and murder are encouraged and also of rapists and murderers within cultures where rape and murder are discouraged are two sides of the same problem. Evil.
I do not claim that men are born evil. Men are made evil through circumstances which are almost too complex to parse, in every country there are serial killers, sociopath’s and gangsters. These people commit crimes we wish they wouldn’t. And some cultures, such as that of Rwanda, commit acts of genocide we wish they wouldn’t.
A good culture where bad things happen, however, is different than a bad culture in which even more bad things happen. Recognition of this fact is essential.
There are countries that you would never want to visit, even for a day, because the odds of you getting shot are way too high. Why is this? Because these countries are shitholes. Some of these shitholes are evil, some are simply anarchic.
Let me break this down quick.
There are places that are great to live, America, Europe, Japan, south Korea, Canada, the rest of the first world and the best parts of the second.
Then we get into a second area, the second world, where things are improving but haven’t yet reached the high standards of living enjoyed in the first world. On the one hand you can drive a car and drink the water without shitting yourself to death, there is an upper class, the economy is growing rapidly, education levels are rising, but on the other hand people still get kidnapped and the kidnappers chop off an ear as a ransomed note, and this is common enough that it doesn’t make headlines, as it would had it happened in the first world, and the murder rate hasn’t dropped to historically nonviolent first world levels.
Then there are places where the population either wants, or should want, to emigrate. Somalia , Seria, Iraq, the rest of the middle east minus Turkey and Israel, Northafrica, central Africa, Southafrica, North Korea, Mexico, the list goes on for a really long time.
That’s because these places are the aforementioned shitholes.
What must a country do to be designated a shithole? In short, the technical definition is as follows. Shithole. A country in which no one is surprised to hear of something completely shitty happening that day.
Car bomb kills a hundred. In the United States that would be headline news for ten days. If the headline instead read, car bomb kills a hundred in… Yemen, at least my reaction is, no shit. Then I eat my breakfast.
Its not as though anyone sane is going. “A car bomb? In Yemen? God I just didn’t think it could happen here!”
In the first world we take peace mostly for granted. Its unlikely you’ll be shot today. This is a blessing of civilization.
In the second world there is reform, because some one realized there are places more civilized and peaceful, and they want there own country to be like that. So your odds of getting raped or shot are higher then they should be, but get lower every few years.
And then There are countries where the incidence of rape and murder are much higher than in the first world. And much of this rape and murder is institutionalized, weather by government legislation or savage tradition. Poverty is rampant, and not American poverty where your poor but have food and clean water and a TV and your kid goes to school, and perhaps you get to drive a beat up car, but third world poverty where you shit worms and have malaria by age eight and finding two meals a day is the overriding struggle of your life. Because there are no food stamps. Because the government sucks.
Some of these countries lack a powerful government, such as Somalia, and some of these countries have a powerful government, and that government is evil. Iran.
There is a huge difference between the shitholes and the nonshitholes.
For a long time the world was a shithole. So it isn’t surprising many countries are still shitholes.
Lets all take a moment and focus on the good news, which is that some countries are no longer shitty. Western Europe, Asia, eastern Europe, the America’s, all used to be shitty.
Here’s the historical context of shitholes. Your a dude. You never go to school one day in your life. You work the field. Your back gets bent before your balls have hair. You die at thirty.
Your a chick. You never go to school one day in your life. You work the fields. Your back gets bent before you have your first period. You have a kid. You have a second kid. You have a third kid you have a fourth kid. Half of those kids die. You have a fifth kid. You die in childbirth at twenty.
Your a dude. You have a lot of money. You get everything you want but your really religious and live in an extremely violent society. You fuck peasants and there is no rape in marriage. Legally speaking and being a product of your time you take full advantage of this. You either die in war or from a disease today we cure with a pill. You die at fifty. Your a chick. Your family has lots of money. Because your a woman none of your families money is yours unless your lucky and become a widow. You get married off to a dude. You have no say in who the dude is. He can cheat, you can’t. the statistics say You aren’t allowed an education, you have a kid. You have another kid. You have another kid. You die at twenty-five.
