You must have misunderstood. I’m saying anti P.C. tend to be the less well off. The poorer majority. Scapegoating, distraction from the causes of their diminishing prospects, ie the siphon up economy advanced by the global billionaire mafia. Blame women and minorities rather than the greedy rich and powerful.

the point is not that P.C. censoriousness is utterly blameless but that it is a side effect of a dirty political economic climate. And in spite of the sins you have listed, it wouldn’t have come to this in the absence of the conditions I have already offered.

P.C. Wouldn’t be perceived as a problem if the big money hadn’t pushed Reagan/Thatcher policies that vastly shrank the middle class. Censorious P.C. is a reaction to the volume of anti P.C. sentiment that gets aired when scapegoats (minorities and women) are required, someone for the poorer majority to blame. This is all a distraction.

to sum up my thoughts, the global billionaire mafia are hoping the people they have made poor by loudly pushing siphon up economic policies as if they actually could work will scapegoat others. Being anti PC is useful to them, and social media certainly help in the trend to polarization. P.C. wouldn’t even be in the news, we would just continue to progress to more inclusivity as communication shrinks the world if it weren’t for the economic cruelty insisted upon by the GBM and the fact that dupes don’t place the blame where it is deserved. I’m more afraid of the influence of the right with its legitimation of siphon up economics than I am of P.C. censoriousness, which is just a reaction.

Given the voice if anti P.C. is far shriller, louder, and more powerful, and the shut-them-down P.C. contingent is a small, youthful minority, and the communications errors of this youthful contingent is being used by the far right to shore up its appeal, I would say that your fears of P.C. being able to bring consensus to a closed point is misplaced. The FAR greater threat is the far right.

n the broader scheme of all the universe, we do not have claim to any significance. Therefore the concept of our importance internally is negated by the broader concept of our insignificance.

The case accommodating an existence of God is not accounted for here. Too often, God gets inserted to provide an answer we want to hear at the expense of facing reality. — SimonSays

Yes, God gets inserted into the universe to make us matter, but given the brief tenure of human life in relation to other life on earth and more broadly the age of the universe it's obvious that this insertion is a product of the history of human belief systems. What is God such that he would care about us? What would a God be to us that made a universe where we show up as a mere dot toward the end of the timeline? A heavenly father sacrificing his son? Seems rather incredible.

On the other hand,

I think a fundamental part of our psychology is the need for someone/something to care about us. The need for this in our lives has been exploited by various leaders for thousands of years. — TogetherTurtle

We need to hope for a better future, but I'm not sure that "meeting our every desire" is going to accomplish this. Today's "leaders" are exploiting our need for social acceptability in terms of our consumer status or distracting us with plastic hearts, pumpkins and inflatable Santas or promising us convenience with plastic bottles and megatons of disposables. So far we're wrecking the planet producing, distributing and discarding piles of stupidly packaged tacky merchandise, most of which we don't need.

We need another story - one that lets us feel at home on this planet, this "small blue dot" and encourages us to be environmentally responsible.

If you take as a given that God is a necessary being - I'd guess the 3 major types of monotheism take God as a necessary being and theologians in each area have reasoned about scripture for centuries. Only one type of monotheism thinks Jesus is a son of God... So what's the point of this discussion? I see no "necessity" other than a concocted one.

Retinal images are 2D. We perceive in 3D and no it’s not just because of stereoscopic vision. People have to learn to see and when they have sight trouble that causes them to miss the critical period for this, it is difficult. Furthermore, we fill in the blanks. I can’t see the legs of the side table obscured by the couch but I can make sense of it in 3D space. I can distinguish objects by sight. We learn this combining sight and proprioception. As we do that we learn to objectify our perceptions (which is probably why little ones throw things given to them).

You ask

Is belief or faith in the supernatural a worthy idea for us or is it a tool used by lying preachers intent on fleecing sheeple?

Neither. Except perhaps in the case of the fleecing of the flock by those American consumerist mega churches. But not because science has all possible ontology completely sussed. How could it?

But for two related reasons:

• The historical origins of religious narratives in the context of the geological timeline makes us aware they are a cultural artifact

• Beliefs that help human societies thrive emerge to justify the type of social organization necessary given a certain level of technological development. In a global economy where women’s work in the home has largely been outsourced or made redundant by manufacturing and medical technology (food, clothing, the pill), we need a new story. One that doesn’t preserve closer-to-God hierarchy or a cosmic patriarchy.

Still unsure what you’re actually asking in the OP though. Hope you can reiterate the questions posed so I can actually attempt to address them. — I like sushi

In a nutshell: Why do people mistrust the idea that we are thoroughly socially informed to the point of denying it, even given that it's obvious and culture is what allows us to be us?

So far most have said they don't deny it, others have denied it but are not interested in providing any reasons.

