Friday 4 July 2014

After Simon Anholt's TED Talk: "Good" or "Global Friendly"?

Last month, Simon Anholt gave his TED Talk "Which country does the most good for the world?", which raises my puzzle after watching his talk: as for his talk topic, might his "good" be better substituted by "global friendly" from an intercultural perspective?

Referencs. :
Simon Anholt's Talk
http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_anholt_which_country_does_the_most_good_for_the_world
Simon Anholt's Index
http://goodcountry.org/

by Laura Jiang

Definitely, Anholt's talk is inspiring and worth a listening. However, some of his viewpoints upset me. In his talk, he gives 3 reasons explaining some countries' "not 'good', which sound not convincing enough to me at first. His 3 reasons are 1) national governments focus on their own countries insides because of the demands from their people, 2) effects of cultural psychopath, 3)incompatible between domestic and international agenda of a national government.Apparently, all his reasoning comes from the scope of his personal career as an independent policy adviser to promote his "nation branding" efforts, which could be even broader, namely from a view of cultural relativism or  an intercultural perspective. By the end of his talk, his data collection is something impressive to me, whereas his qualitative analysis seems to need further digging in depth and width. For example, he attributes those countries' "not good" to their leadership's fear of their agenda changing from domestic priority to a priority of domestic and international agendas together. He seems to skip over the necessity of a country's survival and territory safety first before its adaptation to its outside world. He also ignores not only the developmental gaps among countries but also the global economy landscape today still oriented by post-colonial capitalism and consumption-ism, which exist as a default settings for his Index when he emphasizes his notion of promoting a country 'good, good-er, good-est' , not conventionally 'good,better and best', for the world humanity with no moral judgement and no concern of national GDP and wealth, although the top 10 countries ranked in his Index are there speaking aloud such a settings behind his data. Although Kenya as the only one developing country ranked above 20 in his Index is used by him to soothe the embarrassment of his Index's implying the global inequality in distribution of economy and power, he seems to forget applying the Attribution Theory to his data analysis.
by Laura Jiang

As for the choice of words, since he explains his 'Good' is "the opposite of selfish", not conventionally that of "bad" in the meaning and he claims his "Good" with no moral judgement', I wonder if he considers the word of "selfish" a moral term or not. If we accept his definition of his "Goodness" opposite to "selfishness", might his topic "Which country does the most good for the world" be interpreted as "Which country does the most good for the world is the most 'selfless' for the world"? Then, does he really mean his Index with NO moral judgement? Thus, his talk raises my puzzle with the suggestion of "global friendly". To certain extent, I think that his index from his data collection of those international sources is fairly meaningful for raising more people's attention to and interest in the importance of international and intercultural communication if people are not only impressed by "the nations leading his index that are 'good to be in', 'good to be from', as well as 'good to be around'...
by Laura Jiang

Certainly, Anholt's talk bears its values for mental exchange, while I like to quote Einstein's lines that "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."to remind myself of how to deal with certain published Index for a proper understanding of self, other and the world.

by Laura Jiang

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