For most people this is how life went down for millennia
Then came modernization. Modernization gave us so much that even a bare bones listing of its achievements would take twenty pages, but I’ll tick off the high points.
Modernization is why you are not a subsistence farmer or a peasant, modernization is the reason why women aren’t raped at random with the blessing of society. Modernization is why we don’t burn witches. Because we don’t believe in witchcraft. Modernization is why criminals aren’t stretched on the rack, its why criminals aren’t crucified, modernization is why criminals don’t get noses, hands, ears, or other more important body parts chopped off.
Modernization is why if you get into a bar fight, you don’t pull out a sword and gut the dude who called you a fag. Which is what used to happen all the time. Modernization is why its now a crime to beat the shit out of your wife. Modernization is why women don’t die in childbirth, which was so common that nobles would often marry two or three times, because the first wife died birthing kid ten. Modernization is why you don’t have kid ten, because you can control the number of children you have.
Modernization is why there are doctors who have effective cures for disease which do not involve the four humors of the body or leaches. Instead the cures involve kidney transplants and chemotherapy and skin grafts and vaccines. Modernization is why all your friends don’t have smallpox scars. Its why we brush our teeth. Its why we can fly in airplanes and drive in cars. Its why horses are now something rich girls learn to ride for the fun of it, rather than as a means of transport. Its why HBO canceled a show when three horses had to be put down on set. Its why you have no fucking idea how to hitch yourself up to a plow and drag it like an ox. Its why being fat is a problem. That’s a real modern problem, btw.
In short, every single convenience you take utterly for granted today is a product of the march of civilization. The civilization your living in is a product of cultural movements whose aggregate over centuries has been modernity. The civilization ruled by a despot is the product of fear and a weak willed population ignoring the flourishing of more successful forms of government. For the most part.
The degree to which the members of a country still live the bleak existence described above has to do with how modern they are.
The American farmer is not a European peasant. But an African peasant is much like a European one. What separates them is five hundred years. Africa and the middle east, in fact, are the dark ages with guns.
Let me continue to break shit down.
Writing is good. Efficient farming is good. Cars are good. I mean all of these things are good for people.
If you can’t write its hard to trust your history because memory is fallible. If you can’t write, sooner or later, your memories which have been past down through oral tradition die or are corrupted and your history is lost.
Writing allows for all sorts of things which will forever be beyond the illiterates comprehension.
Cars are good, because you aren’t stuck to the daily speed and distance of a horse.
Efficient farming is good because society cannot advance until someone can pull his head out from the dirt to stop breaking his back with drudgery and instead use that time to think.
Writing, farming and cars are good advancements. This does not mean that the people without efficient farming techniques, literature and cars are bad people, they are unfortunate people. They are not lesser people, they are people forced to develop in a lesser society.
On the other hand, chopping off a girls clitoris is not an amoral action. Its immoral. Evil. I hope this isn’t news. The culture that institutionalizes clitoris chopping is a savage and evil culture first because Clitoridectomies are awful in themselves and second it isn’t as though the culture where this happens is just like ours except for that one thing, its one of those markers that allows you to stereotype a ton, and you’ll be right. The problem is you can’t blame any of the dudes who went along with this, kneeling on some screaming chicks wrists as the tribal elder sharpened the freakin rock, because he doesn’t know any better, he was raised in clit chopping land. He’s like a southern racist from the fifties. Evil, naturally, but when everyone around you is evil you’ll grow up to be evil as well.
When someone says to me, all cultures are equal, none are better, none are worse what they must mean is that there isn’t anything wrong with five guys holding a girl down and using a sharpened rock to fuck up her shit.
They fall back to this weak ass position. They go, “Well, I’m not saying I approve of that action, but your value system is based on your culture, and there value system is based off there culture, and you can’t force your values down someone else’s throat.”
First, yes I can.
