[ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals)

[Stefano Vaj]

On 27 December 2011 07:17, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Japan has a history of racial purity that goes back far beyond Hitler.
> They are the most genetically homogenous population on earth.

Chinese Han are in fact even more. But what I was referring to with
"xenophilia" is the fact that Japanese are in principle in love with
everything coming from outside. With time, they imported buddhism,
confucian ethic, chinese characters, catholicism, Belle Epoque forced
industrialisation, nationalism, parliamentary democracy, imperialism,
they kept sending people abroad, they even embraced enthousiastically,
albeit in a superficial and modified fashion, the American way of life
in a matter of months after WWII.

> It is still frowned upon to marry outside the culture. I have known a number
> of Japanese women who married Americans at the university.

Mmhhh. Japanese men and women are not so averse to inter-cultural
affairs and mixed marriages are not so unusual. Certainly, neither the
spouse nor the offspring will ever be considered as a Japanese.

> The world may yet benefit from the Japanese population dynamic as
> robots to care for the elderly are a huge priority for them, and that
> research has led to Asimo, and will lead to other great leaps forward
> in robotics and AI, IMHO.

Yes. Even though I think that the biological aging of a given society
makes for a cultural and existential aging thereof, leading eventually
to extinction, possibly through the most direct route which consists
in replacing it piece by piece by imported human resources, once more
the relative shortage of labour encourages technological innovation.

This is both applicable to industrial and to domestic labour. Domestic
appliance were developed and became popular first in the US because
for social, economic and cultural reasons lower middle classe there
did not enjoy much of a permanent, live-in domestic help. My own
mother did not see much of a point in the seventies for buying a
dish-washing machine when the work of a maid was so much more
flexible, accurate and delicate on the china, while wasting much less
soap and hot water.

-- 
Stefano Vaj