Thinking About People

[Delightful]

A question came up in a conversation I was having recently, and I'd like to pose it to you all since we have people from all over the place on here.

 

When you think about "all the people in the world" do you only think about people from your culture? Like, say, does a white American, donly think of Americans/British, and sort of forget about the millions of people in China, India, etc? And if you're European, do you think of the world as basically just Europe?  etc. etc.

 

To clarify, I'm talking about a sort of subconscious gut-reaction, rather than an intelligent "well I know when I think about it logically that there are all these countries."

 

Just curious. What say you all?

[Kasimir he/him]

The long answer is that I don't know, for many reasons.

 

The short answer is that I always think of the world as being three separate pieces and these pieces may conflict or jar each other depending on the context in which I'm thinking about 'all the people in the world.' These three pieces are: (1) Asia, narrowly defined as Southeast Asia + South Asia + East Asia, (2) The United States of America, (3) Europe. Maybe let me explicate this: it seems difficult, when thinking about 'all the people in the world', not to immediately think of my own narrow region in Asia, excluding central Asia, and to use that as my baseline template for 'the vague set of people about whom I'm thinking.' At the same time, when making these generalisations, I'm always aware of categories (2) and (3) and how they're this disjoint set of people--can't ignore them, but sometimes, you don't really know if you can include them either.

 

The best way I can put it is that I consider these subconscious and gut because for me it feels like no matter how I look, I can't ignore the fact that many of the lenses, both in terms of education, mass culture, etc etc. are centred on the Anglo-American world. Not really 'us'. So there's always this awareness, even at this unthinking level, that there's more than just (1) in the set of 'all people'.

 

So I think the short answer kind of morphed into the long answer: maybe I just don't have much clarity with regard to my own thought processes, but for those reasons, I feel like it's hard to be sure about.

[Delightful]

What's most interesting to me here is that you didn't mention South America at all - and I think it's also the last place I think of.

 

When I think of 'all the people in the world', my strongest impression is America and Australia, (since I live here +, as you said, a lot of media etc focused on the US), and then China/South East Asia (because they're Australia's geographic neighbours), and then I'll think of, say the Middle East and Europe. And writing this, I realised that while I'm sort of aware that I don't think much about South America, I just completely forgot Africa. I forgot an entire continent. That's really quite scary.

[Kasimir he/him]

Actually, I would say the last place I naturally think of is Central Asia--I only mention it this time because of some reading I was doing on Central Asia one or two days back, but I find that just as scary because the world's a pretty big place.

 

But yeah, from the two of us, Africa's been left out at least twice now, and so has South America (though I guess you could say I've also been conscious about leaving out South America since I specified the US rather than 'America'--which incidentally points to two sorts of things going on there: ignoring South America and conflating/ignoring the whole of North America and rolling it into 'America' as the USA.)

 

In the same vein, there's a lot of unpacking to do in the notion of Europe: I'm willing to bet a couple of firemarks that when we say 'Europe', we think of Western Europe and less of Eastern Europe and the further east we go to Central Asia, the less likely we are to think of them at all, and that's just as huge a geographic region to omit.

[Observer]

The Americas are the first thing that spring to mind, though for some reason I'm leaving out Canada. Asia and India come up, along with the Middle East later. Depending on the topic, I might think of Africa as an afterthought. Australia is almost never on my mind though. (Sorry people.) Quite an interesting question you pose there. The world is so huge, thinking about it as a whole generally leads to a lot of generalization and cutting. Yes...the more I think about it, the more I like this question and its implications. Thanks for asking it!

[Delightful]

Thank you Observer. And rather a fitting name you have for this conversation

 

I also realised, and i'm wondering if this is the same with you guys - when I think of countries in this manner, I think of the geographical land mass as it appears on a map, rather than say the people or landmarks etc. Except for America which I kinda think of as a mix of the landmass + Obama and skyscrapers and a fast food place on the highway......

 

I totally get why you don't think of Australia - almost no one does, we're out in the middle of nowhere and are hardly a superpower or anything. We just have dangerous animals

 

I guess this leads to a question I'm posing, that I have no way of answering: Are we even able to talk about "the world" as a whole, or does that automatically assume......that people are like us, maybe? I mean, there is obviously humanity to everyone, there's so much different and yet so much the same everywhere - I guess I don't even really know what I'm asking exactly, just....realising how interesting and complex this world is.

Edited November 16, 2014 by Delightful

[Kasimir he/him]

Two things to tease apart there: (1) not to mention even continents/landmasses/countries simply aren't homogenous. This reminds me of the critique of classical economics assuming the standard picture of rationality as the self-interested individual--and then there's this issue with what they call the WEIRD people (Western, Educated, and from Rich, Industrialised, and Democratic countries). Similarly, this branch of philosophy called x-ϕ has that issue: they asked too many college students from the Anglo-American world in order to determine their intuitions, but someone went to Hong Kong to try out their intuitions and found those just conflicted with the first set of intuitions. (This matters because modern philosophy does some work with intuitions: we build on them.) It's pretty much the point of the politics of difference/identity: that to abstract away from differences and complexity, to not appreciate the world in its full, glorious messiness is to erase, rather than to achieve greater clarity. So the upshot is, yes, there is a problem if we want to extend from our own case to imagine everyone else is like us and just wipe away their differences.

