Many on the far left and in the fluffy new age croud decry the dominance of western culture across the globe. We hear words like creative destruction, material-rationalism, malthusean crisis, and exploitation bandied about with no context and little critical thought. While these self labeled cultural critics deify non-western cultural beliefs like collectivism, magical thinking, and ludditism, they are oddly silent on polygamy, misygony, and inter-ethnic hate.
Western culture dominates for a simple reason: Progress is dependent on novelty and it is clear that contemporary western culture produces the most novelty when compared to all other global cultural movements throughout human history. As a cultural movement, the west has driven novelty through laissez faire markets in which value (in the form of both tangible goods and intangible ideas) is freely exchanged, and through socioeconomic freedom to ensure a diversity in a set of free minds. Thus novel ideas and discoveries are developed and exchanged, ultimately creating the “fittest species” in the darwinian global marketplace of culture.
However, in recent years the west has moved away from these values of free minds and free markets. The right attempts to impose judeo-christian values under the guise of western culture when it is really the rise of secularism and rational inquiry that has seperated the west from the rest. In this way the right threatens the freedom of minds. The left on the other hand threatens the free markets under the guise of social benefit, when really it is an embrace of free markets that has created the unprecedented wealth and “middle class” affluence first seen in the west. As the right makes its assault on the minds, the left attacks the market, threatening freedom and destroying our cultural potential for novelty and therefore dominance.
We must return to our cultural values at once, or risk seeing our prosperity destroyed. The only way to do this is to once again embrace free minds and free markets and step out of the way of our collective destiny of accelerating consciousness.
Recent Comments