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DSimon comments on A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies - Less Wrong
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I actually have not seen anyone go down the argument branch you're talking about here. I mean, are there people who are actually against foreign aid programs aimed at improving school attendance or literacy rates? On any grounds besides finding a more efficient charitrons-per-dollar scheme, I mean.
Do you mean that you haven't seen anyone here (on LW) go down this branch?
Or that you haven't seen anyone (in general) go down the branch that CJ is, here (in this thread), talking about?
The latter. I've heard arguments along the lines of "We shouldn't do X because it's imperialist" before, but usually in regards to artistic or military interactions, not foreign aid work.
Gotcha.
For my own part, it depends on which "aspects" CJ is talking about.
For example, I know some people who argue that Christian cultures are objectively better at making a working, prosperous, and safe society, and that therefore we should work to convert immigrants and their native cultures to Christianity. And I know people who object to such interventions on the grounds that this is nasty cultural imperialism.
Of course, CJ is not talking about Christianity, so that's irrelevant; I mention it only as a concrete example the kind of pattern I'm thinking about.
CJ is talking about some other aspect of certain cultures... call it X. As I understand it, CJ believes X encourages abstract thinking, which explains higher IQ scores among residents of X-rich cultures, and explains high status among X-possessors in just about every developed country ever.
I'm not sure if anyone actually proposes bringing X to cultures that lack it, nor if anyone actually criticizes such X-proselytizers as nasty cultural imperialists, though. That's because I'm not sure what X actually is.
Since you mention Christianity, here is an example of the transformation power of introducing new memeplexes on the practice of killing cursed ("mingi") children:
Whether the slow end of the killing of children because of superstition constitutes objective working or prosperous society is a matter of debate (population growth and all that Jazz). I find it hard to deny that this kind of "cultural imperialism", seems right to me.
Much like, and this goes partially against my principles, I wouldn't mind, in a different branch of our universe, forcibly converting modern day Aztec's still sacrificing thousands of people to the Sun each year to Christianity (or Islam for that matter).
In the context of CJ's original post, I suspect this is tangential, though as above I'm not entirely sure... infanticide, superstition, or some combination thereof might be the mysterious X. (Or, rather, their negation might be.)
If X is anti-infanticide, I think the original claim is simply wrong, but I do agree that real people do propose bringing X to cultures that lack it (as you describe with the Banna). And there's probably someone somewhere objecting to that as cultural imperialism, though probably not with much support.
If X is anti-superstition, the original claim might be right and is worth experimenting with, and I'd grant that people like Hitchens and Dennett and Dawkins could be construed as proposing bringing X to cultures that lack it, including my own. (And they are definitely objected to as an analog to cultural imperialists.)
Strictly enforced monogamy by Christianity coupled with strong rules against inbreeding (extending beyond cousins!) perhaps are something that fits the bill . Obviously modern Western Christianity seems to be slowly abandoning both, with the exception of fundamentalists.
I'm pretty sure that if one could push a button that would convert the non-Islamic population of Africa to Christianity instantly one would see an improvement in the measurable standard of living. Doing the same for the Muslim population might or might not (one would have to weight its effect on the spread of AIDS vs. the gain women would enjoy).
Also I think I need to point out that:
Will probably produce different societies, not to mention values. In many respects Western "humanism" is deeply infected with "Christian" memes, it partially serves as a refuge for atheists to shepperd the ones they liked from Christianity into it.
For me, the most obvious candidate for X is literacy and mathematics education, so that's what I was thinking about. However, you're right that religion fits CJ's pattern a lot better.
The important difference may be that religion is usually proposed as a method of increasing a society's morality, rather than its level of comfort or wealth. Perhaps that's what makes it more apt to be seen as imperialist: Compared to metrics for safety or prosperity, morality metrics are easier to see as a relativistic thing that societies ought to define internally. The resistance against IQ as a metric to focus on internationally may be similarly explained.