The Value of Knowing Two Cultural and Intellectual Traditions

One of the most important things about knowing two cultural and intellectual traditions is the understanding that there are alternative ways of seeing and explaining things. It's value lies not just in having two ways of seeing and explaining things, but it lies also in the understanding that there are different ways of seeing things. For someone like this, it is not too much for them to then imagine that perhaps there might also be three ways or four or more ways to look at something. This appreciation that there are diverse ways of seeing things is extraordinarily important in the multicultural world we live in today. The chief problem with the monocultural person is the absence of this appreciation, the absence of an experience of diverse ways of seeing and explaining things. This is the person who having never known anything else but the one way of seeing things makes the mistake that there is only one way, their way.

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