Second, its very simple, really. A country where evil rampages around unconstrained is a bad place. No, all the people there aren’t bad people, but something’s rotten in Denmark if the Dutch are killing each other every day and if Dutch women are raped all the time and if theft is rampant and if slavery or subjugation are the norm.
The west has, in fact, shoved its values down lots of other countries throats. If we had not democracy would never have spread. This process doesn’t always happen because we as a society make a concerted effort, sometimes good idea’s are so good they are transmitted like viruses.
I hate to use emotion and sentimentality as a cornerstone of an argument but sometimes when explaining moral issues I believe I have to.
When people believe in an idea, whatever that idea is, they naturally construct rationalizations for why the idea is good. In societies where murder is commonplace, a lesser value is placed on human life by the people in that culture. Moral relativists would have us accept this. But I will not.
The world has improved. Some people refuse to believe that we’ve experienced progress throughout history because they are liberal and progress has not been distributed equally throughout the world.
As I said already, it isn’t surprising that some of the world is still awful because two thousand years ago the entire world was awful. Even Rome, our first real grasp at a civilization that could have become modern, wasn’t America with toga’s. It was misogynist, women were under the control of either there wife or there father. The roman ethics was even more warlike than the later Christian ethos when it came to conquering territory. Rome may have evolved into something more like our civilization later, and is noteworthy because until it began to collapse it was a society in existence, stable and trending upwards nonetheless Rome entertained itself with gladiatorial combat that today we would never countenance. You put two people in a ring with swords and watch them try and kill each other. Now we see that in action movies. The closest thing we have to gladiators is the ultimate fighting championship, and we’ve put in place rules to insure the safety of the participants.
It comes down to this. If every person could choose to take there family to a new country or stay in there own country, the amount of emigration from any given country would give you a good idea of the supremacy of that country.
Most people probably would not want to live in the third world if they could magically get teleported to the first. But very few people living in the first world would want to go live permanently in the third.
It doesn’t matter if this is unkind, that’s why cultures and people are not the same.
It is foolish to evaluate a person without also looking at his culture. Many of the presidents historians consider to be among our greatest were racist. They thought Blacks were inferior and this belief was so strong it remained unexamined. The kings and queens of England had prediusis even harder for us to understand. Hitler did not invent anti-Semitism.
It makes no sense to hate people of the past for being racist because the belief was so prevalent that it took exceptionally good people from that time to understand it was wrong.
But you can easily look at a culture and see its moral shortcomings because what you are evaluating then are the common beliefs of a society.
This is why, had we to do it all over again, we probably would not have made genocidal war on the Indians, because now we see land grabs as wrong.
It is redolent of the imperialist mindset of the nineteenth century to claim western cultural superiority, but that is an unfortunate coincidence.
When looking at how people in the second and third worlds live, there attitudes towards there living situation are not important.
Slavery must have given slaves ghastly psychological scars. But there must have also been slaves who made there peace with being enslaved. In general people make peace with adverse conditions because its do that or kill yourself but this doesn’t mean because they have found a way to live through shit that it isn’t shit they are living through.
Similarly the woman forced to wear a Burka or who is not allowed to talk to men without a male family member present or who is denied an education based on her sex may be content with her lot because realistically she cannot expect any better. But her contentment with awful circumstances does not justify her placement into those circumstances because the same Burka wearing woman born in Iran may have been a scientist had she been born in England.
What goodness, for lack of a more intellectual term comes down to is choice.
If you want to wear a Burka, go ahead. If you want to be a housewife or hunt and gather, your free to not work or to hike out into the woods and go off the grid and grow your vegetables and hunt deer. Realistically our government is not so omni-present to stop you from doing the latter and has no desire to stop you from doing the former.
But the important aspect of your situation is that you have the choice.
In the first world you have free speech which allows you to say all cultures are equal. If you said that in Iran they’d shoot you in the face, there bye denying you freedom.
I have written this post because its so easy to discount civilization. People complain about things which prove the progress we have made. If you think you live in an extraordinarily violent or brutal society, and you are living in the First World, you believe this to be true because you lack an understanding of how awful things used to be everywhere.