 

But (2)--is it relevant? Because that's what we do sometimes too. We focus on the correct level of resolution for our conversation/the matter at hand, and we acknowledge that we're going to lose and miss out on some aspects, but we just don't think they're important/relevant/essential to this particular case. An example is focusing on the level of the gene or on the level of the individual member of a species when thinking about what level natural selection acts on (there are many, many other levels that can be considered; these two are just an example.) To focus on the level of the gene allows us to explain some weird things that happen but then we seem to miss out on being able to explain other weird things. So I guess that while this is kind of a tangent, I'm wondering what kind of extension is going on: is it problematic to automatically assume other people are like us? Do we have similarities in terms of our mental or physical structure simply in virtue of being human beings? Are we simply abstracting away things that don't matter for our purposes, or are we erasing and leaving out important complexities that we don't have the right to?

 

Also, sorry, yes, totally missed out Australia And New Zealand, too.

[SmurfAquamarineBodies he/him]

 

Also, sorry, yes, totally missed out Australia And New Zealand, too.

 

Yay. We got a mention.

[little wilson she/her]

I know this thread is almost a month old, but I think it's an interesting subject. I'm going to preface my response with saying that I studied a bit of cultural anthropology and a fair bit of international politics when I was back in college. I also happen to love geography--particularly political geography.

 

For me, personally, when I think of "all the world" I think of literally all the world. The continents, countries, peoples, everything. I can't break it down into sections, because I think of it as a whole. When I'm going through the countries of the world, if I miss one--even if it's just a tiny country in Africa, like Gabon (there's a reason I use Gabon as an example, because that really happened)--it bugs me until I can figure out what I missed. I'm not sure if this is because I've taken way too many "Countries of the World" quizzes (and that's not even counting the hours I've spent on geoguessr and any dozen geography apps in the Play Store--of which I've downloaded most at some point in time) or if it's because I'm trying to rebel against the typical, ethnocentric American who has trouble thinking outside of the United States.

 

Regardless of why it is now, I know that before my second to last semester of college (when I switched my minor to International Studies and then learned all of this stuff), I knew the continents but I didn't care as much about the countries. I knew the US, Canada, and Mexico, along with most of the countries of Central America (but if you'd ask me to point to them on a map, I would've been like "Um. Here somewhere?" and waved over that whole Central American strip from Guatemala to Panama), about half of South America, a tiny piece of the Caribbean, most of Western Europe, a bit of Eastern, a little bit of Africa, about a quarter of Asia, and a little bit of Oceania (just Australia and New Zealand. Might've said the Philippines and Indonesia if you caught me on a good day). I knew intellectually that the world was bigger than just that bit of knowledge I had, but it didn't seem to matter.

 

As I think about it, it makes me wonder what made me change, why I suddenly wanted to learn more. I'm not entirely sure, but I think we must've had a lesson in my Cultural Anthropology class that made me realize exactly what this thread is about--the world is a lot bigger than I'd realized. And I know that my International Politics class that semester tested us on the countries of the world, and that might've been around that time. I think I must've jumped on that opportunity as a way to combine my studies and learn as much as I could (which explains why my second to last semester was my favorite semester, despite taking 15 credits of upper level courses--which should've made me want to quit school right there). Which would make sense. We only had to learn 80% of the world's countries for those tests in that class. But I learned all of them. At the time I thought it was just for the sake of knowing them all, since I was coming that close anyway. But even my teacher didn't know all of them. Nor did I stop there--I learned the capitals and the flags too. Which could just be evidence that I'm simply a know-it-all over-achiever, but I don't really think so, because that was 4 years ago and yet most of that knowledge is still there. I maintain it as much as I can, so....I don't know.

 

I'm probably being far too introspective, and I don't think that's really want you were looking for. So I'll just answer one more thing.

 

 

 Are we even able to talk about "the world" as a whole, or does that automatically assume......that people are like us, maybe?

 

I think we can, and I don't think that it automatically assumes anything. It depends on how we're looking at and perceiving other peoples. This is where ethnocentrism comes into play. As long as we understand that the world is far bigger and more complex than we realize, then we can know that most of the people in it aren't going to to be like the people we're familiar with. We might not understand them per se, but as long as we recognize that we don't and we try not to judge them based on our own notions, we can keep ourselves from falling into the trap of assuming people are like us. If that makes sense.

[stormvisions he/him]

I believe I do think of the whole world when I speak of it, but that is a little deceptive and fuzzy around the edges. I think if I had to describe it better it would look more like a heat or choropleth map (I confess I had to look up the name). The 'hot' spots of identification would probably revolve around my latino heritage, my 'Americanism' though not nessacerily the prototypical white American (if there is such a thing), other poor minority communities around the world and finally all the rest in degrading shades and color intensity.

 

I think this identification with others is like one of those items of headgear that mad scientists wear in some movies - where there are a series of magnifying glasses over their eyes, that they rotate as they try to get a closer and closer look ("hmmmm, the brain seems mishappen...Wahhahahhaha!" *evil laughter*). The first lens I use is probably the lens with which I see myself, so I think I first see others with whom I can easily identify. Then I flick through other lenses, representing the other ways in which I categorize people and the world - race, creeds, tolerance, environs, and whatever other categories are floating around up there- and that patchwork quilt is what I mean when I say "the people of the world" rather than some sort of smoothly blended fabric.

 

That's just my honest assesment. It probably isn't the best way to view the world. I do strive to see everyone the same and I recognize the warps and bubbles on the lenses I use - products of my own life experiences.

Edited December 24, 2014 by stormweasel