
The Dogma of Otherness (1986) - tomrod
http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html
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RichardCA
Whenever the subject of dolphin intelligence comes up, I go back to this
video. It's from a PBS Frontline episode.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=511nWKjNFpw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=511nWKjNFpw)

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mr_spothawk
> "And you'll agree that as a truly pervasive set of assumptions, it's pretty
> much a liberal Western, even American, tradition, won't you? Think how
> strange this Doctrine of Otherness would seem to an ancient Roman, or to the
> dynastic Chinese who thought the world revolved around Beijing, or to Tudor
> England, or to most of the peoples of the world today."

it falls apart there, for me. I don't know what those other cultures
appreciated. perhaps it was the case that every human in those societies were
were entirely anti-other.. but I feel like it must have been the case that
there were aspects of non-(ancient)-chinese culture that the Chinese
appreciated, and adopted... else, we'd not have had any cultural exchange,
ever

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jhbadger
In most of history cultural exchange happened not by enlightened people
seeking out other cultures, but through conquest. In the case of China, by the
Mongols, for example. Or in the very language we are communicating in - which
is a weird mixture of Germanic and French thanks to William the Conqueror.

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woodandsteel
Very interesting article. However, after he explained the dogma of otherness
and got other people to agree that it is what they believe, it would have been
a lot more direct to ask them if there is any way to determine if this belief
is correct or not.

He could also asked them why it is bad for people to believe in absolute
truths. They likely would have answered that it leads to the West oppressing
other nations, and then he could have pointed out that that the belief
oppression is bad is a Western one, and not even all Westerners believe it,
and many non-Western cultures believe quite differently.

I have thought a lot about the D of O, and have come to the conclusion that
the people who advocate it don't actually believe it. You can see this because
they have absolute moral responses when another culture does something that
clearly violates liberal norms, like female genital mutilation. And ditto when
it comes to their evaluation of the views of other people in our own culture,
like conservatives. The D of O advocates clearly believe that there are
absolute factual and moral truths, and that they have them.

So why do they pretend to believe the D of O? That is a long, complicated
story, but a large part of what happened was back in the 1950's Marxism ran
into a dead end where it couldn't win people over through normal direct
political argument. And then many French radical intellectuals responded to
this problem by coming up with a new two-part persuasion strategy.

The first part is to try to get people who believe in capitalism to give up
their views by persuading them there is no absolute truth so they would
abandon their beliefs as to why the free market is the best economic
philosophy. And then once the leftist had accomplished that they would change
positions and persuade the now-former capitalism supporter that Marxism is the
absolute best.

Needless to say, this strategy has failed, but it has unfortunately left us in
the position where a great many Americans say things that are nonsense and
that they don't actually believe.

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pmoriarty
_" The Dogma of Otherness insists that all voices deserve a hearing, that all
points of view have something of value to offer."_

This might have been a dogma amongst most Americans in 1986 (though I
seriously doubt it, considering the rampant anti-Communism, sexism,
homophobia, and conservatism of the time), but these days, with anti-Muslim
and anti-Mexican xenophobia being virtually the law of the land, with a neo-
Nazi sympathizer in the White House, with all branches of government and a
huge percentage of the electorate controlled by his racist, bigoted party,
it's hard to read this sort of essay without laughing, crying, or raging.

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narag
I disagree with the author that zeitgeist and dogma are the same thing. Dogma
is something imposed top-down from cultural elites. Current dogma is
multiculturalism and relativism (or "otherness" following the article).
Trumpism is against it.

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Avshalom
At what point did the president of the united states and both branches of
congress stop being the "top" and at what point did the majority of the
population start being "elites"

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narag
So for you Trump represent the _cultural_ elite? That explains a lot.

~~~
Avshalom
No I believe the entire framing is invalid because the majority cannot by
definition be the elite and the federal government cannot not be the elite.

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Judgmentality
At first I thought this was 'The Dogma of Otterness' and was curious what the
hell that meant before realizing my mistake.

