The screenshot above shows the number of visits from a given country over the last month for this website. This is a multicultural site! I don’t say that in a normative sense. It’s a pure description of the readership. Though posters and commenters here differ in their values and views, I don’t pretend to make any pretense at equality of perspective. I regularly call commenters barbarians, savages, and animals, because that’s how I view them. This is harsh, but to have frank talk people need to be explicit about their presuppositions. We all bring presuppositions to the table. For example, as an American I naturally bring certain expectations of individual liberty as axioms, when in a descriptively multicultural context they aren’t always appropriate. For example, I don’t think that they were always appropriate in regards to the “Arab Spring.” Yes, to some extent the Arab Spring was about individual liberty, but I believe that much more thoroughly they were about national and collective liberty. Freedom in a 19th and early 20th century sense of national self-determination, if you will.
Now, as a matter of preference I wish that the “discourse” would take individual liberty as a prior expectation. But as a matter of reality that isn’t always so. But context matters. If I’m talking about political turmoil in the Arab world, or elections in Taiwan, American presuppositions are not only inappropriate, but they’re wildly misleading. In more frank terms they’re idiotic, and I’d be playing out the classic stereotype of a buffoonish and culturally imperialist Yank who knows not what they know not. This sort of American misunderstanding does not apply just to our perception of non-Western societies. Many Europeans do not have the same conception of individual liberty as we do, and we need to understand, if not necessarily respect, that reality.
Of course the inverse proposition holds: those who are not American or Western need to understand American or Western propositions when impinging into a discussion on American or Western terms. Though Americans are a subset of Westerners, one can not substitute for another. There are subtle differences between the English and the American. This is the primary reason I don’t accede to the presuppositions of less assimilated immigrants to the United States. If you are an immigrant there is a possibility that you can seal yourself off into your own subculture, but more generally you are going to have to “face the music” at some point.
Cultural “scripts” which are useful in one context are less than useful in other contexts. When you immigrate you are faced with a situation where your old scripts tend to give you false information. For example, when I make anti-Indian comments on this weblog people of Indian provenance routinely impute from that that I have a peculiar anti-Indian (Hindu) bias. From a sample size of 1 they also wonder why I’m picking on India. Because of my surname this is probably understandable, but the readers here need to update their priors. I have a long history of specific and frankly virulently anti-Islamic writing on the web. And a cursory reading of this weblog would inform anyone that there is much more anti-Pakistani commentary than anti-Indian commentary.
This is why I’m frankly sick and tired when I get confronted with the script “why are you [Muslim/Pakistani] picking on Indians [Hindus].” Why? Because picking on Muslims and Pakistan is so fucking easy that it gets boring sometimes! More seriously, India is the “world’s most populous democracy,” and India has more cultural influence in the West than the Muslim world does (at least positive influence). When the neo-fascist government of China (bless their economic growth, but they’re still fascist) behaves atrociously they’re following the script. When the ostensibly parliamentary democracy that is India has to confront the realities of its underdevelopment and barbarity, then that should come in for a critique because India wishes to be taken seriously on the playing field of Western, not “Asian,” values.