Whigs

Tradition-observing people have lived for hundreds of years in stable extended family structures without rapidly destroying their natural environment. It is time we considered their values as worth more than cursory dismissal. The problem is smug self-righteousness. Like all missionaries both sacred and secular, Weirds are so sure they are right that they are using powerful political and economic pressures together with a blitzkrieg of mass education and mass media to compel everyone to become like themselves. If you are not a Weird you are not just an ignorant idiot, you are immoral! Such ethnocentric cultural imperialism is dangerously irresponsible. If you are going to be a cultural imperialist then be prepared to make your values clear, listen to other opinions, and be prepared to openly defend your actions.

WEIRDs Exposed

I am delighted that recently there are more and more signs of a radical reappraisal of the mechanistic secular-scientific ideology underlying our civilisation now coming from various academic writers for the public. The last radical changes in intellectual fashion were led by the Esalin Institute during the early 1960s but the escapism into individualistic Eastern philosophies and experimentation with drugs and sex that characterised this revival made no positive impact. Today the attack is growing on naïve reductionism and materialism as irrational fixations. Die-hard Darwinists are finding it ever more difficult to reject multi-level evolution as modifying organic evolution and even sexual selection is rearing its beautiful head. Darwin was always worried about the male peacock’s tail. Ecologists like Gregory Bateson are forcing us to see Nature not as objects in space that can be manipulated but as an inter-related complex of systems linked by feedback loops. Highly dysfunctional social darwinism combined with bourgeois individualism can only be a temporary aspect of our historical development during what I assume is a transitional cultural stage.