I do not say we must try and right the worlds wrongs. But it is absolutely important to recognize that there is a right and wrong in an international context. Our country is not always in the right, we are not a cartoonish perfectly moral guardian. But there is a difference between the United States and Iran, the United Kingdom and north Korea, Germany and China.
These differences were not preordained. But they exist. It is important to understand this when focusing on international relations because you must understand the moral point a country is speaking from in order to evaluate its moral authority. Iran’s wanting to wipe Israel off the map or the genocide in darfure or the ethnic cleansing in Cosivo are evil being practiced on an international scale.
They are not the same as the United States accidentally bombing a hospital.
This is bad. Hospitals shouldn’t be bombed.
But compared to where the rest of the world is coming from, the fact that we even care enough to apologize is progress.
In mid evil times, or in Africa or the mid east today, you’d go to war and slaughter villages to the last child.
This post is not foremost a defense of America. Its a defense of the first world.
The goal is that there will at some point only be a first world.
When I read about all the awful stuff that happens in other countries on a daily basis the only thing I think is, that wouldn’t happen in my country.
This is not because we are better people, its because we were born into a better culture, which is why we are not killing each other over a spring or three goats.
The first world, year by year as a society the first world is struggling to get better. We try and stamp out ignorance, bloodthirsty ness, religious strife,and bigotry.
These things are hallmarks of bad culture.
If something bad happens– excuse me, when something bad happens in the Arab world tomorrow, lets say its a car bombing, the question that should be asked is, what’s the absolute root cause of why that guy just took his truck and blew himself up and took out that restaurant of civilians along with his worthless ass?
In the United states if we had a car bombing, it would be front page news. And car bombings dot the foreign section of the New York times like periods.
The fair rule of law, a trust in government, the cultivation of intrastate peace, the education of children, all of these things are so important.
The first world is not a utopia, at all, unless you compare it to the third world.
There is nothing noble about savagery. The strife afflicting Africa isn’t fine or noble or just or a northern model of how shit should get done, its barbaric and needs to stop. Similarly, the Chinese or Iranians don’t get to claim they are civilized and great if they don’t allow there people freedom.
We, the first world, already went through these struggles.
The thing is that if you were looking for the seeds of utopia, you would find them here, in the first world.
Thank you.
Pages & Rages 
Of Course There are Better Cultures, you Dumbass
There is a common school of thought which has arisen because of a massive logical fallacy. This is that because all people are equal, all cultures are equal and therefore all cultures are equal because they were made by people.
This is false. Some people believe that a preliterate society that still is hunting and gathering is as good as a modern industrial state. And the only thing I want to ask the people who seriously believe that is what have you been smoking?
Here’s the thing. If you really think all cultures are equal, go live in Afghanistan. I’m not telling you to go live in Afghanistan because I want you out of this country, I’m telling you to go live in Afghanistan because I know you wouldn’t like it there and after a week and a half removed from the First World or whenever you happened to see an honor killing you’d come back and admit to me I was right and you were wrong.
All people are… Well they aren’t created equal. But because fairness is advantageous to everyone we should pretend they are. The law shouldn’t differentiate between the smart and the stupid, the rich or the poor. Because our culture values the concept of equality. And this is right. Its not like stupid people should be jailed for murder while smart people should be let off the hook.
A culture isn’t a person. Cultures are institutions crafted by people, much like fighter jets. and, as we can empirically show some fighter jets are better than others, similarly some cultures are hands down better cultures for the well being of the members within them.
I never thought I’d say this, but serious disagreement with my thesis comes from over thinking the issue.
When we look at our history, we judge ourselves based on how we are today as compared to how we were in the past. We can all agree slavery was wrong. All slavery, not just ours, Roman, Greek, Egyptian was categorically wrong. It is wrong because you would not want to be a slave, and even more agregus than slavery itself was the fact that the distinctions by which some men were enslaved while others were not were based on nothing more than ignorance. . The argument which is made by some academics is, “Who says slavery is wrong? Isn’t your anti slavery ethos created out of your western values? The people who hold slaves don’t think slavery is wrong, and your demeaning them by dismissing them as savages.”
