Another of your ambitiously thoughtful posts. Although you make clear that the hierarchy you present is not one of “worth,” it is a hierarchy of “insight,” a value-laden term. The sentiment I liked most was your advice to think of insight as something to be stewarded rather than evangelized. This wise advice captures perfectly my negative response to the “new atheists.”
Imagine someone from a modern high material comfort society going to and try to impose its cultural software to a tribe whose cultural system has allowed it to be perfectly adapted to their environment for hundreds if not thousands of years. This is another case where one should be careful to avoid careless dismantling another humans cultural software without fully understanding how it works and how it is adaptive. In fact, our “primitive” hunter and gatherer pre-agriculture cultural software sustained us for hundred of thousands of years, while our current high energy and high resource consuming one may not be that sustainable at all.
Another of your ambitiously thoughtful posts. Although you make clear that the hierarchy you present is not one of “worth,” it is a hierarchy of “insight,” a value-laden term. The sentiment I liked most was your advice to think of insight as something to be stewarded rather than evangelized. This wise advice captures perfectly my negative response to the “new atheists.”
Imagine someone from a modern high material comfort society going to and try to impose its cultural software to a tribe whose cultural system has allowed it to be perfectly adapted to their environment for hundreds if not thousands of years. This is another case where one should be careful to avoid careless dismantling another humans cultural software without fully understanding how it works and how it is adaptive. In fact, our “primitive” hunter and gatherer pre-agriculture cultural software sustained us for hundred of thousands of years, while our current high energy and high resource consuming one may not be that sustainable at all.