xbacksideslider
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lazyeye6 said:xbacksideslider said:The scary thing is that it IS possible for the human condition to go backward. Knowledge is fragile. Cultural error, or a change in context, can result in a reversal of progress. One example, some Polynesian groups, isolated on islands, lost the knowledge of how to build ocean going canoes. Multiculturalism's insistence that all cultures are equal, devalues those that achieve.
The scary thing is that reactionary attitudes like this devalues the hard work and positive achievements of my nephew who was born in Mexico of multicultural parents, who earned a PhD in environmental engineering (chemical engineering/water science) from a major American university, who interned at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, who did post doctoral research at the Sorbonne and who is the director of water quality for a major metropolitan water district in the USA.
Perhaps this poster could cite exactly which Polynesian groups, isolated on islands, lost the knowledge of how to build ocean going canoes and how this is demonstrative of multiculturalism devaluing achievement.
Unbelievable!
Lighten up.
Multiculturalism's demand, insistence, that all cultures are equal is a stupid refusal to recognize that some cultures and idea sets are more successful than others in serving human needs. Perhaps you think that the quality of life in the USSR or the CCCP of the 1970s was superior to that in the free world? Perhaps you think that the life of American blacks under southern prejudice and bigotry was equivalent to their life in the north? Obviously not.
No, culture matters.
As for cites, here you go, several cites, which document how many Oceanic cultures lost knowledge, both of how to build transoceanic craft and of the methods of transoceanic navigation; this is not to knock Polynesia but to show how it happens to all cultures. Oceana offers illustrative case studies of the loss of cultural knowledge precisely because of the isolation that the fact of islands provides to the analysis.
http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarl ... d1-d3.html
" . . . .The Maori has forgotten the art of building the form of sea-going craft in which his ancestors reached the shores of New Zealand from the islands of the Central and Eastern Pacific. . . ."
http://www.pbs.org/wayfinders/polynesian8.html
" . . . .the reconstruction and sailing of ancient voyaging canoes becomes more than adventurous and anthropologically-fruitful excursions into the past. These projects become ways culturally-uprooted Polynesians can themselves rediscover the means by which their islands were discovered and settled, indeed their ancient cultural heritage as a uniquely oceanic people. . . . ."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation
" . . . . . Knowledge of the traditional Polynesian methods of navigation was widely lost after contact with and colonization by Europeans. . . ."