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Jose Ortega Y Gasset, writing in the 1930's, preached that access to educational and economic opportunities should be premised on one's lineage, up bringing, wealth, and social responsibilities. A succession of societies and cultures discriminated against the ignorant, criminals, atheists, females, homosexuals, members of ethnic, religious, or racial groups, the old, the immigrant, and the poor.
In the south and in the coastal region from Nanking to Tonking, Yünnan to Fukien, and reaching as far as the coasts of Korea and Japan, is a culture with so-called shoulder-axes. Szechwan and Yünnan represented a further independent culture. All these cultures were at first independent. Later the shoulder-axe culture penetrated as far as eastern India.
The vast, cruel, fumbling clumsiness of Nature, her lack of majesty in crises that ought to be majestic, her incurable indignity, disgusted me, aroused my disdain, I wanted, as a philosopher of all the cultures, to feel that the present was indeed a majestic crisis, to be so esteemed by a superior man. I could not.
Like all European cultures, it was European; like all European cultures, it was something more than European. A most marked and unmanageable national temperament is plain in Chaucer and the ballads of Robin Hood; in spite of deep and sometimes disastrous changes of national policy, that note is still unmistakable in Shakespeare, in Johnson and his friends, in Cobbett, in Dickens.
Unlike her fellow-disciples, whose exploits remained, for the most part unknown, and unsung by their contemporaries in foreign lands, the fame of this immortal woman was noised abroad, and traveling with remarkable swiftness as far as the capitals of Western Europe, aroused the enthusiastic admiration and evoked the ardent praise of men and women of divers nationalities, callings and cultures.
That an estrangement really exists can not be doubted; but the explanation of it is to be found in the difference of the two cultures which have their roots in history.
The principle of nationalistic sentiment, itself based on coöperation, on social tradition and common ideals, but bound up so closely with political sovereignty and antagonisms as to become exclusive instead of coöperative in its attitude toward other cultures.
Here they mingled with Semitic types, and after a lapse of millenniums there arose from this mingling the culture of Ethiopia and Egypt, probably the first of higher human cultures. To the west of the Nile the Negroes expanded straight across the continent to the Atlantic.
After the victory of the Entente the microbes of hate have developed and flourished in special cultures, consisting of national egotism, imperialism, and a mania for conquest and expansion. The peace treaties imposed on the vanquished are nothing but arms of oppression. What more could Germany herself have done had she won the War?
The addition of such pure cultures in many cases produces favourable results, but it does not always do so, and the result is not uniform.
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