I’m sorry I only have anecdotal evidence to add, but this is a subject in which I’ve been interested for several years. When I moved to France from Pakistan, I was asked the following questions:
- Is it hard being a woman there?
- What is life like under martial law?
- What do you think about Benazir Bhutto?
When I moved to America, I got the following:
- Do you have electricity there?
- Do you have television there?
- Do you know what Coke is?
- How come you speak English?
- I have a friend from Pakistan, his name is X, do you know him?
- I know Pakistan is a pretty big city, but what country is it in again? (This from a Yale graduate.)
I’ve found that Americans, on average, seem to be less-informed about the world in general than people in other countries. I don’t know why this is, although I have noticed that the media in America seems to focus less on the outside world than it does in other countries. (I suppose this could be because America is so much larger and there is so much more going on in America, as some of you have pointed out.)
However, I don’t think that Americans are arrogant. Every American who asked me one of the “ignorant” questions I listed above was extremely eager to learn about other parts of the world. Of course there are Americans who go about saying that America is the greatest country on earth, but in my experience almost everyone thinks that whichever country they happen to have been born in is the greatest country on earth. (In fact, the only people I have ever met who don’t think that are Americans.) The only reason patriotism looks bad in an American and not in a Frenchman is the fear that America truly is the greatest country on earth, that American culture is spreading at an alarming rate, that even people in Muslim fundamentalist countries want to watch American movies and eat American fast food.
Americans are also criticised for their lack of international travel, even though many of them have visited areas within America which are much more varied and diverse than the average European will see in a trip around Europe. A European could see London, Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels all in one weekend. An American has to get across the Atlantic Ocean first.
The argument that “non-Americans know so much about America, but Americans know so little about them” is obviously flawed, as has been pointed out here. But it, too, works to strengthen the idea of Americans as ignorant, arrogant people.
In my opinion the “ignorant American” stereotype has some validity, but is exaggerated due to the biased perception of America in the eyes of the rest of the world.
