The Revelation

What anthropology revealed has been mulled over for about a century now. The essence of it has been expressed in a variety of ways. During the nineties there was a lot of resonance for Daniel Quinn’s version: Taker Culture vs. Leaver Culture.

A new book — The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous — is currently making a splash:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/12/books/review/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-joseph-henrich.html

It explicates a lot of details, there are a lot of statistics, and there are some idiosyncratic ideas (literacy as a brain-changer, prohibition of cousin-marriage as a Big Deal). But I’m afraid such a treatment will lose the simple and profound essence: There have been two human lifeways. One is original, natural, sane, and sustainable. The other (of recent inception) goes off in crazy directions and is not sustainable.

The one is localist, place-based, and communitarian. The other fosters the rootless mass institutional-technological society we now inhabit.

There is great irony in how the acronym WEIRD is composed of seemingly positive elements (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) and yet implies negativity (strangeness, bizarreness, perhaps ghastliness). Our current lifeways, are, indeed, weird — atomized, individualistic, complexified, hypertrophied, and anomic to such an extent as to be insane.