Today marks the 8th Anniversary of my first landing in Beijing.
Under the formula worked out with my friends of similar China-vintage a couple of years ago, China years are the only ones that really matter.... BUT China years age you about five times as much as years spent anywhere else.
For the past few years, this idea has been rather comforting to me, since it has enabled me to persuade myself that I am quite a bit younger than I actually am. Now that I am "turning 40", it is a far less consolatory conceit. I may have to come up with an alternative method of counting.
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Not entirely unrelated, I saw an entertaining, provocative piece the other day which I immediately knew I had to share with you. It's about a study (using something called the Ultimatum Game) by the University of British Columbia suggesting that Westerners MAY have it all wrong in thinking that other cultures are strange. (That link goes to the mobile edition of the page; for the full, you have to be a registered subscriber.) The premise is encapsulated in the acronym WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. As the headline says, "We are the WEIRD ones."
I have a feeling this may move you to pull an intellectual blade, Occam's or your own, from its sheath.
Social psychology is one of my 'guilty pleasures' - but surely the most intellectually shoddy of the sciences. Picking holes in the methodology of the experiments is almost too easy: if you have to get down to "pitifully small and obviously skewed sample", you're scraping the bottom of the barrel rather.
It's hardly revolutionary (or, ought not to be!) to point out that most social psychology studies focus only on the industrialized West - and, even more specifically, mostly on college towns in the US - and that things may be very different in other, less 'developed' societies. Social behaviour is heavily culturally conditioned - perhaps especially so in areas such as altruism, trust, cooperation, and status relations.
The 'Ultimatum Game' on which this study was based is inadequately explained in the article: behaviour in the game may vary enormously depending on whether there's real money involved, whether people get to play more than once (and on both sides or just one), and - most crucially - on how the idea is explained to the offeree.
While it might be instructive to have more comparative studies of this kind on very different cultures/societies, my hunch is that there's not all that much ethnically specific about this, that it's almost all derived from environment. As the rest of the world catches up with 'the West' in industrial and social development, and realises mass education and democratic government, I suspect social behaviour will homogenize: that it won't be a case of the WEIRD and the rest any more; almost everyone will be EIRD.
However, maybe some of these differences are more deep-rooted in the literary, religious, political, and philosophical culture of certain countries or regions. What bothers me most about China is the apparent absence of many values that we take for granted - things that you'd tend to think would be universal fundamental principles. I haven't noticed - or read about - this anywhere else in the world, and I am reluctant to believe it is really true here (or, if it is, I am inclined to think that a lot of it may be due to exceptional and hopefully short-term influences, i.e. the intellectual devastation of the Mao era).
There often seems to be an absence of "common sense" here. It's not clear that they accept even such basic dichotomies as efficient being better than inefficient, neat being better than messy, methodical being better than haphazard. I wonder if our 'Western' fixation on striving towards ideals stems from Plato and the Greek philosophical tradition, and isn't as fundamental in other cultures of thinking. I wonder, too, how far our fusing of the ethical and the aesthetic is present in other cultures - how far other peoples see the veneration of beauty, seeking to preserve and promote it, as a virtue or even a moral duty. Again, one feels that this really ought to be a universal human impulse - perhaps somewhere just behind loving your family, but rather above not killing people. China, alas, often gives me cause to doubt this.
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