First, yes, my western values tell me slavery is wrong. That’s one of the great things about my western values.
Second, every slaver is not necessarily a savage, but is certainly savage.
And if you really want to keep arguing this with me I’m just going to come up to you with a bullwhip and my laundry and beat the fuck out of you until you admit to me that slavery is better off dead.
Or until you’ve done my laundry.
Either way I win.
There’s a word that liberals shie away from these days, and that word is evil. It gets hidden away in the wreak of moral relativism.
Here’s how this works. Murder, rape, human sacrifice and theft are all evil. Why? Because you would want none of these things to happen to you, and the infliction of pain for no larger goal other than ones personal ends is wrong.
This has a basis in logic and in empathy. If you had to watch a rape from beginning to end hopefully you’d feel sick. If you were raped you’d be devastated. Thus the first is the empathetic reason, it hurts us to see other people in pain, and second the logical. We don’t want to be in pain thus we stop rape and murder whenever possible because it is implicitly understood that its always possible the next person who is murdered or raped might be you or me.
A culture that allows evil within itself is by definition evil.
The United States isn’t perfect. We have problems. Too much rape and too much murder. But we’re trying hard to improve and the very fact we see rape and murder as serious problems to be dealt with rather than as a permissible status quo indicate we are moving in the right direction. Our own Societal improvement isn’t always as rapid as we’d like it to be and sometimes its slower than anyone with common sense can fathom, but it is happening.
The existence of cultures where rape and murder are encouraged and also of rapists and murderers within cultures where rape and murder are discouraged are two sides of the same problem. Evil.
I do not claim that men are born evil. Men are made evil through circumstances which are almost too complex to parse, in every country there are serial killers, sociopath’s and gangsters. These people commit crimes we wish they wouldn’t. And some cultures, such as that of Rwanda, commit acts of genocide we wish they wouldn’t.
A good culture where bad things happen, however, is different than a bad culture in which even more bad things happen. Recognition of this fact is essential.
There are countries that you would never want to visit, even for a day, because the odds of you getting shot are way too high. Why is this? Because these countries are shitholes. Some of these shitholes are evil, some are simply anarchic.
Let me break this down quick.
There are places that are great to live, America, Europe, Japan, south Korea, Canada, the rest of the first world and the best parts of the second.
Then we get into a second area, the second world, where things are improving but haven’t yet reached the high standards of living enjoyed in the first world. On the one hand you can drive a car and drink the water without shitting yourself to death, there is an upper class, the economy is growing rapidly, education levels are rising, but on the other hand people still get kidnapped and the kidnappers chop off an ear as a ransomed note, and this is common enough that it doesn’t make headlines, as it would had it happened in the first world, and the murder rate hasn’t dropped to historically nonviolent first world levels.
Then there are places where the population either wants, or should want, to emigrate. Somalia , Seria, Iraq, the rest of the middle east minus Turkey and Israel, Northafrica, central Africa, Southafrica, North Korea, Mexico, the list goes on for a really long time.
That’s because these places are the aforementioned shitholes.
What must a country do to be designated a shithole? In short, the technical definition is as follows. Shithole. A country in which no one is surprised to hear of something completely shitty happening that day.
Car bomb kills a hundred. In the United States that would be headline news for ten days. If the headline instead read, car bomb kills a hundred in… Yemen, at least my reaction is, no shit. Then I eat my breakfast.
Its not as though anyone sane is going. “A car bomb? In Yemen? God I just didn’t think it could happen here!”
In the first world we take peace mostly for granted. Its unlikely you’ll be shot today. This is a blessing of civilization.
In the second world there is reform, because some one realized there are places more civilized and peaceful, and they want there own country to be like that. So your odds of getting raped or shot are higher then they should be, but get lower every few years.
