Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gareth321 | Hacker News Reader

I fully agree. It seems self evident that Enlightenment principles are superior to the alternatives. Free speech, democracy, the right to dissent and disagree, separation of religion and state. These principles keep the West prosperous as compared to competing ideologies. Totalitarianism, communism, monarchy, etc.; these do not maximise the wellbeing of the population - demonstrably.

It astounds me when I encounter people decrying Western values. Have they not travelled the world? Do they not understand how much worse it can be? No one argues that Enlightenment values are perfect; just that they’re the best we’ve found so far.

View on HN

  > It astounds me when I encounter people decrying Western values.

It astounds me when I encounter Westerners decrying other cultures' values. Just recently HN had a nice flamewar concerning polygamy. Some cultures are different from Western cultures, that does not make them worse, or better. But different. In culture like software like genetics, monocultures can be dangerous.

Sure some cultures are different but we can also make judgement calls on whether it’s worse or better.

A country that deprives women of agency, for example, is different, sure, but one can also make the judgement call that’s it’s a worse culture.

Your measure of better or worse is subjective. If so called agency of women results in economic gains, but at the same time puts costs on social cohesion, children growing up a good childhood, and the value of family (or so on), then you could also say it is worse.

Only if one ignores core liberal ideas of human rights.

By your logic we couldn’t say slavery was bad if society was better off when it existed.

This is false. Slavery is objectively bad.

There is no objective foundation for human rights. I personally prefer to live in a world where we all pretend they exist, but we need some other way to reach people that don’t hold the same arbitrary moral axioms than reasserting them. For a long time, that was to claim that enforcing our table of human rights made you richer, but unfortunately that’s losing currency nowadays.

I believe the word Presentism comes to mind.

The idea of human rights is constantly in flux. It is subjectively understood and applied. For example, is internet access now a human right? It is not clear what interpretation of human rights should prevail. Not to mention that ‘liberal ideas of human rights’ is a very Eurocentric framing which denies important contributions from other civilizations.

Even interpretation of historical events relative to the present can be subjected to a flux in understanding. If slavery was codified to protect the rights of slave owners and slaves, while also providing for both parties, then this arrangement could be considered better than the economic servitude many laborers find themselves in today.

In fact, most slavery in history was not like the brutality of so called American chattel slavery.

Of course it's constantly in flux, but that doesn't mean the flux is always in a "good" direction.

I mean, the belief system of Germany in WW2 went off the rails and a good portion of the population agreed, but I think we can all admit it didn't evolve into a "better" system.

Cultural relativism was en vogue a couple decades ago but I would like to think we have outgrown that wildly naive school of thought. Throwing gay people off roofs is bad. Murdering adulterous women is bad. Silencing political dissent is bad. These cultural values are bad, and the cultures which permit them are to blame.

I think it’s time we start being a little less apologetic about our good values and a little more critical about their bad values.

And yet what if that apologetic attitude is part of how we out grow our bad values? Unless you think we're perfect and there's no further room for improvement?

It’s not clear that the things you mentioned are bad unless you read them with a certain bias. For example, punishment for adultery was a long staple of many groups throughout history and still today. And honestly I don’t see how this is a bad idea if implemented correctly. Perhaps by narrowing your view of acceptable values you’ve blocked out the diversity of human experience.

You know, this might be the most horrific and evil reply I've read on HN. You actually have the fucking nerve to call the murder and oppression of women and gays something that is only bad when you're 'biased'. How can a person's understanding of ethics become so warped as to actually believe that?

I think you should review hacker news guidelines:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

>Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

And punishment for adultery and homosexual activity has been something staple across many religions and cultures, which have formed the basis of great civilizations. Adultery and homosexual activity have been social evils in many moral codes and ways of life. It’s not about oppressing women or gays, it’s about justice and fairness.

Viewing things through such a narrow and dichotomous view makes you unable to cope with different ways of life except that you condemn it without understanding.

Parent seems to hold individual liberty among the highest priority values.

IMHO, it'd be an uphill battle to argue it should rank lower.

  > Parent seems to hold individual liberty among the highest priority values.

I could imagine that the collective progression of society would rank higher than individual liberty in some societies. Especially in populations with serious threats to existence. Think of the Yadizi today - they've had their women stolen and their men killed for a decade. They are nearing the threshold were they will not have a diverse enough gene pool to avert their eradication.

In such a society, I could imagine that adultery (potentially confusing which child belongs to which lineage of genes) and homosexuality (reducing the pool of available genes) might be dissuaded on punishment of death.

