Quote Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro View Post
I enjoy a wide variety of things, and the anthropology type stuff is interesting (history falls into this category too I think, one of the most fascinating things about it is getting a glimpse of a different time), but none of that is valuing diversity. It's always the thing itself that's valuable. I think you take this as a trivial criticism but how is it trivial? It seems important to me to be clear on what it is we are valuing. In America we have a kind of amusing thing where in a cafeteria we might have an italian food stand, a hot dog stand, a taco stand, and then to add some "diversity" we add vietnamese food. Because pizza, hot dogs, and taco's are all american food now due to being so popular. They were valued because of their qualities as food. The appeal of diversity just seems to be that people feel good about not being western-centric or whatever it is they think is so terrible. It's akin to how they market certain products as environmentalist and people buy them for that. I feel strongly that if I am reading a book of philosophy from another culture, it should be because I want and expect to learn something that will change my life--it shouldn't be because it's different. Because if I value it just because its different then I don't care if it's true or false. But the author cared if it was true or false, he cared very much!
Maybe the difference is that you want to know what is "true", where I'm more interested in understanding how someone else thinks something can be "true" -whether I agree with them or not. You seem to be keen to ascribe a sort of absolute value to diverse things, whereas I think that there is no absolute, especially when you consider the multiplicity of perceptions and how our own perceptions change according to experiences and exposure.

Fascinating. What tribe did you say you were from?