3) Tautology is tautology? 'American' isn't an ethnicity (well, Native American is but I'm talking about the rest of us who inhabit the country). 'French' however, is an ethnicity. Is somebody who passes a test and gets a piece of paper really as 'French' as someone whose family has lived in France since back before the Roman Empire? If so, then being 'French' is rather meaningless, isn't it?Sean951 said:
I don't buy it. By comparison, being American just means holding that piece of paper. If, say, 100 million Chinese people moved into France, became citizens and then over the course of a couple decades changes the national language to Mandarin and most movies and public media are derived from traditional Chinese culture as well as the architecture, food, and everything else, then I hate to break it to you, but the geographical region of France would cease to be 'France' in any meaningful sense of the term. Are they really an evil bunch of racists for trying to preserve their culture? Why does everyone else in the world somehow have a right to come to their country and claim citizenship if their native population isn't for it?
4) Maybe. Maybe some regions would, but I doubt all regions would. Europe was pretty lucky in stumbling into its technology. Even extremely well organized civilizations like Japan and China with great potentials for scientific discovery and industrial complexes didn't develop the printing press on their own. Sub Saharan Africa has been far less organized than them, so they'd be even less likely. (Sub Saharan Africa doesn't include North Africa, which I openly admit has traditionally been fairly advanced. At one point Alexandria was basically the center of world culture.) There's no way you can claim that it would though. Hegel is full of crap, history isn't teleological: it's a conglomerate of blind forces above all else.
5) I think we're agreed. Part of the problem is that black people were deprived of their original culture when taken to America and the culture that developed has strong self defeating attitudes instilled into it by the pessimism that inevitably arose from their situation. Part of that includes a disdain for education and professional success because it used to be the case that a black person could only get those by 'sucking up to the man' and thus people who did so were seen as traitors. I think Malcolm X had it right when he saw that it would not only take political upheaval in America to uplift black people, but social and cultural upheaval within the black community as well. (And also adequate support of basic needs from the government like health care and education.)