And then There are countries where the incidence of rape and murder are much higher than in the first world. And much of this rape and murder is institutionalized, weather by government legislation or savage tradition. Poverty is rampant, and not American poverty where your poor but have food and clean water and a TV and your kid goes to school, and perhaps you get to drive a beat up car, but third world poverty where you shit worms and have malaria by age eight and finding two meals a day is the overriding struggle of your life. Because there are no food stamps. Because the government sucks.
Some of these countries lack a powerful government, such as Somalia, and some of these countries have a powerful government, and that government is evil. Iran.
There is a huge difference between the shitholes and the nonshitholes.
For a long time the world was a shithole. So it isn’t surprising many countries are still shitholes.
Lets all take a moment and focus on the good news, which is that some countries are no longer shitty. Western Europe, Asia, eastern Europe, the America’s, all used to be shitty.
Here’s the historical context of shitholes. Your a dude. You never go to school one day in your life. You work the field. Your back gets bent before your balls have hair. You die at thirty.
Your a chick. You never go to school one day in your life. You work the fields. Your back gets bent before you have your first period. You have a kid. You have a second kid. You have a third kid you have a fourth kid. Half of those kids die. You have a fifth kid. You die in childbirth at twenty.
Your a dude. You have a lot of money. You get everything you want but your really religious and live in an extremely violent society. You fuck peasants and there is no rape in marriage. Legally speaking and being a product of your time you take full advantage of this. You either die in war or from a disease today we cure with a pill. You die at fifty. Your a chick. Your family has lots of money. Because your a woman none of your families money is yours unless your lucky and become a widow. You get married off to a dude. You have no say in who the dude is. He can cheat, you can’t. the statistics say You aren’t allowed an education, you have a kid. You have another kid. You have another kid. You die at twenty-five.
For most people this is how life went down for millennia
Then came modernization. Modernization gave us so much that even a bare bones listing of its achievements would take twenty pages, but I’ll tick off the high points.
Modernization is why you are not a subsistence farmer or a peasant, modernization is the reason why women aren’t raped at random with the blessing of society. Modernization is why we don’t burn witches. Because we don’t believe in witchcraft. Modernization is why criminals aren’t stretched on the rack, its why criminals aren’t crucified, modernization is why criminals don’t get noses, hands, ears, or other more important body parts chopped off.
Modernization is why if you get into a bar fight, you don’t pull out a sword and gut the dude who called you a fag. Which is what used to happen all the time. Modernization is why its now a crime to beat the shit out of your wife. Modernization is why women don’t die in childbirth, which was so common that nobles would often marry two or three times, because the first wife died birthing kid ten. Modernization is why you don’t have kid ten, because you can control the number of children you have.
Modernization is why there are doctors who have effective cures for disease which do not involve the four humors of the body or leaches. Instead the cures involve kidney transplants and chemotherapy and skin grafts and vaccines. Modernization is why all your friends don’t have smallpox scars. Its why we brush our teeth. Its why we can fly in airplanes and drive in cars. Its why horses are now something rich girls learn to ride for the fun of it, rather than as a means of transport. Its why HBO canceled a show when three horses had to be put down on set. Its why you have no fucking idea how to hitch yourself up to a plow and drag it like an ox. Its why being fat is a problem. That’s a real modern problem, btw.
In short, every single convenience you take utterly for granted today is a product of the march of civilization. The civilization your living in is a product of cultural movements whose aggregate over centuries has been modernity. The civilization ruled by a despot is the product of fear and a weak willed population ignoring the flourishing of more successful forms of government. For the most part.
The degree to which the members of a country still live the bleak existence described above has to do with how modern they are.
The American farmer is not a European peasant. But an African peasant is much like a European one. What separates them is five hundred years. Africa and the middle east, in fact, are the dark ages with guns.
Let me continue to break shit down.
Writing is good. Efficient farming is good. Cars are good. I mean all of these things are good for people.
If you can’t write its hard to trust your history because memory is fallible. If you can’t write, sooner or later, your memories which have been past down through oral tradition die or are corrupted and your history is lost.
