Xenocentrism

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Xenocentrism (adj: xenocentric) is the preference for the products, styles, or ideas of someone else's culture rather than of one's own. See also Terracentrism

Xenocentrism has recently been used in social philosophy to describe a particular ethical disposition. Ethnocentrism, as coined by Professor William Graham Sumner of Yale University, describes the natural tendencies of an individual to place disproportionate worth upon the values and beliefs of one's own culture relative to others. Expanding upon this idea, John D. Fullmer of Brigham Young University offered that Xenocentrism results from an attempt on the part on an individual to correct his or her own ethnocentrism. He argued that as an individual reacts to his own perceived ethnocentrism, he or she will often overcompensate and instead begin to place undue consideration upon the ideas and needs of social groups that are far removed.

Thereby, a wealthy philanthropist may hear of an obscure disease in a distant country and invest in its research, although the matter is not entirely pressing within the community that he resides. The tendency for xenocentrism is also used to explain the reason that, in the political systems of many liberalist democracies, emphasis is often placed upon legislation to protect groups that are of a minuscule minority and with whom most voters have no immediate experience.

Fullmer further asserts, however, that as an individual begins to place importance upon things once foreign to him, he or she almost inevitably depreciates those matters that are present and familiar. In events which directly contrast the welfare of two parties, such as war, it can be seen in many free-speaking democracies that a large portion of the population is more sympathetic toward the deaths of foreign citizens rather than toward the deaths of the society's own soldiers. Furthermore, Fullmer argues that xenocentrism is the major defining attribute of all dissenters to modern wars undertaken by contemporary liberalist democracies. Soldiers from common American communities, for example, are not greeted with sympathy by xenocentric groups, but instead are appropriated disparaging labels such as 'baby killer' as in the Vietnam war. Thus, it has been proposed that the excesses of Xenocentrism are the primary cause of many liberalist democracies' difficulty to politically justify and sustain foreign wars.

While Xenocentrism is defined by Fullmer to be a principal cause of ethical bias, emphasis is placed upon its position as an important step from inborn ethnocentrism to a state, labeled by Fullmer as Omnicentrism. This ultimately ideal state is characterized by the complete lack of any familiarity bias, whether for or against one's own culture. Fullmer offers that the step from Ethnocentrism to Xenocentrism is one made by an ethically advancing individual, but that many fail to progress beyond this state, instead remaining biased by the unhealthy excesses of Xenocentrism. ss