My Culture's Better than Your's...so Raspberries!

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."

Samuel P. Huntington

Yeppers, that about says it. This is another post to expound on some ideas that will soon form a thread over at AD.

I try to find patterns in discussion over political issue. The individual data point of statements just cry to be placed into some best-fit line pattern of an overarching theory.

Perhaps I'm overeaching, perhaps not.

You tell me.

If seems to me that nations and groups of nations have a habit of patting themselves on the back.

That's no always a bad thing I suppose, I don't think Patriotism and the like is always negative.

the problems come in when patriots abandon the absolute good in their country for their relative advantage over other countries.

My point?

The West (or which I'm a card carrying member) has always had something of a superiority complex. It had manifested itself under different flags, from explicitly racist expression like "Manifest Destiny" and "Jim Crow"...

...to more economic policies of colonization in the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

It is human nature to try and explain that which hey see around them. It what I'm doing with this thread and it's what the West as a whole has been doing since Social Darwinism and before.

Since the concept that Europeans as a race are biologically superior has lost some of it's luster another theory has taken root somewhat.

It is not the equal of past expression of the superiority of the "white race," but it's dangerous in it's own way.

The new claim is that European and American "culture" explain their relative success compared to the third world, Africa, Latin America, and other regions.

The counter examples of culture as a primary economic factor are endless. China and Taiwan, North and South Korea, the rising status of Brazil, the gulf in Eastern and Western Europe etc.

..but the theory holds, probably because it's more than a little flattering.

Next pet project.

Burst that little bubble so that we can all get down to discussing economic realities which usually hinge on things far more substantial that "culture".

Whatever that means.