Writing allows for all sorts of things which will forever be beyond the illiterates comprehension.
Cars are good, because you aren’t stuck to the daily speed and distance of a horse.
Efficient farming is good because society cannot advance until someone can pull his head out from the dirt to stop breaking his back with drudgery and instead use that time to think.
Writing, farming and cars are good advancements. This does not mean that the people without efficient farming techniques, literature and cars are bad people, they are unfortunate people. They are not lesser people, they are people forced to develop in a lesser society.
On the other hand, chopping off a girls clitoris is not an amoral action. Its immoral. Evil. I hope this isn’t news. The culture that institutionalizes clitoris chopping is a savage and evil culture first because Clitoridectomies are awful in themselves and second it isn’t as though the culture where this happens is just like ours except for that one thing, its one of those markers that allows you to stereotype a ton, and you’ll be right. The problem is you can’t blame any of the dudes who went along with this, kneeling on some screaming chicks wrists as the tribal elder sharpened the freakin rock, because he doesn’t know any better, he was raised in clit chopping land. He’s like a southern racist from the fifties. Evil, naturally, but when everyone around you is evil you’ll grow up to be evil as well.
When someone says to me, all cultures are equal, none are better, none are worse what they must mean is that there isn’t anything wrong with five guys holding a girl down and using a sharpened rock to fuck up her shit.
They fall back to this weak ass position. They go, “Well, I’m not saying I approve of that action, but your value system is based on your culture, and there value system is based off there culture, and you can’t force your values down someone else’s throat.”
First, yes I can.
Second, its very simple, really. A country where evil rampages around unconstrained is a bad place. No, all the people there aren’t bad people, but something’s rotten in Denmark if the Dutch are killing each other every day and if Dutch women are raped all the time and if theft is rampant and if slavery or subjugation are the norm.
The west has, in fact, shoved its values down lots of other countries throats. If we had not democracy would never have spread. This process doesn’t always happen because we as a society make a concerted effort, sometimes good idea’s are so good they are transmitted like viruses.
I hate to use emotion and sentimentality as a cornerstone of an argument but sometimes when explaining moral issues I believe I have to.
When people believe in an idea, whatever that idea is, they naturally construct rationalizations for why the idea is good. In societies where murder is commonplace, a lesser value is placed on human life by the people in that culture. Moral relativists would have us accept this. But I will not.
The world has improved. Some people refuse to believe that we’ve experienced progress throughout history because they are liberal and progress has not been distributed equally throughout the world.
As I said already, it isn’t surprising that some of the world is still awful because two thousand years ago the entire world was awful. Even Rome, our first real grasp at a civilization that could have become modern, wasn’t America with toga’s. It was misogynist, women were under the control of either there wife or there father. The roman ethics was even more warlike than the later Christian ethos when it came to conquering territory. Rome may have evolved into something more like our civilization later, and is noteworthy because until it began to collapse it was a society in existence, stable and trending upwards nonetheless Rome entertained itself with gladiatorial combat that today we would never countenance. You put two people in a ring with swords and watch them try and kill each other. Now we see that in action movies. The closest thing we have to gladiators is the ultimate fighting championship, and we’ve put in place rules to insure the safety of the participants.
It comes down to this. If every person could choose to take there family to a new country or stay in there own country, the amount of emigration from any given country would give you a good idea of the supremacy of that country.
Most people probably would not want to live in the third world if they could magically get teleported to the first. But very few people living in the first world would want to go live permanently in the third.
It doesn’t matter if this is unkind, that’s why cultures and people are not the same.
It is foolish to evaluate a person without also looking at his culture. Many of the presidents historians consider to be among our greatest were racist. They thought Blacks were inferior and this belief was so strong it remained unexamined. The kings and queens of England had prediusis even harder for us to understand. Hitler did not invent anti-Semitism.
It makes no sense to hate people of the past for being racist because the belief was so prevalent that it took exceptionally good people from that time to understand it was wrong.
