Living outside America

I don't defy USA has a great contemporary culture but it's just one side of it. Another side is what you so easily dismiss - the history and traditions. Culture in the sense we're discussing is not something you can associate with one person. It's a collective term that basically describes the full range of learned human behavior patterns, which of course includes the baggage accumulated over the years (in some cases thousands of years) of history. Which USA doesn't have in the same degree as most of other countries, simply because it is a relatively young country.

Maybe I put too much stress on the traditional side of culture but coming myself from culturally very uniform background I always thought about USA as a multi-culture nation. Hence my surprise at pixie's statement. Shared media, history and education are basically common traits of every country (except for the ones that changed borders recently). Unity of values and the perception of the surrounding world may really be unique to America, though I'm not sure if putting Black people from Boston and immigrants from Asia and Mexico in the same bag as Rednecks from Florida is not an overgeneralization.

What you describe as a part of culture I see as a proof of multi-culturality. Can multi-culturality be a part of culture? I guess it depends on the definition. But I would argue that American culture is not uniform (of course many aspects are but I think most historically rich countries are much more uniform in that matter).

I admit it's kind of remarkable how everyone is religious in America. A bit less if you look at the crime rate (what happened to Thou shalt not kill?) but still. However I still stand by my previous statement - all the things you mention are not characteristic only to America. Maybe you can't appreciate it because it's a foreign culture to you but culture of many countries is just as uniform as American and often richer thanks to the hundreds of years of history. And wealth is hardly an American-only thing. As I mentioned, all these points together apply to Japan as well and many of them (not necessarily all at once) to other countries as well.

http://www.atheismresource.com/2010/atheist-dont-commit-as-m...

http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.pdf

http://seattle.cbslocal.com/2012/06/22/study-finds-people-wh...

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

I felt the same way when visiting Australia for the first time. The sense of a "Pioneer Spirit" with a vast mostly unexplored territory seems to still be there. It was actually quite infectious.

The funny thing is calculating it at high resolution would require classified data (the best measures of the exact shape of the earth are classified; they are used in ICBM flight path calculations, and deviation from an oblate spheroid is significant when you want to put something on a tennis court from the other side of the world. The exact distribution of mass (some concentrations of heavier materials) and magnetism (for MAD detection of submarines) are similar.

The U.S. is a weird sort of quasi-empire with military outposts and large economic interests all over the world, but in territories that aren't their own and with the notion that the countries we inhabit are not part of the U.S. in any way shape or form. Sort of like vassal states, but without all the "pay us your tribute or we'll invade and burn your cities down" that modern America is terribly uncomfortable with.

It's an interesting academic exercise to pick apart where the U.S. is and isn't like an Empire because it's not that simple.