> > You really think so? Relative to what - the world wide range of > thought? I think that in general Indian cultural thinking is both less > liberal at the more liberal extreme (say relative to Scandanavian > countries) and less conservative at the more conservative extreme (say > relative to the most conservative Arabic sheikdoms). > > If you want to rank India relative to other indvidual countries in > terms of diversity of thought I'd personally rate it relatively high > in homogeneity. There are certainly outliers, but in general I'd say > that Indian society was relatively homogenous in attitude. Just for > one example take Indian attitudes toward arranged marriage. > > -- Charles >
That shook something fundamental in me, so I am going to make a feeble attempt at diluting the absoluteness of : > I'd say that Indian society was relatively homogenous in attitude. 1. You seem to be comparing Scandinavians vs Arabs on the same scale, and comparing that to Indians. I would guess that Indians are more diverse than the Scandinavians; Indians are more diverse than Arabs. Just because, they don't span the entire spectrum, doesn't make them less diverse than any one particular nation. 2. The diversity seems to be growing. I think the attitude towards arranged marriages in India is more diverse today, than it was ten years back, and I can say that for a lot of other topics. The economic conditions & social history have a large role to play in defining "attitude" eg. you would probably find a lot of homogeneity w.r.t. *piracy *amongst Indians, because a lot of Indians did not always have the comfort of being able to pay to "do the right thing" and then habits take time to change. But I believe Indians have very diverse thought processes: I cant think of too many other nations where you have a good amount of national level support for political parties that are: Left-ist, Capitalist(at least pro-industry); Liberal, Non-secular bordering on extremism While it would be a stretch to assume that the Indian populace voting for these parties represents people who believe in all their ideologies, its amongst the best metrics we have, to measure diversity of thought at a national level. I wish I had Amartya Sen's book at hand - he has an entire chapter about how Indians have respected & cultivated diversity of thought. I repeat my disclaimer :) - What Charles wrote, shook a lot of what I have thought to be true, so this is an attempt to salvage some ground. - Mekin -- Product I help build - http://BooksiRead.org Blog - http://mekin.livejournal.com/ Linkedin - http://www.linkedin.com/in/mekin