Our flexibility in making use of cultural tools is what distinguishes us from other animals. They copy, we practice and improve.

Can the idea that the organic structure and functioning of the brain coevolved with culture be tested? — Bitter Crank

Merlin Donald's approach is to see culture evolving in stages that have ultimately allowed humans an open-ended repertoire of behaviours. He draws from anthropology, archaeology, genetics and neuroscience to defend his position. I could not replicate his arguments adequately in this space but a reasonably short essay might interest you in which Donald addresses how the brain evolved with culture and provide solid reasons for thinking that it would have to have done so. "An Evolutionary Approach to Culture" in The Axial Age and its Consequences, eds Bellah and Joas. 47-75.

You seem to be more on the side of learned behaviour and culture. I'm more on the side of instinct -- even for people. Some of us believe that much of our behaviour is genetically encoded. People learn language whether they want to or not. They just start absorbing it. It's instinctual. so on and so forth — Bitter Crank

The fact that we can learn it is because our brains evolved to be able to represent and share things symbolically and these repertoires exist in the "external memory storage" enabled by culture, our shared distributed cognitive space . It is culture through which infants are socialized. (Even deaf children realize communication of ideas is possible as they can observe people. Helen Keller took time to realize that Annie Sullivan was communicating something but learning took off once she understood.) Voluntary behaviour is enabled by culture. The remarkable thing about humans is that much of our repertoire is not encoded, we have the open-ended capacity to learn and draw on and add to our cultural repertoire. Probably about the only thing you could say was hardwired in humans are all the things that give us the great capacity to adapt.

I'm glad you liked the lecture. I will follow up your recommendations. I recently read Laland, Darwin's Unfinished Symphony and Morris, Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels. Did you read Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution?

Even before tools there were hierarchies and related common understandings, danger cries, etc. Any social animal has a culture.

if by “the brain comes first” you mean as a necessary condition of there being culture at all, then who would disagree? On the other had if your view is that the brain material primacy in the sense that it requires you to posit a time when there were loners who decided to form the original primate culture, then of course it is preposterous.

Culture exists across brains and in laws and in networks of roads and in the various media from mythical narratives to digital media that function as external memory storage, etc. Being the arena or ongoing history it extends beyond any living brains into the mists of primal our past and to into our future. It is distributed across media, across generations.

We are not merely a collection of individual brains, regardless of how much some of us like to think of ourselves as thoroughly self-authoring and autonomous. We use the tools that our brains have evolved to be able to use insofar as our hominid brains have coevolved with culture over millions of years.

Brains are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the evolution of culture. There is no ground zero for culture. All animals learn and social animals learn from each other. Social interactions create culture. There was never a time in history or prehistory where lone primates individually decided to come together to form the original primate culture. Primates are born into groups. The brain has evolved to make use of the tools that history has given us, cumulatively. Our brains would not function as evolution has made us if we hadn’t had the rich resources of culture informing our cognitive development. This should not be the least controversial. So let’s move on and see what the implications are, especially as regards the irrational rejection of the non controversial facts that our brains are wired to be cultural (because, again, brains and culture coevolved).

Also dogs are evolved from wolves and came into existence through being domesticated over the course of about 40k years. They wouldn’t have existed without us. The are not more genetically related to us than chimps, that’s for sure!

It’s not mere coincidence if food availability has an effect on survival rates an on what genes are more likely to be passed on. I’m saying there is gene culture coevolution- mutual influence. Over 8 to 10 thousand years.

of course you are right in that respect.

Also false beliefs do have an effect, not the one we believe they have. Anti-Vax for instance.

Here’s a link to an abstract explaining my milk example. in this case it refers to cows but same idea. https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1263

BTW, Just in case anyone is confused by “culture” I don’t just mean arts and ideas. I mean technology, economy, language, public institutions, social norms, and the prehistorical and historical roots of all that.

I don't think you can always separate memes from genetic influence - how about "goat's milk is good for everyone" This affected genes that influence ability to digest milk but would not have been propagated if no adults could successfully digest milk. What becomes important to people has to be at least possible to have an effect on us. Of course no particular "idea" is directly due to genetics. To think that releases all memes in general from genetic influences would be kind of crazy.

Quite. Here is an interesting talk on the matter for anyone who is interested. https://vimeo.com/157414065 . Prof Donald is not particularly charismatic but his ideas are pretty interesting.

Here's a 20 minute version if you haven't time for the whole lecture. It comes with a summary of his position as well: http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-6/donald-on-the-evolution-of-human-consciousness

I think you should read more. Try Merlin Donald's A Mind So Rare or perhaps try your like with a search like this one at google scholar: https://www.google.ca/search?q=brain+culture+coevolution+-+google+scholar&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:y&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZ9Zfv6_DiAhWOvZ4KHYPFA8kQpwUIJg&biw=2246&bih=1329

I don't see that you have provided any supporting claims, hence "naysaying".

