The lexicon of contemporary thought is not random. Simply by cataloguing the words that make frequent appearances in popular discourse one can probably deduce many things about a society, culture, moral system, etc. in a particular place and time.
Consider this set of words that can be extracted from contemporary mainstream discourse: anti-intellectual; anti-intellectualism; evidence-based; anti-science; scientism; pseudoscience; conspiracy theories; fake news; humanism; progress; post-truth; relativism; skepticism; experts; authority; deniers; fundamentalism; banned books.
Is this just a random list of out-of-context words?
No.
Anybody who has consumed a steady diet of news, commentary, research, debate, etc. in the contemporary West has, depending on his/her level of consumption, regularly encountered many or all of those words.
Sometimes what is absent tells us more than what is present. Clearly, as that set of regularly-used words shows, many of us have lived in a social, economic and political climate full of struggle over ideas, beliefs, truth, reality and the production and dissemination of knowledge. However, absent from all of this divisive discourse is a word and a concept that, ironically, probably encapsulates such discourse's many internal patterns: ethnocentrism.
As the many competing sides and interests struggle over the narratives and worldviews that compete for epistemic, cultural and political hegemony, it does not seem to ever occur to the combatants that they are nothing more than actors following the script of their own culture. The fact that other peoples in other cultures in other places and other times may not, say, be concerned with binaries like natural and supernatural never seems to occur to these everything-by-the-script cultural actors.
People in the West are too busy writing books and producing podcasts about; beating each other up in online forums over; etc. fault lines between things like the natural and the supernatural to notice that maybe people in other cultures see no such fault lines.
Not only are we ethnocentric, we are so ethnocentric that we think that the sky will collapse if our culture doesn't get things right.
Yet, ethnocentrism is not on anybody's radar in mainstream discourse.
So what exactly is ethnocentrism? I am not going to define it like a dictionary would. Instead, I am going to define it by how it manifests in practice. Ethnocentrism is projecting one's own culture onto all people, all places and all times.
It might be tempting to downplay ethnocentrism as a harmless, understandable bias. But would that be an accurate characterization?
I think that if we in wealthy Western countries were conscious of our ethnocentrism and thoroughly, honestly assessed it we would find that the thing that we most project onto others is not our positivism, rationality, empiricism, naturalism, secularism or anything like that. The thing that we, the minority in the world, most ethnocentrically project onto others is our capitalist consumption.
We love capitalist value-added goods. SUVs. McMansions in the suburbs. RVs. Home entertainment systems. Video game consoles. Mass entertainment. Vacations in touristy resorts. Processed foods. Apparel representing constantly changing fashions. Etc.
Not only do we love the objects of capitalist consumption, we unconsciously assume that all humans in all places and all times love them as well. Not just love them, but, like us, have an insatiable appetite for them.
Many--probably most--of our social scientific theories/models, as well as our historical narratives, philosophical canon, etc., probably contain an unspoken telos that makes those SUVs, McMansions, etc. the inevitable result of human nature, economic laws, cultural evolution, etc. Some of us--the people doing the economics, psychology and sociology and writing the history and philosophy, of course--are simply more advanced, more developed, etc. in that inevitable unfolding that leads to things like producing and consuming SUVs, the thinking goes.
Maybe some of us in the Western world of today think that we are more rational, civilized, wise, etc. than others thanks to our science, technology, democratic institutions, secularism, etc. But I doubt that our cultural projection onto others is greater or more intense in any other aspect than it is with our capitalist consumption.
Who knows, maybe an honest assessment of our capitalist consumption would reveal that it is the root of all of the ecological and political instability that is threatening to overwhelm us. Maybe just knowing the simple fact that maybe 99℅ of humans past and present see absolutely no value in SUVs would give us the reality check needed to start responding appropriately to things like anthropogenic climate change.
But before we can see things from the perspective of the other 99℅ or so members of our species we first have to confront our ethnocentrism. Judging by the overwhelming bulk of our discourse, we aren't even aware of ethnocentrism enough to use the word, let alone see its pervasiveness in everything that we say and do.