Peace, Culture, and Human Differences

This essay will consider two related questions. First, is the safest road to universal peace one that tries to diminish the importance of human differences and to emphasize the similarities that all humans have to one another, or might it instead be one that values human differences and tries to preserve them all in some kind of harmonious balance? Second, what in the Western past is worthy of being maintained and perpetuated, or, even more, what in Western tradition is "golden" and should be cherished, protected, and passed on to coming generations?

Americans often tend to naively assume that our present American society is the culmination of all Western tradition. If one stops to think about gangs, dope dealers, organized crime, unemployment, mortality rates, and other sometimes depressing topics, it is immediately obvious that America is not perfect. On almost any one such topic, one can usually find some other European-style nation that is currently performing better than the USA is. However, if one plays the parlor game of "Where would you like to emigrate to?" it also becomes obvious that there is no other country that is overall superior to the US along every dimension that Americans think important.

Now that the Cold War is over, the term "freedom" is not bandied about so much, but it remains almost the tacit bottom line of most Americans' values. One's answer to the parlor game is often that, "Even in Canada (or wherever), I wouldn't have as much freedom in pr

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Category: Philosophy - P