perfidy

Steven den Beste has a long post on biological and cultural evolution today. Most of this I have no problem with, as it's a quite well written summary of the general state of the art. Toward the end though, he gets into talking about evangelistic and xenophilic cultures, and says that they are generally exclusive:

But in general, what you find is that some cultures tend to be dominated by evangelism and they don't tend to be as open to outside ideas. Others tend to be quite xenophilic and don't tend to be quite so evangelistic. You can also get some which don't tend to either, which are smug and self-absorbed and are so contemptuous of outsiders that they feel little need to spread their ideas to anyone else

I would argue that Western culture to a certain extent, and American culture to a much larger extent is both evangelistic and xenophilic. And the reason that we can be both is that we willing embrace new methods, techniques, knowledge (and people) from anywhere, and roll it into the constantly evolving culture that we then evangelize. It is a point of pride in American culture that we absorb any good thing without worrying where it came from - and the rest of the world certainly complains often enough that we are ramming the result down their throats.

[Update:] Got an email from Clueless, who said that the part two of the series already written, "went into exactly that."

I'm smart. (3300 words, and its only part one. Sheesh.)