Are all cultures equal?

[luiz]

People are equal, cultures are not.
What I'm trying to say is that some cultures are much more advanced then others, but the people of the less advanced cultures are perfectly able to catch up if given the opportunity.

To give an exemple:
Let's thing about the Portuguses and the Natives they found in Brazil. In all senses(and I do mean ALL), the portuguses culture was more developped then the Native one. They produced better weapons, better medicine, better works of art, they could write, and so on.
But once you teached a Native how to do those things, he became as good as any portuguese in doing those things.

 

[Sarevok]

Culktures are equal, but the way these cultures run their governments makes some cultures better than others. This is especially true when considering Western and Arab cultures, which are in my opinion equal, but the West conducts themselves better.

 

[HamaticBabylon]

African scientific culture is much better than Arab Nomadic culture, and that is a fact!

 

[amadeus]

Try as you might, but you cannot take anything objective (for example, level of technological advancement) and make it equal "better" or "worse." What is better to you might be worse to someone else, and irrelevant to a third person.

It is subjective, but they asked for my opinion. The artistic aspects of a culture don't matter much when you're starving to death.

 

[WillJ]

It is subjective, but they asked for my opinion. The artistic aspects of a culture don't matter much when you're starving to death.

Well sure, you can have an opinion on something being better than something else, but I assumed that that's not what Drunk Master had in mind when making the poll.

 

[amadeus]

Or do you think that there are universal values on which you can measure all cultures around the world and say this one is better than the other?

 

[stormbind]

When given the chance, just about everyone wants blue jeans, air conditioning, television, DVD's, music, computers, video games, refrigerators, good medical care, and / or all the other perks that have come from the consumer-driven free-enterprise Western culture. We rock!

But it's not having those things that defines culture, it's what you do with them that counts

 

[WillJ]

Or do you think that there are universal values on which you can measure all cultures around the world and say this one is better than the other?

I'd say that "universal" implies objective.

 

[Duddha]

People are equal, cultures are not.
What I'm trying to say is that some cultures are much more advanced then others, but the people of the less advanced cultures are perfectly able to catch up if given the opportunity.

To give an exemple:
Let's thing about the Portuguses and the Natives they found in Brazil. In all senses(and I do mean ALL), the portuguses culture was more developped then the Native one. They produced better weapons, better medicine, better works of art, they could write, and so on.
But once you teached a Native how to do those things, he became as good as any portuguese in doing those things.

Your measurement of culture rests purely on which culture was better able to survive, neglecting the fact that one killed the other. I don't think that is an adequate measure of culture.

The problem with deciding whether one entire culture is better than another is that there is no easy measurement, it is a multidimensional scale, with more dimension than can be measured at once. We also have to take into account the fact that we are also self-biased, usually considering ourselves naturally better than other, and that the tools we use to measure culture (history) are themselves biased towards those who had the power to write history and pass it on to us.

In conclusion we cannot measure enitre cultures against one another. At best we can compare features. Like "I prefer a culture with X" or "X feature of culture Z benefits Y aspect better than A feature in culture B". But none of that adds up to a ranking system of cultures.

The basic question of this thread is faulty and silly.

edit: delete

 

[ainwood]

Moderator Action: Culture bashing is just nationality bashing by a different name.

Thread closed.