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Fred Thomas
Even though my ethnocentricity has served me well, I sometimes wish that there was a bit more diversity in our hometown of Rocky River when we were growing up. I'm not talking about the phony superficial diversity promoted by our liberal universities. I am thinking about real cultural diversity that we could learn from and adopt as our own.
I learned a lot about my wife's Korean culture since I was stationed in Korea for two years and we attended a Korean/American Church for twenty years. I can sing hymns in Korean. I have even been compared to an Asiaphile in that regard and even accused of xenocentricity. Something as simple as taking ones shoes off at the door keeps the house a lot cleaner. When a person is born in Korea, he is considered one year old because they count the time in the womb. That's an interesting perspective. Koreans have similar values in regards to family, education and business but they push their kids harder to succeed, they believe in night cram scools in addion to regular scool, they are willing to work unlimited hours at family business to get ahead, they practice frugality that is astonishing and they form groups of friends to pool their money for enterprise because they don't have the same access to banking.
I am not suggesting some moral equivalence between cultures. Some cultures we could learn nothing from except, "Thank God we are not like that." Many countries in the Middle East and Africa haven't even figured out indoor plumbing yet. I would scratch them off the list of cultures we could learn from. Countries that were colonized by the British and the Dutch seem to be doing better than those that were colonized by the French or the Spanish. Some have suggested re-colonization of Haiti but who would want the job?
Looking back at the Roman Empire we see that many of our great cultural ideas were born thousands of years ago in Athens and Rome. But the Mayans never invented the wheel and believed in human sacrifice. They were even wrong about their "end of the world" prediction. They definetly are off the list.
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