RE: Is Atheistic Humanism the ideology of the Anglo-Sphere?
December 30, 2013 at 9:38 pm
(This post was last modified: December 30, 2013 at 9:49 pm by mralstoner.)
(December 30, 2013 at 8:25 pm)theyear12013 Wrote: Is Anglo-American-Australian-Kiwi-Canadian humanism now the defacto ideology of the Commonwealth+Americasphere? Is it also the dominant ideological force in the world today?
What are the dominant policies/ideologies/factors of the Western world today?
1. Consumerism
2. Diversity
3. Globalisation
4. Government Incompetence
5. Crime, riots, terrorism etc.
Something like that. Western nations are being radically transformed from being Anglocentric, into borderless cosmopolitan shopping malls occupied by multinational corporations. Meanwhile our governments can't balance their budgets, and we have periodic outbreaks of inter-racial/religious crime, riots and terrorism.
So what is your question: is humanism the dominant force in the West, and the world?
That's an interesting question. I'd break it down further:
1. Is the transformation of Western nations desirable? I vote: hell no!
2. Is the transformation sustainable? Hmm, my head is starting to hurt.
So let's step back and take an evolutionary look at the world. In evolutionary terms, group fitness is the determining factor of success. It's not individuals which hold power, but the group most fit in a world of competing groups.
And on those terms, you'd have to think the Western world is at the end of its life cycle, and China is at the beginning of theirs.
What has this got to do with humanism? Well, humanism is a part of the fracturing of Western nations. And that fracturing (or diversity) is debilitating to group psychology. Ergo, the Western world is being pulled apart by various interests groups (business, ethnic, ideological) and is not acting as a cohesive group. In a world with groups like China that are acting aggressively in their own interests, the West seems like a lame duck.
What's the moral to the story? I think Professor Jonathan Haidt hit the nail on the head:
"Religions are moral exoskeletons... Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few)."
Does that mean we need religion for the West to survive? Hell no. But it does mean that humanism (being rather formless, normless, diverse, and open) has failed to retain a vital ingredient of group fitness: namely, unity or cohesiveness, and acting in our own interests.
Happy New Year? No such thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynmLdLwlgLI
