Well, show me 23rd Century culture and I might well say mine is more ‘savage’. However based on what I can compare now, I’d say that certain cultures are miles behind in terms of civilisation.
And I’d agree with John that the proposition is confusing in more ways than one. Just to seek some kind of consensus, are we saying that 18th Century Americans and 21st Century Americans are different peoples?
I also read it this way. I think that the question didn’t intend a difference between the two words.
I pick disagree. There are certainly certain peoples (or cultures) that are more savage and others who are more civilized.
I didn’t see any racial overtones so maybe you’re just seeing what you want to see. The OP mentioned “peoples” which in my mind just means any group of people. Whether such groups are made up of one or many races is immaterial.
I read no such implication in the OP. I guess each one of us brings our own baggage to these ambigious questions. Me included of course.
Marc
Right up front I’d like to say that the question is poorly worded, both for the reasons in the OP and those mentioned by John Mace. I don’t think I can say that I agree or disagree because I’m not clear on what I’m supposed to be agreeing or disagreeing with.
I don’t know any New Guineans, but I do know a few people from sub-Saharan Africa. Some of them are of course the privledged offspring of government officials or whatnot, but there are others who grew up in pretty primitive conditions in cultures that might be called “savage”. I mean the kinds of cultures where it’s not only acceptable, but mandatory, for adolescent girls to have their genitals sliced up.
One of these women I know is now a vocal opponent of female genital mutilation, but at the time it was done to her she had no real objection – after all, every adult woman she knew had been through the same thing. Does that make her a savage? Were the other women, who were both subjected to and then carried out this bloody tradition, savages? I don’t think so. There might be a few sadists or sociopaths in the group, but I think most of them must be ordinary, decent folk. They didn’t cut or submit to cutting for kicks, they did so because in their culture (and most must have had little to no knowledge of any other) that was just the way things were done. Any woman who didn’t go along was not only unmarriagable but not a “real woman” at all. I have no problem condemning such cultural practices and I would be happy to see them vanish forever, but I can’t find it in me to condemn the people as savages.
-5-something, -5-something
But that’s what the question is asking - can we/should we use 21st century American standards to judge non-American cultures? Why is it ok to judge them, but not a 19th century American culture?
Anyway, I don’t remember what I originally checked to this question…but I vaguely remember thinking less about the violence (that seemed to mark other people’s answers) and more about the arts (performing and visual), literature (or oral tradition), language, religion, and familial structure…cultural factors that were often labeled (by some) an indication of savageness. For those, I would say “agree” to “strongly agree.”
I also think that a culture is very easily misinterpreted by those looking in from the outside.
I think we agree. I’m saying that it’s just as wrong for 21st century America to castigate 19th century America as it might be for 21st century America to say condemn 21st century Iran.
-2, -3.2 something
And for the life of me can’t remember what I answered on this one back when. I might have even mildly disagreed.
BUT… let’s remember, the questions are designed to be so spare as to force us to use the “baggage we bring” when anwering. As others have pointed out, the first clause refers to “peoples” – notice the plural, it’s in the collective sense – and the second one to “cultures”, creating SM’s dichotomy as to whether we’re describing an intrinsic trait of that nation/tribe, or a historic accident of culture.
The other tripwire in the question is the phrase “only different” – that adverb, to many of us, carries a connotation of moral equivalency, and it need not be so. As mentioned before, there are cultural practices that should be stopped, where a participant may incur no individual moral culpability at the time , but should still stop doing that.
Why is it wrong? Why isn’t equally right? Slavery was accepted in 19th century America, but there were MANY people who thought it was wrong and who fought to end it. I have no problem castigating 19th century Americans for allowing slavery. We can understand why it might have seemed acceptable to some, but that doesn’t mean we have to be nonjudgemental.
Part of the problem is trying to reduce any complex culture to one word: Civilized vs Savage. There are aspects of both in pretty much all cultures.
-4.62, -5.28
My answer would mirror SentientMeat’s and Menocchio’s. However, I have to disagree with the idea that it’s wrong to judge other cultures based on the one you are currently in. First off, there is really no grand framework for cultural evaluation that can be used to judge all cultures, but there are certain basic traits of cultures that have been shown to be preferrable. Individual liberty, individual rights, freedom of association, religion and speech, and economic freedom are all well-accepted as superior to their counterparts. In that sense I have no problem looking at other cultures and judging them based on those traits, even if they hadn’t been imagined yet. So yes, by those standards, Iran presently, the US 200 years ago, and Papua New Guinea pretty much throughout history come up short.
The real question, and what I think is actually what this Political Compass question wants people to think about, is whether differences in culture are inherent in people or is it all circumstantial. I lean very heavily towards the latter.
I’m reading the statement differently. I can’t get past seeing it as asking if there are some groups of people who are biologically savage, such that it wouldn’t matter what culture they were reared in, they would always descend to savagery. That any culture they developed, regardless of the environment or technology available, would be savage. I don’t agree with that.
If the statement is just a question of whether it’s possible to judge one culture relative to another, measuring relative savageness, I’d agree. I’d say it might be harder to judge an entire culture than you might think, but you could pick out practices and judge them and argue about their relative importance.
Is a high infant mortality rate a sign of savagery, for instance? What if it’s confined to one group? What if it’s not enforced on that group, just not particularly prevented? Do two abortions in one culture equal a rape in another?
But stating that there are groups that are inherently savage - no.
Tough question. After looking at it from the various angles I have to go with a tentitive ‘disagree’. There ARE savage peoples throughout history. Technological level has nothing to do with it (as the Nazi example showed)…or say Communist China 50’s or Cambodia under Pol Pot. Certainly in these examples (and myriad more throughout history) the entire people/culture wasn’t ‘savage’…but the actions of the peoples as a whole certainly were. I think the main problem/hangup people have with this is equating ‘civilized’ with technologically advanced and ‘savage’ with primitive. Primitive peoples can certainly be ‘civilized’ and technologically advanced peoples can be ‘savage’…you just have to widen your mind and not equate in traditional ways. But you’d have to be blind not to see that there certainly ARE peoples who are quite savage, no matter what their technological level is.
-XT
Economic Left/Right 0.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian 0.92
I am almost right smack dab in the center, what th-!?!
I picked “Disagree”
Due to my religious beliefs, I think that all people/peoples are “savage” at birth, and that only through God’s grace can we acheive the status of “civilized”.
Now bear in mind that this is not stating savage=unsaved.
I believe that you can be “Unsaved” and civilized at the same time. It’s just that I believe that it is God who allows us the blessing of civilization. But this option is by no means a given, it’s up to the person and/or the “peoples” .
However, I did not pick “Strongly Disagree” because I also think that the question was poorly worded. Matter of fact, I think that I maybe only used the "Strongly - " option twice. I just worked off of gut instinct. What a weird test.
That’s my 2¢
well, before i was (1.62, -4.92), but i took it again today and thought harder about the questions, and arrived at (5.12, -5.59). so take that as you will.
i checked agree. i have strong misgivings about using the words “civilized” or “savage” about people or cultures. these words, to me, imply a moral superiority, and thus an absolute morality. for me, morality is an entirely personal thing, and i reserve the right to frown upon any nation, culture, or people that commit what i consider atrocities. however, being objective about it, it really is just different–it is just my perspective. since, to me, morality is highly personal, one cannot apply a title of “moral victor” without assuming one’s morality is the best morality one can have, and that’s a very dangerous road to travel.
maybe i’m being a bit too pedantic about this, but there you have it.
Accepted by whom? Those that practice them.
Not all cultures embrace these ideals, and would, by no means, consider them to be superior to their ways. Sure, I prefer them, but I’ve been raised to prefer them.
You’re basically comparing apples with oranges and stating that it’s an accepted fact that oranges are better simply because oranges are all that you’ve been exposed to, and all your life, it’s been stressed that oranges are the “right” thing. But I prefer apples. I was raised on a farm with an orchard. I don’t particularly like oranges. It’s simply a matter of taste or preferance, just like cultures.
In a very simple sense, cultures can be likened to a taste in music. I love opera and classic rock. I don’t like rap, and I deeply despise country music. Howver, you may love one of these forms and think that I’m nuts for not loving it as well. You could argue the merits of that particular music 'till the cows came home, but it wouldn’t make you “right” any more than my preference makes me “wrong.”
I think it’s grossly unfair to declare our cultural ideals to be the end-all-be-all of civilization and look down upon other cultures because they don’t measure up to our standards. Love of Western ideals is not innate. We have been so deeply indoctrinated (or socialized, if you prefer) to love those concepts that it seems unthinkable that any culture would not love them, too.
