Do you tend to feel that people from Australia, New Zealand and the UK are not very different from those of us in the U.S. (insert your own country)?
I don't think that people from those three countries are tremendously different from Americans like myself. People from continental Europe seem more different. Those from non-Western countries are even more alien.
Does it sometimes seem that those from other countries just don't think as we think or that they must have a different moral framework or just don't "get it"?
I think that all human beings are pretty much alike (but perhaps not 100%) in their basic social instincts. But inherited cultures can lead to those social instincts being expressed in dramatically different ways. The Islamic world is an illustration of that.
Do you think that those countries that you tend to identify with just happen to speak the same language that you do and you are therefore able to better communicate with them than with those in other countries?
Being able to speak the same language is obviously important. So is coming from a similar historical background and sharing many of the same ways of conceiving of things.
We know that people the world over should all be, more or less, the same.
Why? I think that's an expression of a contemporary post-nationalist faith that's being promoted in all of our media and schools these days. Everybody is just the same. I'm not convinced that I believe it or that I should believe it.
The problem is that it kind of presupposes a single normative global culture, which always seems to be some leftish version of contemporary post-World War II Western culture, often its European or American variants. Other cultures, such as Islam and its God-revealed Law, are expected to conform to Western presuppositions. But many Muslims have no interest in doing that, hence the kind of problems that we see around us today. China is another culture whose communist-party rulers don't show much intention of conforming to Western ideals of liberty and democracy.
There's still something faintly imperialistic about the global liberalism that's supposed to be normative everywhere. Foreigners are always supposed to emulate us, there's no expectation that we abandon our supposedly more modern and enlightened values and copy them. Perhaps we need to be more cognizant of the world's cultural diversity.
