Quote:
Originally posted by Dan Halberstein:
Jewish culture now both prizes scholarship, and accepts the quite value-neutral "GUILT TRIPPING [OF] CHILDREN."
Or was that meant to say that in Jewish culture, parents accept that children spontaneously guilt-trip?
I think the former. At any rate, regardless of the formulation, it's become clear to me that in the disguise of shilling for the latest liberal, anti-racist argument, many members of this board feel free to spew out caricature.
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So guilt is foreign to the Jewish experience? And Jews themselves do not make jokes about it? Excuse me, I need to clean my ears, I must have been listening to some other reality.
Caricatures/stereotypes are blanket exaggerations formed around some kernel of truth, usually cultural, which may not and likely will not be uniformly true for all members of a given group, but serve as shorthand so you don't assume that absolutely everyone loves porkchops or knows how to play chess.
It's not difficult to say that a culture that places a high degree of regard for members of a certain profession will also produce a great number of folk who excel in that given profession, as well as a greater than usual number of lay people who have some degree of experience with that given profession, and indeed, more so than members of other cultures that do not have that degree of regard for the given profession.
As for guilt, is a social mechanism by which members of a given society are made to conform to the values of that society. There are other mechanisms, including corporal punishment, incarceration, denial of privileges, shunning, bribery, rewarding virtue, personal pride and so on. While individuals can and do make personal choices, it's not a bad bet to say that members of any given culture are going to use one particular social mechanism, especially if it's one that members talk about frequently.