But you can easily look at a culture and see its moral shortcomings because what you are evaluating then are the common beliefs of a society.
This is why, had we to do it all over again, we probably would not have made genocidal war on the Indians, because now we see land grabs as wrong.
It is redolent of the imperialist mindset of the nineteenth century to claim western cultural superiority, but that is an unfortunate coincidence.
When looking at how people in the second and third worlds live, there attitudes towards there living situation are not important.
Slavery must have given slaves ghastly psychological scars. But there must have also been slaves who made there peace with being enslaved. In general people make peace with adverse conditions because its do that or kill yourself but this doesn’t mean because they have found a way to live through shit that it isn’t shit they are living through.
Similarly the woman forced to wear a Burka or who is not allowed to talk to men without a male family member present or who is denied an education based on her sex may be content with her lot because realistically she cannot expect any better. But her contentment with awful circumstances does not justify her placement into those circumstances because the same Burka wearing woman born in Iran may have been a scientist had she been born in England.
What goodness, for lack of a more intellectual term comes down to is choice.
If you want to wear a Burka, go ahead. If you want to be a housewife or hunt and gather, your free to not work or to hike out into the woods and go off the grid and grow your vegetables and hunt deer. Realistically our government is not so omni-present to stop you from doing the latter and has no desire to stop you from doing the former.
But the important aspect of your situation is that you have the choice.
In the first world you have free speech which allows you to say all cultures are equal. If you said that in Iran they’d shoot you in the face, there bye denying you freedom.
I have written this post because its so easy to discount civilization. People complain about things which prove the progress we have made. If you think you live in an extraordinarily violent or brutal society, and you are living in the First World, you believe this to be true because you lack an understanding of how awful things used to be everywhere.
I do not say we must try and right the worlds wrongs. But it is absolutely important to recognize that there is a right and wrong in an international context. Our country is not always in the right, we are not a cartoonish perfectly moral guardian. But there is a difference between the United States and Iran, the United Kingdom and north Korea, Germany and China.
These differences were not preordained. But they exist. It is important to understand this when focusing on international relations because you must understand the moral point a country is speaking from in order to evaluate its moral authority. Iran’s wanting to wipe Israel off the map or the genocide in darfure or the ethnic cleansing in Cosivo are evil being practiced on an international scale.
They are not the same as the United States accidentally bombing a hospital.
This is bad. Hospitals shouldn’t be bombed.
But compared to where the rest of the world is coming from, the fact that we even care enough to apologize is progress.
In mid evil times, or in Africa or the mid east today, you’d go to war and slaughter villages to the last child.
This post is not foremost a defense of America. Its a defense of the first world.
The goal is that there will at some point only be a first world.
When I read about all the awful stuff that happens in other countries on a daily basis the only thing I think is, that wouldn’t happen in my country.
This is not because we are better people, its because we were born into a better culture, which is why we are not killing each other over a spring or three goats.
The first world, year by year as a society the first world is struggling to get better. We try and stamp out ignorance, bloodthirsty ness, religious strife,and bigotry.
These things are hallmarks of bad culture.
If something bad happens– excuse me, when something bad happens in the Arab world tomorrow, lets say its a car bombing, the question that should be asked is, what’s the absolute root cause of why that guy just took his truck and blew himself up and took out that restaurant of civilians along with his worthless ass?
In the United states if we had a car bombing, it would be front page news. And car bombings dot the foreign section of the New York times like periods.
The fair rule of law, a trust in government, the cultivation of intrastate peace, the education of children, all of these things are so important.
The first world is not a utopia, at all, unless you compare it to the third world.
There is nothing noble about savagery. The strife afflicting Africa isn’t fine or noble or just or a northern model of how shit should get done, its barbaric and needs to stop. Similarly, the Chinese or Iranians don’t get to claim they are civilized and great if they don’t allow there people freedom.
We, the first world, already went through these struggles.
The thing is that if you were looking for the seeds of utopia, you would find them here, in the first world.
Thank you.
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