WEIRD, in a good way

LISTEN. We're WEIRD, we westerners, says a new book by Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich (THE WEIRDEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous). It's the subject of a glowing Times review by Daniel Dennett. 

That's an acronym, and not necessarily an aspersion. It means we're western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Being weirdly western predicts that a great many of us 

are individualistic, think analytically, believe in free will, take personal responsibility, feel guilt when we misbehave and think nepotism is to be vigorously discouraged, if not outlawed. Right? They (the non-WEIRD majority) identify more strongly with family, tribe, clan and ethnic group, think more “holistically,” take responsibility for what their group does (and publicly punish those who besmirch the group’s honor), feel shame — not guilt — when they misbehave and think nepotism is a natural duty.

These traits are hallmarks, generally, of what we call western civilization. We were talking about that in Environmental Ethics yesterday, some of us wondering whether there's a baby worth saving in the murky bath of the western imperialist aggression  that began by displacing indigenous Americans and has proceeded to walk not so softly and wield a rude self-aggrandizing stick in foreign policy ever since... all while committing and excusing domestic sins of social injustice and oligarchic corruption.

Some of us actually weren't wondering that, so much as insisting that bath and baby were all too far gone to save, too stained by past bad behavior and present venality to defend.

I say the west at its best has been an advocate for reason and the light of science, the very tools we need to critique and reform our tradition's worst excesses. To those who say we're beyond redemption, at least in the shrinking time-frame in which we must reconstruct the meaning of our democratic experiment, I say you may be right. Hope not.

So what in our WEIRDness is worth conserving and preserving?

The freedom to be Stoics and Epicureans, to move to the country and eat a lot of peaches etc. We spoke yesterday of communal experiments in non-conventional living, of voluntary simplicity and the rights of individuals to seek their own good in their own way. (William Morris was mentioned, and Brooke Farm, and The Farm, and even the aspirant non-commercial spirit of Bonnaroo and Burning Man.) Doing the counter-cultural thing in a non-conformist way requires courage of the Kantian sapere aude variety.

The freedom to scissor your bible, Jefferson-style, is an Enlightenment exercise in personal self-governance it'd be a shame to abandon.

The freedom to defy "tradition" in the pursuit of happiness is wonderfully WEIRD too.

The advent and continuing refinement of Pragmatism has been one of western culture's better contributions to world philosophy. Baggini's discussion of James, Dewey, Peirce, and Rorty in How the World Thinks comes just in time to address what's missing from any pure Stoicism. Epictetus the slave might understandably have been indulged in such purity, but western culture's expansion of individual liberty gives most of us now the opportunity to act and at least try to alter events. Before we resign ourselves to impotence, before we seek refuge in mere understanding and acceptance as the fullest extent of our freedom, we can do something. "Even if it's wrong," as my old friend in Carolina says.

I composed and thought I'd posted a bunch of questions for discussion, pertaining to the Baggini chapters. They've vanished, maddeningly, but I do want us today -- or eventually, we'll revisit the subjects of Pragmatism and Tradition later in the semester -- to ponder Peirce's statement about not pretending to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts, Dewey's repudiation of "the problems of philosophers" in favor of "the problems of men," and James's quintessentially pragmatic question, "What concrete difference will its being true [or being believed to be true] make in anyone's actual life?" 

Baggini proposes finally that Americans "appreciate better the virtues of their indigenous pragmatic philosophers," by whom I think he means the likes of Peirce, James, and Dewey, with their roots in British empiricism. 

But of course there were truly indigenous American philosophers on the North American continent before them. See Scott Pratt's Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy and Bruce Wilshire's Primal Roots of American Philosophy for details. Our willingness to rethink our tradition, to reject chauvinism and reclaim those roots, is itself one of the finer flowers of enlightened western culture. I think it's worth cultivating. Not eradicating. Let's cultivate our garden.