Amazingrace writes (summarizing Gwyneth Paltrow’s comments):
> I like living here, because I don’t fit into the bad side of American psychology
> The British are much more intelligent and civilized than the Americans
> People don’t talk about work and money. They talk about interesting things at
> dinner
This sounds similar to the sort of generalizations that people who’ve lived in both the U.S. and the U.K. (including me) make about the two countries. It’s a little bit sloppily stated, as far as I’m concerned. My personal observations would be as follows: She’s not talking about psychology, of course, since that only applies to individual people and not countries. She’s trying to explain the differences between American and British culture. She gets some of it right and some of it wrong.
There are differences in American and British culture, and in some ways American culture is worse and in some ways British culture is worse. Now, it may be that the ways in which American culture is worse are more bothersome to her than the ways in which British culture are worse, but that’s different from just saying that American culture is worse. If the bad things about American culture bother her more than the bad things about British culture, that’s her right. At worse, she may be overgeneralizing, but it’s not even clear that she did that. She never explicitly said that American culture is worse, just that the bad parts of it bother her more.
The British are more intelligent and civilized? I don’t think so. There are situations in which the British come off as more educated and other situations in which the Americans come off as more educated. Again, the worse that I can say is that she’s overgeneralizing. She doesn’t know as much about either British or American culture as she thinks she does.
Americans talk more about work and money in ordinary conversation? This is probably true. It doesn’t mean that the British are more intelligent. It doesn’t even mean that their conversation is more interesting. There are different (unstated) rules about what can be talked about in conversation in the two countries. I can certainly understand why someone would think would find the conversational rules in one country or another more to their taste. This doesn’t mean that one culture or another is better.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s comments are no more silly or insulting than any other random famous person’s comments. She’s an actress, not an anthropologist, and I don’t expect her comparisons of British and American culture to be very accurate. Why would you expect any famous person to make clever, or even semi-accurate statements most of time? Most of them didn’t become famous for their brilliant thought. If I were to go through the published statements of virtually any celebrity, I would undoubtedly be able to rip them to shreds if I had the time to research them. Heck, if I were to go through the collected posts of most SD posters, I could rip most of what they say to shreds if I had the time to research their statements. The fact that most of what most people say is, at best, trivial, and, at worst, fatuous nonsense doesn’t mean that most people are evil.