David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This week on Coffee and Wisdom, we’ve been talking about embodied cognition and the difference between two phrases, “I think therefore I am” and “I am because we are”, that we’re discussing the Western idea that led up to this very individualized concept of the person and then looking a little bit at how this differs within other cultures. That’s more of what we want to do today. This is from a BBC online magazine. The author is David Robson, and it’s called “How East and West Think in Profoundly Different Ways”. Fun little article if you want to look it up online. Partially in there he says this; “Psychologists are uncovering the surprising influence of geography on our reasoning, behavior and sense of self. From the broad differences between East and West, to subtle variation between U.S. states, it is becoming increasingly clear that history, geography, and culture can change how we all think in subtle and surprising ways, right down to our visual perception. Our thinking may have even been shaped by the kinds of crops our ancestors used to farm, and a single river may mark the boundaries between two different cognitive styles. Wherever we live, a greater awareness of these forces can help us all understand our own minds a little bit better.” Interesting and intriguing, I hope you find those ideas. One of the things he mentions in the article is this idea of Weird, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and Democratic.

Joseph Heinrich was the first person to name this in his book, “The Weirdest People in the World.” At that time, he was a researcher at the University of British Columbia. Now he is a research assistant fellow at Harvard. He says, “If we are what we see, and we are attending to different stuff, then we are living in different worlds.” One of the critiques here then is why are we looking at mostly privileged college students when we do various kinds of psychological research? And that idea, when he introduced it, really began to change how research was being done in American universities. Robson goes on to say, “The tacit assumption had been that this select group of people could represent universal truths about human nature, that all people are basically the same. If that were true, the Western bias would have been unimportant. Yet the small number of available studies which HAD examined people from other cultures would suggest that this is far from the case. “Westerners — and specifically Americans — were coming out at the far end of the distribution”, says Joseph Heinrich, again now at Harvard, who is one of the study’s authors.” And as I’ve mentioned before, this is one of the ways we know there is somebody behind the curtain. Generally, we call that European ideas, Weird, white supremacy, etc. The idea that whiteness is in some way a universal value. There are have been a lot of books that have come out since that time. This discovery, one that you might be enjoy because it is a PDF online and free is “Decolonising the University”, edited by three professors in Johannesburg. That would be getting outside of this Weird designation to look at how really other people in the world see reality.

Robson goes on, “When questioned about their attitudes and behaviors, people in more individualistic Western societies tend to value personal success over group achievement, which in turn is also associated with the need for...