Can Culture Be Superior? - Page 2

Originally posted by: chatbuster

haha, since all the points have been on one side, lemme take up the other. 😉

yes, one culture can be superior to another. very simply, isnt civilized culture superior to the primitive/ tribal? no? really? phir aadmi aur janwar mein antar kya hai? 😛

more later based on rebuttals 😉

are we talking culture prior to agriculture? do we have neanderthals to refute their culture? I could act as one.. 😆😆😆 For starters,

• DID THEY WAGE WARS for reasons that had nothing to do with providing for their basic needs - food, water, shelter?
  

• They hunted and formed tribes and probably marked territories, but did they not EARTH comparatively UNHARMED for us in attempts of doing that? We have subjected several humans to harms created by radioactivity. We have killed and destroyed children's lives, we have even gone ahead and used them as warriors in the name of "our way of life" I wonder if pre-historic men did any of these and if they did, to what extent..
  

• In fact, they created INUKSHUKS to guide, guard and welcome strangers, while we have VISA and ENTRY restrictions of world travellers.. 😆😆

Tribes are cool BTW. We snatch their resources from them. They wouldn't show up in city grabbing your land in the name of it being their land according to scripts they believe.. Political agendas go ahead and manipulate tribes even..
We, I am speaking for all humans (myself included) have the least respect for Mother Earth. We prove it every second of generating more CO2, than we need to.

But what is culture? Do we know what is the culture which is meant or projected to be superior or inferior to another?

Originally posted by: mermaid_QT

are we talking culture prior to agriculture? do we have neanderthals to refute their culture? I could act as one.. 😆😆😆 For starters,

• DID THEY WAGE WARS for reasons that had nothing to do with providing for their basic needs - food, water, shelter?
  

• They hunted and formed tribes and probably marked territories, but did they not EARTH comparatively UNHARMED for us in attempts of doing that? We have subjected several humans to harms created by radioactivity. We have killed and destroyed children's lives, we have even gone ahead and used them as warriors in the name of "our way of life" I wonder if pre-historic men did any of these and if they did, to what extent..
  

• In fact, they created INUKSHUKS to guide, guard and welcome strangers, while we have VISA and ENTRY restrictions of world travellers.. 😆😆

haha, so what am i hearing? the primitive culture was superior?😛😆

well, in any case, QED. case closed. you yourself found one culture superior, in opposition to what you had earlier in this thread.😉 might be the wrong culture in my opnion, but hey if someone really likes hunting in underwear and tearing apart meat with their mouth, who am i to say?😆😆

Originally posted by: s.priya

But what is culture? Do we know what is the culture which is meant or projected to be superior or inferior to another?

i think we've been just throwing the word culture around in a general way. i just picked the civilized/ primitive fault line to illustrate my point coz that should hopefully be the one that should yield the least hue and cry. 😉 though one can never be sure😛😆

Originally posted by: chatbuster

haha, so what am i hearing? the primitive culture was superior?😛😆

well, in any case, QED. case closed. you yourself found one culture superior, in opposition to what you had earlier in this thread.😉 might be the wrong culture in my opnion, but hey if someone really likes hunting in underwear and tearing apart meat with their mouth, who am i to say?😆😆

well.. u have only heard half of it.

did they ever care for making progress towards making life healthy for their children?
did they build secure homes for them no some of the kids got eaten by animals perhaps
did they bother to live beyond just peepee, poopoo, food, sleep and procreation and some art?

doesn't man today make you proud? we have such high technology that we need no inuskhuks today. we can speak different languages, we are aware of other countries and their resources, we are aware of several modes of transport.. we cook our food in half a bilion ways, we have visited the moon.. 😃
we have organizations teaching people way of life more than food, sleep, procreation and other biological function..

No culture is superior. There are good things and bad things of every culture. no culture is perfect. we can learn a lot from the other (whichever it may be, no limits of time either)

Isn't it Rahul? 😃

Originally posted by: mermaid_QT

No culture is superior. There are good things and bad things of every culture. no culture is perfect. we can learn a lot from the other (whichever it may be, no limits of time either)

Isn't it Rahul? 😃

haha, not so fast cutie. 😆i think this is simply passing the buck. of course, there's good and bad with everything/ everyone/ all cultures. but it does not take a lot of differentiation and evolution to come to that conclusion. that's the case almost everytime with anything.

the real question is if they have the same quantities of goodness/ badness that we really cannot differentiate and say one is superior. let's not exterpolate the workings of a feeble/ waffling mind onto the absence of real distinctions.😊

ok, let's make this simple: say you had three choices-

a. civilized culture is superior on balance, given warts and all.

b. primitive culture is superior on balance, given its own set of warts.

c. both are equally good/ bad.

now, to my mind, are we really so clueless or unsophisticated as to pick c.? that wld be like a kid who cldnt decide or want to.😊 dont know about you, but i'd pick a.😉😆 ultimately finding one culture superior to another.

ps. which do you pick?😉😆 trick or treat? or never could decide?😆

I would pick A too... given that I am a biped. What about Mother Nature.. Who would she pick? What about endangered species? Who would they pick?
Culture is a convenient term for MAN. Life comes in other forms too. We don't hear them but perhaps birds have their debate mansions and they are judging us. Which culture do you think they are picking as superior?

