Beyond Feelings - Vincent Ruggiero [23]
ETHNOCENTRIC PEOPLE
The problem is that some people do not understand that each person has a special viewpoint. For them "mine is better" is not an attitude that everyone tends to have about his or her things. It is a special, higher truth about their particular situation. Psychologists have a name for them – "ethnocentric" people, people who believe strongly that their race, their religion, their culture, or their value system is superior to all others. This belief they consider above the normal processes of examination and questioning. Faced with a challenge to it or even a situation in which they are called on to explain it, they will resist. In their minds there is no point in examining or questioning it. The matter is settled.
Ethnocentric people, of course, are not born but made. Their early training in the home creates the habits of mind that characterize them. As children, they tend to expect and need strong leadership and strict discipline from their parents from their parents and teachers. Also, they are rigid and inflexible in their views, unable to face problems for which the outcomes or answers are not clear. They have no patience with complex situations and meet their daily affairs with oversimplifications.
As adults, ethnocentric individuals tend to hard categorizing. They recognize no middle ground to issues. Things are either all one way or all the other. If such people are not completely for something, they are completely against it. The political party or candidate of their choice, for example, is the savior of the country; the opposition can only lead us to destruction.2
The measure of any person or idea from them, of course, is its similarity to their race, their religion, their culture, their value system. Whatever blends with their outlook is worthy. Whatever differs from it is suspect, threatening, dangerous. This is a sad and undesirable attitude to take. But ethnocentric people find it quite satisfying. Psychologist Gordon Allport offers this explanation:
By taking a negative view of great groups of mankind, we somehow make life simpler. For example, if I reject all foreigners as a category, I don't have to bother with them – except to keep them out of my country. If I can ticket, then, all Negroes as comprising an inferior and objectionable race, I conveniently dispose of a tenth of my fellow citizens. If I can put the Catholics into another category and reject them, my life is till further simplified. I then pare again and slice off the Jews… and so it goes.3
Ethnocentric people's prejudice has an additional use. It fills their need for an out-group to blame for real and imagined problems in society. Take any problem – crime in the streets, the drug trade, corruption in government, the assassination of a leader, a strike in a major industry, pornography, a rise in food prices – and there is a ready-made villain to blame it on. The "kikes" are responsible – or the "wops," "niggers," "spics," or "polacks." Ethnocentric achieve instant diagnosis, as easy as matching column A to column B. and they get a large target to point their anger and fear and inadequacy and frustration at.
CONTROLLING "MINE IS BETTER" THINKING
It's clear what ethnocentric people's extreme "mine is better" attitude does to their thinking and judgment. It twists and warps it, often beyond correction. The effect of the "mine is better" tendencies of the rest of us is less dramatic, but no less real.
Our pride in our own religion can lead us to dismiss too quickly the beliefs and practices of other religions and ignore mistakes in our religious history. Our preference for our own