I personally feel sorry for some Islamic women who have very little personal freedom, but I’m not ignorant enough to assume that if given a choice, she would fling aside her culture and embrace blue jeans and women’s lib. Likely, if I asked her, she would feel sorry for me that I don’t have the same lifestyle that she does.
I’d lay money that our culture will be vastly different in a couple hundred years. It’s entirely possible that our great-great-great-great grandchildren will look back on our culture and think we were evil, or crazy, or ignorant and uncivilized. But they will have no right to judge, just as we have to right to judge others today.
This misrepresents the argument opposing yours, I feel. My label of “savage” was not directed at differences in superficial minutiae such as fashion, music or even sexual liberty, but at horrific violations such as genital mutilation, unpunished rape, sexist infanticide or the threat of being stoned to death based on mere gossip and slander. She might not “fling aside” her clothes and religion in favour of denim and
promiscuity, but I’d suggest that she would (secretly, perhaps, since speaking out might itself be dangerous) wish an end to such atrocities with all her heart. If these things were so arbitrary, why does history show that people do not regress in this manner? That, once a given people have freedom from such subjugation, they are extremely loathe to give it up? This implies that rape and summary execution are not “different kinds of music” but are to some extent universally abhorrent.
Put simply, if it’s all just apples and oranges, why do the cultures who taste the apples of freedom rarely, if ever, return to the oranges of oppression?
As much as I hate to play the “NAZI card”, I think it’s relavent here. It was part of the culture of NAZI Germany to kill anyone who was Jewish. Is that just like prefering Wagner to Scott Joplin?
Or, if you like, it was part of the culture of much of the US early in the last century to segregate people by race in all aspects of the public sphere. Is that just like preferring Frank Sinatra over Elvis Presley?
I do not agree. Yes, perhaps some women, more especially those who have been directly exposed to Western ideals and culture, would, but a woman who has been raised to believe that “honor killings” are the correct response to promiscuous sex might throw stones at the victim herself, despising the woman as a whore. Why shouldn’t she, when her neighbors, her sister, her mother, and everyone she knows agrees that the “slut” deserves to die?
As for FGM, I remember an article, written years ago (and I will search for a cite tomorrow) about a family who lived in a country where this was frequently practiced. The mother and father had Western-style opinions on the matter, and wouldn’t have their daughter “circumsized”, and the girl was frustrated and embarassed by this. Her friends were proud that they had “become women” by having this procedure done to them, and teased the girl for her unaltered state. She tearfully pleaded with her parents to have her circumsized like all of her friends, so her mother pretended to comply.
There is not an American inside every oppressed woman, yearning to break free. The very idea would seem ludicrious to them. What is around them is what is “right”, just as we define “right” and “wrong” by what we have seen around us. They have been raised to love their country and their God, just as we have.
What is “normal” is defined by a culture. As I said before, there is no innate, lofty sense of a universal “right” and “wrong.” Actually, when you boil it down, there’s no such thing as a universal taboo. Even incest, which is the closest thing we have to a universal taboo, is extremely loose in its definition-- again, differing according to different groups. Some groups forbid sexual relations between even distant cousins, while in other groups, father-daughter sex is permissable under certain circumstances.
Culture can only exist when there’s a tacit agreement among members on the rules. Sure, you’ll always have rebels and outcasts, but the majority must embrace the culture’s dictates. Cultures in which FGM and honor killings exist could not survive if there were widespread opposition to it by the members.
Give them time. Democracy and “freedom” are extremely new concepts, considering the length of human history. I can’t say for certain that we’ll be free here in the United States in 100 years. There could be a massive upheval in our culture which could give us a version of The Handmaid’s Tale. You never know. Stability is much more rare than upheval.
Interestingly enough, “freedom” in Iraq has been a step back for women, or so I’ve heard. Whereas women had relative freedom, as well as careers in government jobs and the like, what I’ve heard is that many have been put back into the veil, and now stay at home.
I don’t want to get into a discussion about the war, but I predict that within 20 years, Iraq will deeply regress from the imposed form of democratic government, and that a Taliban-style regime will take power. (If you want to argue this point, perhaps we should start another thread.) My point is that we can’t expect people to embrace a form of government, or “freedom”, for that matter, since some of these concepts are foreign, if not actually opposed to their beliefs.
Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear.
Had I lived in Germany in 1930, i don’t know what kind of person I would have been. I’d like to think that I would have been part of the Resistance, hiding Jews like Corrie Ten Boom, but I can’t say for sure. I wasn’t raised my entire life to hate Jews and to see them as unhuman filth. As much as I’d like to assure myself that “somehow” I would have had an innate sense of how wrong the persecution and Holocaust was and that I would have risen above two decades of socialization, I don’t know if I would have.
Nor can I say for certain that had I been an American living in the South during the fifties and sixties I would have opposed segregation. Perhaps it would have seemed perfectly natural to me, and I would have been offended by the attempt to upset the social order. I’d like to think that I would have knelt with Dr. King on the Petus bridge and prayed with him as the brutal police rained down blows, but I can’t say. I wasn’t raised to see blacks as inferior.
The effects of socialization are incredibly powerful. Your parents and your peers shaped your preferences, predjudices, outlook, moral code, and your aesthetic sense among other things. While it is possible to nudge away from these things, or even to overtly rebel, most people go along with what they see around them, and accept it as normal. This socialization forms the basis by which we judge the world around us. It overpowers almost everything. If you had been raised in a tribe where eating babies and sleeping with your siblings were encouraged, that’s what you’d be doing. No innate sense would alert you that it’s “wrong” to do so.
By comparing it to choices in music and clothing, I was trying to put these concepts into very simple terms-- thereby making it complicated, unfortunately.
Well then, you are now justifying oppressive violence by pointing to some individuals - see them, they don’t want an end to practices we call savage - who are, crucially, not on the receiving end of an involuntary mutilation, infanticide, rape or gossip-based stoning.
Surely one might argue that arbitrary murder in an industrialised democracy is not ‘savage’, by appeal to a subset of psychopaths?
No, actually I’m saying that there’s no need for them to justify anything. You cannot ask someone to justify what is their entire world. It would be like an alien species landing on Earth and demanding I justify our American culture and its negative points. There’s no way I could do that, nor would it be fair to ask it of me.
Just imagine if those aliens came to live on this world, and told us that they believed that eating animals was morally repugnant, that our values of monogamy and fidelity were ridiculous and backward, and that we’re “savages” for watching boxing or wrestling matches at the Olympics. Would we instantly agree with their “enlightened” viewpoints, and jump at changing ouir society to be in line with what they consider “civilized?”
What is “right” and “wrong” varies widely according to whom you ask. My position is that there’s no right and wrong, civilized and savage when it comes to different cultures. They may have practices with which I disagree, but they do not have to answer to me, nor do I have a right to judge them.
No, you misunderstand. By living in a culture, you are subject to its rules. In our culture, murder is wrong, so, thus, a murderer will be punished according to our justice system.
However, if murder was not wrong, someone outside of this particular culture could not fairly demand that the murderer be punished. The outsider would feel angry and upset at seeing his cultural values upset, but he cannot judge the murderer by cultural standards unknown to him.
There is no universal moral code to which all cultures must adhere before they can be considered “civilized.” The people are only responsible for living by the rules within their culture. It is not their “job” to worry about what other cultures think of those rules.
Then that argument cuts both ways, and thus ends up going nowhere. Surely it is “just our culture” to label their culture ‘savage’ and intervene (forcibly if necessary) in an attempt to civilise it?
It is altogether too easy a cop out, I feel, to watch a man murder another in order to acquire his wife, or a woman stoned to death at the whim of a mob, and blandly state that there is no universal morality: of course there isn’t, just as logic is not a universal epistemology, nor English a universal language. We must agree to a logical discourse in a commonly understood language, since babbling nonsense at each other will not be useful at all. Similarly, we could refuse to agree a morality even as simple as “torture of innocents is wrong”, but such a debate would get us precisely nowhere.
Let us discuss, in English, a reasonable human morality, just as I would with those aliens. (And I feel it would be entirely fair for them to ask me to justify my culture - if we cannot justify our own actions and philosophy, we are effectively retarded psychopaths of diminished responsibility ourselves. In any case, this demand for justification, even under the threat of ‘civilising colonisation’ after their judgement of us, would simply be their ‘culture’!)
If we flee the arena and refuse to label rape and murder ‘savage’, why then, are we not just animals?