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We Contemporary Westerners Are WEIRD

We Contemporary Westerners Are WEIRD

Last updated on: March 6, 2024 at 7:26 am by Gene Veith

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We Contemporary Westerners Are WEIRD 2024-03-06T07:26:57-05:00 Gene Veith

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Yesterday we blogged about Gemini, Google’s attempt at an AI chatbox and image generator, and its ludicrous attempts to apply Woke principles no matter what. We drew on an article by Ian Leslie, who said something else that deserves its own post.

From The Google Gemini Debacle Shows Us Why Office Politics Matters More Than Ever: On the Real Alignment Problem (my bolds):

Gemini’s quirks seem more likely to have been the output of a corporate culture that doesn’t realise how weird it is.

In my recent post on how to fix DEI I suggested that organisations make an effort to understand how the cultural-political worldview of their staff compares to their median user (or voter). It’s not that all organisations should try and be a mirror of the public, it’s that, in a highly politicised environment, they should be self-aware enough to know how the profile of their staff differs from the profile of the people they serve.

The anthropologist Joseph Henrich famously reframed our supposedly neutral, objective Western worldview as a WEIRD one (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic). His point wasn’t that WEIRD is bad, just that it’s, well, weird; shared by only a minority of the global population. For an individual or an organisation, it’s not necessarily a good thing to be normal, but it’s nearly always a good thing to know when you’re not normal. To adapt the poker truism, if you look around the table and you can’t see who the weirdo is, it’s you.

This has applications far beyond the internet, Artificial Intelligence, and the necessity of businesses to consider the values of their customers and not just those of their senior executives (as in the Bud-Lite fiasco).

There are just over 8 billion people in the world. Of these, about 335 million are Americans. and there are some 745 million Europeans. So there are about 1,080,000,000 “westerners” in the world. By my calculations, that comes to 13.5% of the world’s population.

Keeping in mind that some non-westerners have western values and that a big slice of westerners reject woke secularism, we can say that an extremely tiny percentage of humanity hold to the ideologies that loom so large in contemporary American culture. Those who do are, technically speaking in Joseph Henrich’s term, WEIRD. And, in the sense of the dictionary definition, “strange and different from anything natural or ordinary,” they are also weird.

Thus, we can conclude that. . .

Believing men can marry men and women can marry women is weird.

Believing that there are more than two sexes is weird.

Believing that we can change our sex is weird.

Believing there is no deity is weird.

Believing we can do without religion is weird.

Believing that culture is just a matter of one group oppressing some other group is weird.

We could go on. (Feel free to cite other tenets of our weirdness in the comments.)

This does not mean cultural relativism, though, another weird idea. Some things are universal, applicable to everyone, by virtue of being human. Modern medicine works for westerners and non-westerners alike. Facts, scientific or otherwise, are independent of culture. So are other objective truths–philosophical, moral, religious–whether we in the west or they in the non-west like them or not.

The west has a lot to offer the majority world. And we in the minority can learn a lot from them. The majority world has appreciated western medical care, technology, and economic progress, and in many cases has gladly received that religion that originated in the Middle East but came to them through the west, namely, Christianity. But we must take care not to impose our unique perspective on them.

Today’s woke progressives, weird though they may be, condemn the west’s colonialism. And rightly so. It’s hard to imagine how it could be right to just move in and take over someone else’s country. And yet woke progressives are eager to impose their values of transgenderism, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, and other weird ideas on Africans, Asians, South Americans, Pacific Islanders, and others in the majority world.

This is colonialism–not just the political and economic kind, but a colonialism that strikes deep into the heart of any culture, the family, being the foundation of every culture, as well as the larger convictions that sustain that culture.

Meanwhile, those of us in the west who also reject those culturally-destructive and soul-destroying ideologies should take heart. We may feel beleaguered here, but the world is on our side. The secularists and the wokesters are the outliers, the weird ones.

Photo by Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

contemporary western civilization

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