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Please don’t dismiss a cultural argument as a bias against a culture. It should be perfectly fine to hypothesise about the impact of cultures. I’m a German liv
by earthnail 4y ago
Please don’t dismiss a cultural argument as a bias against a culture.
It should be perfectly fine to hypothesise about the impact of cultures. I’m a German living in Sweden, and I can tell you that even though the cultures are very similar, there are differences that have a massive impact. Sweden is highly digital, Germany feels like stone age in comparison. And that has almost exclusively cultural reasons: after decades of Nazi and Easy/West split, Germany became brutally cautious around anything involving privacy.
Hopefully this example illustrates that cultural reasons are an important factor in discussing societies, and should not automatically be dismissed as someone having a bias for or against a certain culture.
- factorialboy 4y agoIt's not a dismissal. Hitchens' Razor. If someone makes the cultural argument, the onus is on them to provide proof for such an argument. Please go ahead and give valid reasons why "Indian culture" is not suitable for steady long term economic growth.
- rippercushions 4y agoIt's hard to generalize about something as amorphous and diverse as "Indian culture" (the scare quotes are warranted), but I'd posit that religion makes a large difference between India and China. China was atheist for decades and religion remains by and large pretty marginal today, while in India it's huge right across the social spectrum. The concepts of caste and karma are very Indian too: how the poor are preordained into their lot and the lower castes are stomped down with mob violence if they get too uppity. (Yes, this may sound uncomfortably familiar to Americans.) Urban India is ditching a lot of this baggage at varying speeds and growing fast (cause or effect?), but in wide swathes of the countryside life and belief remains near-medieval.