Posted on January 29, 2010 - by David

Ethan Watters on the Daily Show

The other night, Ethan Watters appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart to talk about his new book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche.

At a little past 4 minutes into the clip, Stewart says:

We could make the argument that when we went over into parts of the undeveloped world with vaccines, and they thought we were poisoning them, you know, we weren’t, we were just trying to cure some diseases, why should we neccesarily give deference to something that might be a superstition, only because it has the value of “well it’s their culture” ?

Watters response echoes one idea which is central to the book: In our attempts to share medical knowledge and treatment with the world “we often bring cultural ideas that may be replacing ideas that actually are helpful in those other places…”

This answer glosses over the main difference between sharing vaccines and sharing treatments for mental illness: Our vaccines actually worked! And they are used to prevent illnesses which we actually understand! Unfortunately, Watters misses his chance to make a bigger point about differences in the nature of mental illness from culture to culture. Still, I think he’s doing a lot to shift the focus of the discussion towards cultural factors.