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Wednesday 15 September 2021

The Wierdest People in the World - Book Review Part 1

 

            

 Westerners are W.E.I.R.D.!

Having been brought up in the East (Pakistan) and spent many years in close friendship with South Asians, I have always felt an outsider in the West, though technically I am a Yank.

In other words I have always felt a bit weird.

But now - and it is official! - it's not me who is weird, it's the West that is Weird, and at last I have found the explanation of why westerners, rather than me, are the weird ones!

The phenomenal and global "triumph of the West", you see, obscures a fact: the way western folk act and think is truly unusual compared to all the other cultures of the world across time and place.

That is the verdict of Joseph Henrich. 

WEIRD stands for:

W estern

E ducated

I ndustrial

R ich

D emocratic

Most cultures who have ever existed and most cultures that exist today are not Weird and do not think or behave like we do. (There you go, I have included myself in the wild weird west).

Understanding this may prove very helpful to believers, for perhaps large doses of Western Evangelicalism have been unwittingly shaped by this wierdness.

I plan to review the contents of this (too long, 680 pages, why can't people write books 100 pages long?) book over the coming weeks, as I read it myself. My single purpose is to explore how evangelicalism has been / may have been unduly shaped by our culture. 

So that we can repent.

Sometimes it really helps to be an outsider

The author found himself appointed teacher of a subject he'd never studied himself! Unusual appointment! This immediately meant that he did not think the way everyone around him did. Rather than this being a drawback it proved to be a great advantage because he was able to see things with fresh eyes.

This is what the prophets of old were enabled by God to do spiritually. They stood outside the established religion of their day, looked in and by divine revelation were able to see what no-one else could see.

Not saying Henrich is a prophet, but his unusual book owes much to his status as an outsider. 

As he got to work, he began to ask the no-one-else-has-asked question. "Of all the studies of people made by ye scholars how many of them have been on WEIRD people and how many of them have been on people from the rest of the - majority - world?"

In other words, Have the conclusions psychologists have made about human beings in general  been based on studies made of just one tiny group of the globe's population? 

Answer - yikes! - 96% of all studies (and hence conclusions) were based on questionaires from western (hence WEIRD) people!

"almost everything we - scientists - knew about human psychology derived from populations that seemed to be rather unusual" (page xiii)

First Conclusions

That's enough of a bombshell for one blog. We'll discover next time how exactly westerners are weird.

Westerners need to humble themselves, that's the first conclusion we should draw out. In our unbelievable arrogance we think that our generalised conclusions about mankind are true - when we have failed to take into account most of the world's noble peoples. (We have, for an example, the unbelievable audacity to think that democracy is the only way to run a country and imagine we are being noble by exporting it / imposing it - by force if necessary - to/on other countries. If a vast 'democratic' nation can only come up with a Biden or Trump as presidential candidates, there is surely something massively wrong with our prized 'democracy.' Democracy is just one way to run a country, certainly not the only or even the best.)

Second, we should adopt a very healthy scepticism to all the findings of psychology, and all the treatments of the same. Their findings have been based on a very small portion of the world's wonderfully varied population and hence their treatments are likely to be weird and unreliable.

Third, it would be good to know, as a Bible believing evangelical, how deeply our Christianity, our belief and practice,  - true no doubt - has been shaped by our weirdness as much as it has been shaped by Scripture.

True growth always involves a Nehemiahic clearing away of the rubble before we can build for the glory of God.

Fourth, I've always been intrigued as to why the greatest church growth across the world today is among charismatic-pentecostal churches. Perhaps the educated weirdness of the West automatically filters out the supernatural elements of true New Testament Christianity. 

But perhaps where peoples and nations are blessed with ordinariness rather than weirdness, no such filter hinders the work of the Holy Spirit?

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