I’ll play along. I’d say Ireland, Scotland, Netherlands, Germany, France, Sweden, Japan. Societies of continuing celebration of poetic, philosophical, artistic, and scientific achievement.
(That’s a short list, and a fast-thought out one that is shorter than it should be. Don’t crucify me for it. There are entire ranges of the planet I’ve skipped)
I think pro-intellectual culture is one that values thoughtful questioning, including of the status quo. Opinions are required to have a good argument; dogma (religious, political, technical, or otherwise) is not acceptable. It's G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis instead of fundamentalists; it's The Federalist Papers instead of "the free market fixes all problems"; it's original Agile instead of process-Agile; it's real Hungarian notation instead of MS-docs-"Hungarian" notation.
An important point that is being almost universally ignored here.
The history of a modern, organized US is about 150 years old at this point. Anything prior to the Civil War is a baby-level of development, hopeful, maybe, could be, nation just learning how to crawl. It's rather absurd that the US is being browbeaten in this thread against cultures that have existed for many hundreds of years or more; in some cases a thousand plus years.
The US has shifted from being ~80% white European-descendant culturally to being 55%-60% (in real terms, as the US has ~25 million illegal immigrants that are never net leaving, and they contribute culturally to the pool) in the span of 40x years, with a massive injection of Asian and Latin-American-Hispanic cultures since the early 1970s. With the point being, the US isn't even remotely close to being a settled, well established cultural structure. Who knows what it will or won't become in 200 more years.
* The US is still 70+% white: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...
* The number of undocumented immigrants is much lower than that: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/us/illegal-immigrants-pop...
Also:
* I don't see any reason to believe nobody has more than one "cultural identity."
* Race is really more about culture than biology too. Maybe less so, but if for some reason you were motivated to come up with some categorization of people based on their biological ancestry, the races that we talk about wouldn't make a ton of sense. When you hear people saying that race is "socially constructed," this is what they're talking about. The Irish weren't considered white a century ago, and it's not like the change came about due to some scientific breakthrough.
The history of the Irish is a good example of how ethnic groups change and assimilate over time.
I had a similar experience when I visited Finland for the first time after knowing of it only as a country with high achievement in schools and free university education. Most of the Finns I knew abroad came from these highly educated backgrounds. But when I visited the country, suddenly I came face to face with school dropouts mopping floors and alcoholic layabouts, just like in any other country on earth.
In Jewish religion, erudition is held in high regard, and in some Jewish communities that carries over to intellectuals as well; but - in some, it's the other way around, i.e. intellectualism is considered straying from focus on religious studies to pursuing Gentile (non-Jewish) thought and life.
... and that's not to speak about the anti-Intellectualism Israel is rife with, these days.
Could you explain your rationale here?
India absolutely has one of the longest poetic traditions and it fascinates me endlessly.
I’d have been remiss to say that’s all that qualifies in my mind. That’s why I said it was not at all the end of what I’d consider an intellectual society.
I’m hesitant to bring present-day Russia into it as I qualified with “continuing”. I say this as someone who studied Russian literature when I was younger.
Again, please don’t discount my qualifiers above. It was by no means a survey list—just meant to illustrate my main point with societies I do have experience with.
I could only conclude that reading and the intellectual life was the pursuit of only a small minority, but because of India’s huge population, even that small minority was large enough to be self-sustaining and make its impact, even if it was rather hidden away from sight.
My gut says that "any country if given the same economic opportunities could produce equal achievement". Obviously, that's in a completely idealized world.
As it stands in actual, real life across human history, I do think that India, Russia, and China are more notable than most countries if we look at those criteria across history, but with "extra weight" given to modern day (e.g. Greece would not qualify with the "extra modern day weight" scale, but would be highly ranked if we only looked historically).
All 3 belong in an "unranked top 5". Just my personal opinion.
Rough guess of share of present day intellectual production by country (I like to make stuff up):
US: 30% Western Europe: 30% China: 15% Japan: 5% India: 5% CIS countries: 5%