Have you ever come across a video clip entitled An Idiot Abroad?

It is of Karl Pilkington who travels to different places to experience the food and culture on that
certain country. I watched the video in which he travelled to Egypt and ate some of their
delicacies. His commentary about the strangeness of it all shows his sense that his English diet (of
Pasta, chicken and potatoes) is normal and the Egyptian diet is just strange. But as the Egyptian man
in the clip says, it’s natural to them. They consider eating as much of the animal as possible to be the
right thing to do, and anything else to be wasteful! In this example, everyone is thinking from the
norms of their own society, showing how we all tend to approach situations with a degree of
ethnocentrism.

Ethnocentrism comes from the Greek ethno, or "people" and centric, "center;" so when you put your
own people, or culture, at the center of the world, you're letting your ethnocentrism show.
Ethnocentrism is so prevalent that is often deemed ‘normal’ whereas it isn’t. It often leads to incorrect
assumptions about others' behaviour based on your own norms, values, and beliefs. In extreme cases,
a group of individuals may see another culture as wrong or immoral and because of this may try to
convert, sometimes forcibly, the group to their own ways of living. Recent computational studies
suggest that ethnocentrism, commonly thought to rely on complex social cognition, may arise through
biological evolution in populations with minimal cognitive abilities. It has an observable effect perse,
on an individual’s personality. Having prejudice to other cultures, evaluating everything based on
their own standards and excluding people from other cultures on their daily lives are, but not limited
to, the effects of ethnocentrism on our personality and to our cognitive ability. Such practices are
sometimes apprehended since its manifests in the form of racism or xenophobia, that can led into
violent acts.

How can we battle these phenomena in a world wherein people can be easily influenced by ideas?

Wouldn’t it be better if people accept that they exist in a diverse society and they coexist with people
from different cultures? Relativism, roughly put, is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong,
standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and
frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them.
Cultural relativism is the idea that a person's beliefs and practices should be understood based on that
person's own culture. Proponents of cultural relativism also tend to argue that the norms and values of
one culture should not be evaluated using the norms and values of another. It can be a form moral
relativism only that it focuses on the cultural aspect of oneself. Several countries have used cultural
relativism as a justification for limiting the rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Such
ideology can construct unprejudiced perception on the cultural background of an individual. In other
words, it is not our differences that divides us. It is our ability to recognize. Accept and celebrate
those differences. And that’s where I end my remarks, because that’s where we are. In the modern
world that we thrive, our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our
civilization.

Thank you.