> "And you'll agree that as a truly pervasive set of assumptions, it's pretty much a liberal Western, even American, tradition, won't you? Think how strange thi

> "And you'll agree that as a truly pervasive set of assumptions, it's pretty much a liberal Western, even American, tradition, won't you? Think how strange this Doctrine of Otherness would seem to an ancient Roman, or to the dynastic Chinese who thought the world revolved around Beijing, or to Tudor England, or to most of the peoples of the world today." it falls apart there, for me. I don't know what those other cultures appreciated. perhaps it was the case that every human in those societies were were entirely anti-other.. but I feel like it must have been the case that there were aspects of non-(ancient)-chinese culture that the Chinese appreciated, and adopted... else, we'd not have had any cultural exchange, ever