This kind of “flipping it” exercise can be useful in general. One area where it comes up for me is with efforts to learn French. Some years back, when I was sort of starting to become more class conscious, but still ignorant on the level of imperialism and colonization, I was putting in some effort to learn French and had more motive to do so on the idea that they were some kind of example of the working class fighting back, historically. As I developed a more nuanced view of France, especially along with its history of colonialism, my motivation went down some.
But when I have a thought like that, sometimes I sort of stop myself and go like, “Hang on, so are you saying it’s bad that you know how to speak English? And are familiar with the more general aspects of US culture?” “Oh well, I know the nuances of US culture, blah blah blah, it’s different.” “Okay, so French culture isn’t nuanced? French people don’t have differing views on all of this too?” “Well…”
It might be like a form of conditioned/socialized “fundamental attribution error”, but on a nationwide scale:
a cognitive attribution bias in which observers underemphasize situational and environmental factors for the behavior of an actor while overemphasizing dispositional or personality factors. In other words, observers tend to overattribute the behaviors of others to their personality (e.g., he is late because he’s selfish) and underattribute them to the situation or context (e.g., he is late because he got stuck in traffic).
And I think dialectics can help break us out of this thinking by putting emphasis on the conditions that contribute to people’s behavior and contribute to the systems that develop.
This kind of “flipping it” exercise can be useful in general. One area where it comes up for me is with efforts to learn French. Some years back, when I was sort of starting to become more class conscious, but still ignorant on the level of imperialism and colonization, I was putting in some effort to learn French and had more motive to do so on the idea that they were some kind of example of the working class fighting back, historically. As I developed a more nuanced view of France, especially along with its history of colonialism, my motivation went down some.
But when I have a thought like that, sometimes I sort of stop myself and go like, “Hang on, so are you saying it’s bad that you know how to speak English? And are familiar with the more general aspects of US culture?” “Oh well, I know the nuances of US culture, blah blah blah, it’s different.” “Okay, so French culture isn’t nuanced? French people don’t have differing views on all of this too?” “Well…”
It might be like a form of conditioned/socialized “fundamental attribution error”, but on a nationwide scale:
And I think dialectics can help break us out of this thinking by putting emphasis on the conditions that contribute to people’s behavior and contribute to the systems that develop.