LACEY SHORTER: Focus is on the wrong concerns

In response to John Cannady’s letter “Christian Values Withstand Test of Time”: Last month, I wrote an article in an attempt to discourage the practice of ethnocentrism, which can be defined as judging another culture by the standards of your own. I believe that this practice has had a strangulating effect in many aspects of the public sphere, perhaps the most apparent being in politics. You charge me with criticizing conservative views, however that was not my intention. Although I limited examples of political wedge issues to those considered to be of a conservative nature, such as gay marriage and abortion, the only other major topic that comes to mind is taxes and, believe me, sociologists have no business in the affairs of economists.

You raised the question whether the beliefs and standards that I adhere to are those of God’s making or a product of the relative ideological origins that I was quick to condemn. By asserting that your version of God is an absolute measure falls into the very kind of ethnocentric thinking that I was trying to dissuade. Christians are not the only ones that have “held beliefs that are based on God’s word and stood the test of time.” The same can be said for Muslims, Hindis, Buddists, etc.

As a sociologist, my interest is people and my means to affect positive change is through institutions. Science tells us that the rapidly declining rate of clean water sources and the culmination of greenhouse gases can spiral into a crisis in the near future if we do not reform our environmental policies, yet too many are preoccupied if what other people do behind closed doors is in alignment with our morals. Our institutional representatives (i.e. politicians) couldn’t care less because as long as the majority is embroiled in an ethnocentric debate/cultural superiority contest, they don’t have to address facts.

I once heard that being presented with a conflicting idea invokes the same chemical response in humans as the presence of a physical threat. Perhaps if we practiced standing in our truths rather than projecting them, we could finally distinguish the real from the ideal.

LACEY SHORTER

Albany