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The past as another country or even a fantasy world as another country is something that IMO Asians do better than westerners. The western world has little experience of true culture shock simply because we’ve been dominating the culture wars for so long that by the time a westerner can easily get to a place, most of the big cities have become westernized with mostly western attitudes towards life and business. You can find western culture everywhere so it becomes harder to imagine a universe in which people don’t aspire to modern western neo-liberal ideals. Asians have the opposite experience—. They inhabit a world that doesn’t adapt itself to their own culture, their folkways, their tastes. So I think that makes them a bit more able to imagine worlds that aren’t like ours or theirs.
I found this most jarring with medieval stuff. I like to read about that world and the history of that world, and they are not like us at all. They were not secular in the least, they believed in God and Fate and Devine Rights. They didn’t worry much about anyone who wasn’t upper class except in the sense that they wanted productive lands and didn’t want revolts. Their lives were dominated by personal politics and looking to get more power for themselves. Even our most power hungry politicians are weaklings compared to what the actual medieval rulers were like.
I think it hurts us culturally because it means we have a hard time understanding people who aren’t culturally WEIRD. The aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were made much worse by the cultural ignorance of American elites who just assumed that traditional Muslims would immediately become Enlightenment minded Jeffersonian Republicans as soon as Saddam or the Taliban were gone. We expected Russia to think like us about Eastern Europe after the Cold War and to value the Western ideal of popular sovereignty over what they wanted which is a secure border between themselves and NATO. It hurts our ability to figure out Israel Palestine because we’re a fairly secular democracy and both Israel and Palestine are religious countries for whom control of The Land is not just about territory but about religion.
There’s a big failure of imagination when the producers of culture have no understanding or close contact with people who don’t think like they do. Producers in America have only themselves and other Narrative-loving liberals to references.
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