We're WEIRD. Get over it.

[sbarrera]

(09-21-2020, 12:51 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Over on the Generational Dynamics thread a few weeks ago I had a skirmish over the song You Have to be Carefully Taught with Xenakis.  Among other things, Xenakis wound up doing his usual character assasination on the character of Emile, who in some versions of the musical sings the song in question.

It seems more relevant now.  The song expresses a principle, an ideal, that all men should be treated equally.  In the musical, it was the question of whether you could love someone who had loved outside his group.  The idea of equality is a WEIRD idea.  The approach being replaced is tribalism.  Those in your kin group or tribe have many relationships and obligations to one another, seek to advance the kin group, to try to exclude others.  If Henrich is correct, most of the world’s cultures were tribal.  That was the norm in the Agricultural Age and hunter gatherer societies.  The recent advance in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies which I have represented here as whig includes fighting racism / tribalism.  It used to be the norm.  We are struggling to make it not the norm, principle above a tradition of tribalism.

It has to be carefully taught?  Is that true or the WEIRD result of Rodgers and Hammerstein being well educated Americans?

Strauss and Howe originally presented turning theory as being non partisan, as not being liked to what has become the red blue divide.  I was and remain dubious.  It is the Cousin’s Wars continued.  It is stepping out of the Agricultural Age into first the Industrial Age then the Information Age.  It is about guns, germs and steel.  It is about becoming more WIERD.  It is about all of the above.  After each crisis, the greatest problems in the culture are removed.  This implies progress.  It gives an advantage in the crisis to the progressives.

And if you are for the blue and against racism and for progress, then the theory of WIERD becomes partisan.  Can a principle oriented person set aside his principles and let a tribal racist remain a racist?  Must the progress towards an ever more WIERD society falter on an old tendency to become ever more loyal to one’s own?

I’m more convinced than ever that the red blue divide is the latest chapter in a much longer battle over the WIERD.

Bob, you seem to be saying that W.E.I.R.D. = blue zone. So what happens if the red zone takes over in 2021? Is that the end of the West?