The truth is IMO, I would leave an option D - for the indecisive, yet not dumbos.. , D would be for the ones that think beyond welfare of bipeds..

Originally posted by: mermaid_QT

I would pick A too... given that I am a biped. What about Mother Nature.. Who would she pick? What about endangered species? Who would they pick?
Culture is a convenient term for MAN. Life comes in other forms too. We don't hear them but perhaps birds have their debate mansions and they are judging us. Which culture do you think they are picking as superior?

The truth is IMO, I would leave an option D - for the indecisive, yet not dumbos.. , D would be for the ones that think beyond welfare of bipeds..

again, i think we are confusing indecisiveness with lack of real distinction.😊 whatever one's basis for evaluating different cultures, at the end of the day, we do prefer one over another, dont we? on balance? doesnt that preference suggest at least a subsconscious evaluation that one is superior to another? 😊

and given that the term "culture" is in reference to humans generally, i'd let humans pick in all their wisdom, taking into account whatever factors their lil hearts desire. dont know why, but i've in any case had a hard time reading tea-leaves and figuring out what various creatures have in mind😆 in any case, getting humans to pick is what this debate is about, no?😆

Originally posted by: sowmyaa

With some heated discussion going on lately at DM, I would like to have discussion or debate about can any culture be superior? Indians think that Indian culture is rich and way more superior than Western culture. West think that East and middle east suppress lady of their house and abuse them. They consider East being male dominating countries where women are not equal to men. There are lot of general notions we all carry and maybe our environment we were brought up and live is the big factor that is responsible for our belief.

However, question being…..what is culture? Who creates culture? And can any culture be superior to other? If yes, who gets to decide that?

Hey Soumya, firstly thanks for the link to the post 😊 Tis an interesting topic to delve into, for the scope of the topic or its key word is massive and far reaching.

Some interesting points I came across while reading this thread

Originally posted by: MNMS

This mentality prevails every where... we see other cultures with our view, not with the view of their native's one. We make judgements based on our perceptions and lifestyle..

Originally posted by: souro

To me culture is a set of rules that helps a society to function smoothly and facilitates interaction among its members so that all the members are benefitted.

I enjoyed the definition put down by Qwerty

Originally posted by: qwertysque

Culture is just a formal evolution of humans in making the society more structured and meaningful to humans...Culture evolves largely out of faith and somewhat out of thinking...The culture which has evolved with more abstractions and procedures tend to be more superior, since the abstractions make it more binding and sustain better...Cultures with fewer abstractions have people retracting back to the cavemen way of leaving...since there is veri little to profess to..

The important thing here is people have to be there to support that culture otherwise it withers away. So any overpowering numbers can punify healthy cultures...despite their flaws...

As I see it, Culture is a subjective word, one could even say it is private to its users, and therefore alien to those who do not fall under those common users who follow the same practice or "culture"

As Qwerty stated above, Culture is an evolution of humans to making a structured society and therefore different sets of humans have come together to form different "cultures".. May not therefore require an IQ of Einstein to conclude that with different human minds at work, the probability of one set or more than one set of human brain has been able to evolve a better structure of society than the other sets. The different sets of "cultures' which have been evolved by humans by interactions are all unique and different, therefore their dissimilarities will make one of them more superior than the other.

This does not by itself mean that ones superiority or anothers inferiority makes that culture BAD, it is merely indicative that the collective thinking of one or more set of humans, in a reaction to a set of circumstances in which they were placed which made them take such collective decision then may have been justified to suit the needs in those days. That culture may have been the need of the hour then.... and may not necessarily be need of the hour today.

Taking your example on debates on the richness of Indian Culture versus the Western Culture, the two are as starkly different, as the culture has evolved out of different set of circumstances and out of a mixture of events which led to such formations.

While the East has been traditionally known for their "musically inclined" culture, the Punjab has been traditionally famous for their "gabru jawans", the sinewy Maratha warriors and the hard working Gurkhas from the land of the Himalayas; the rice eating south Indian is more known for their brain than brawn, while their Karnataka counterparts make up for their business acumen. Arent these born out of cultures as well. Werent these cultures evolved out of a need of the hour. These are comparable cultures and keeping those factors in mind, if one were to analyse them, there is no superior no inferior. But if one were to take the minute details of the prevelant cultures like "Widow Remarriage" or "sati" or "shaving off the hair on the widow's head" which were a need of the hour when these cultures were evolved are way past their need now and therefore such "cultures" are primitive and not advancing and are going against their very definition - change or evolution of humans to make a structured society. These kind of "cultures" which were very very narrow need based and which dont hold good for the larger interest of the society are, in my opinion, not as superior as the culture which recognises the need to adapt and change with times.