> It astounds me when I encounter Westerners decrying other cultures' values . . . Some cultures are different from Western cultures, that does not make them worse, or better. But different.

When I lived in the Middle East, I had a good Saudi couple as friends. The husband had an app so that when the wife wanted to leave the country on a trip, the border people could trigger a notification so he could approve her leaving. This was better than previously when she couldn't leave unaccompanied. Are you really trying to say that's not worse or better, just different?

I went to an Omani friend's wedding in his small village in Oman. The celebration was fascinating and fun. The men and women celebrated in two different groups. There was no alcohol. (But there was lots of dancing outside at night in the heat and spinning around with swords, which almost gave me a sort of drunken euphoria anyway!) The local mosque's call to prayer sounded and everyone in the party (except me and one other Western dude) left to the mosque and came back 15-20 minutes later. I actually admired the communal nature of it, as everyone seemed really close to each other, and could see the benefit of the requirement. On the flip side, if you didn't believe or something but were a local, you absolutely could not show it or skip.

Side note: the wife of the friend was not the secret girlfriend he loved for the years that I knew him, while constantly trying to improve his station in life to get her parents' approval. They said no when he finally did as much as he could and asked; so he ended up marrying the nice girl who his family arranged for him. They are quite happy today, though.

I taught computer science for a little while in China. They have a lot of different cultural expectations and values as well. I had some students come up after class to ask what it was like having two parties in our political system. And then living in Singapore was yet another story!

All this to say, I find your comment extremely simplistic and naive. I can't imagine living for a while in places with wildly different cultures and believing that deep cultural values don't manifest in meaningful ways.

At some level I agree that things are "just different", and that it takes a personal perspective to decry a cultural value or say something is better or worse. I think the Omani example is a good one; there's lots to like about that, and my Omani friend actually really does, even despite not marrying the woman he loved for so long. Whether something is "better" or "worse" depends on your values.

But all that said, I think you can acknowledge that and still stake a claim that, "no, what I believe is better!", and I think that is frowned upon these days and is a shame. While Oman is a lovely place in a lot of ways, I have a 1 year old daughter now, and I would not want her to grow up there. Then you have Saudi Arabia, with even less going for it... China has a much different culture, which we'll see how it works for them going forward. In the context of this article, can different cultures and cultural values really not contribute to the wealth of nations?

I think your example of "polygamy" is a good one. Is that better or worse or just different? I think it's puerile to reflexively say "it's just different". Maybe it is! But then, maybe it also contributes to cultural things; male competition, unwed males, family values, all kinds of things. Honestly, I don't know its effects, but I would be surprised if there were none. And then you could compare those effects against your values (things like "equality of men and women") and probably grade it as "worse", "just different", or "better" on the whole.

Then at a meta level, your "values" are again a cultural artifact. If someone doesn't value "equality of men and women", is that better or worse, or just different? It leads to different judgments of outcomes. How do you judge a policy like giving women the right to vote, if your values are divergent? And if large swaths of the population have one value or another, and one country ends up with women having the right to vote and others not; is that better or worse or just different? Could that have a meaningful impact on other aspects of the culture or nation, on how its politics proceed?

I agree. If no culture is better than another culture, in any real sense, then you're giving up the notion that a culture can ever progress. Western culture has improved in many ways over the past centuries, and it would be ludicrous to say we are not a better culture than we were two hundred years ago.

I mean, the example with the Saudi app is “just different”. It is you who are assigning a certain connotation to it. For example, Saudi culture may value keeping women safe and maintaining social cohesion, and this is a great example of fusing technology to fit a culture. Additionally, Saudi has a lot of cultural diversity that is easy to miss if you only look at the advertisements or news. Many of those in Saudi may not even find the use of such an app to fit their culture, and agree with you.

Anyways, be careful of using an example as a cultural judgement of society. It’s important to practice cultural humility. judgements may reveal more about the one doing the judging than the one being judged.

Doesn’t monogamy predate nearly all religions on every continent on earth? How is it a western ideal?

In the specific case of monogamy, I have many neighbours that don't practice it (they have two, three, or even four wives) yet when I mentioned that here I was met with disbelief, denial, and even hostility. However, these people live in a society that developed under the idea that many men would not grow to adulthood, so this is how they deal with the excess of women.

And even today, where the children do expect to grow to adulthood, they continue to have a dozen children per wife. So obtaining a wife (or more) is a goal that presses the adolescents to achieve things in life. What motivates a Western child to achieve things in life?

Those who decry Western values have their own agenda to keep people controlled...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com