Cultural imperialism is wrong when you can't be absolutely, unequivocally certain that your own culture is in the right. Which means that most of the time, cult

Cultural imperialism is wrong when you can't be absolutely, unequivocally certain that your own culture is in the right. Which means that most of the time, cultural imperialism is bad. I don't know how much you've been travelling, but every place you'll visit you will see that there are big and small differences. Most of these will be weird to you, and some will be offensive. This is true even for very similar cultures, like for instance those of Australia and the United States. It becomes pretty obvious that it's usually impossible to be right in the scientific sense, when it comes to customs and cultural norms. I think we can safely say that witch-burning, widow-burning, genital mutilation (might there be an interesting observation about a popular US custom here?) and torture are all bad enough to warrant a bit of pressure. But outside of human rights violations, or maybe things that most cultures would agree is bad, these questions become fuzzy enough that you'll be more likely to look like a jackass than do any good. Try to imagine how cultural imperialism would look to you if, for instance, India was the global superpower and not the United States. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html has some good observations about cognitive bias regarding social customs.