So I don't think that you'd have in mind something like a group of rational, thoroughly self-directed adults living alone and then coming together to decide how to live, do you? — Izat So

Meanwhile, you have not yet explained what a non-socialized human would look like. And you have ignored the concrete evidence of the intellectual damage suffered by feral and abused children.

So enjoy this instead:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo6yAJo77-Y

No, you’re merely naysaying and as I’ve said in the OP I’m not interested in disputing the science ( neuro paleontology and other areas of research), just in exploring the implications.

Your assertions are thoroughly missing the perspective I’m sharing. If it weren’t for the ages of civilization behind you, which informed your upbringing and development, you’d do no better than a language-less feral child in forming opinions.

I'd definitely agree with claims that cultural and environmental influences are significant factors in the way that people turn out. But that doesn't mean that someone's brain wouldn't work sans culture, etc. — Terrapin Station

Yes, the brain would work but the person would be intellectually maimed until rehabilitated, which is sometimes not possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XSxjnxgdFY

it seems inexplicable to claim that it could all be socially constructed, because it would be difficult to account for how anything got started. — Terrapin Station

I don't think "socially constructed" is the right word. Culturally informed maybe? So I don't think that you'd have in mind something like a group of rational, thoroughly self-directed adults living alone and then coming together to decide how to live, do you? I mean, we have always been fundamentally social. Values emerge through interaction and they probably relate to the conditions for human flourishing - until they don't and the society fails.

there are cultural aspects that I think are damaging and worse than others and/or it would better if I and many others simply were without — Coben

Agree. Glad I didn't grow up in a society that practiced human sacrifice or one that thought the shows they put on at the Roman Coliseum were quite acceptable entertainment.

OK before we get there, consider it like this: Your brain wouldn't work without the "cultural software" that gets installed as you grow, the cultural software that has been undergoing more or less cumulative enhancements and modifications since we evolved into existence. It's not just a matter of values, it's much more fundamental. It's a matter of the very basics of social know-how, technical know-how, language, understandings of options available for action and consequences, cooperation and disruption, etc. If you weren't fully acculturated your brain wouldn't operate as a human brain evolved to operate. You would have fewer options by far. You would be far less adaptable.

So in light of this I wonder why people are wont to insist on human nature being "hardwired" versus socially constructed. In a tweet from skeptic pundit, Michael Shermer from February 2018, he says

If the argument that women "internalize their oppression" holds wouldn't it apply to men internalizing oppressive patriarchy? Where's volition, personal responsibility & choice? If it's all socially constructed then there can be no truth, no reality.

He's either gone down a slippery slope or his last sentence is the premise for the preceding.

He also says in a tweet from May 2018

Here is the original paper of the 7 universal rules of morality: "Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies" https://osf.io/9546r/ I would argue that this helps build the case for moral realism/naturalism & part of human nature.

So taken together we can see Shermer thinks that moral realism and social constructivism are at odds. (Might be framed as absolutism vs relativism).

But I'm saying that they're outdated views and more accurately, that we need to rethink this very deeply. We cannot conclude that being socialized is more inhibiting than freeing. And

being skeptical about certain types of cultural influence — Coben

would be something that cultural influence also enables. We require to be socialized to develop properly and have options available to us. But we need to get beyond a nature/nurture paradigm to think about this more clearly.

At stake: ethics, free will and sources of human agency/individualism, theories of "hardwired human nature" and likely many other things I haven't thought of.

Nice OP. But are you an ontological dualist or just think we need to look at the bigger picture?

Thanks for the timely excerpt and link.

What strikes me about a lot of this activity is the pure pedantry of it all. I don't know about you but 80% of speech is subtext and as you said about Pinkeresque there is what we might call pedantic occlusion everywhere, if you get my drift. Occlusion of potential narrative elements seems more prominent with both mainstream proponents of anti-PC and the extreme PC, with the voices of anti-PC being 100x louder and with currently far more deadly outcomes.

I think people believe that truth is whatever fits neatly into their brains. They believe truth is familiarity. The US is a weird case - should be a very open-ended society but maybe it got ahead of itself and a sizeable portion of the population had a reaction formation (an overzealous defence of something they don't really believe in but don't want to admit to themselves they don't really believe in). What they really mean by free speech is shut up other people.

If you're of a certain age and avoid Fox news, you wouldn't think that all terrorists were jihadis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_Great_Britain

And of course there's the generally under presented cause of many mass shootings in the US (and Canada). https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/21/santa-fe-mass-shooting-misogyny

About that link between endless ranting about PC, beloved of the far right... Ignore it and make it about me being myself, if you like.

Not surprised re Weiss. The IDW does often "stand not against power but on behalf of it".

Taking a stand on behalf of power is probably the crux of this whole overblown anti-PC BS.

Jordanetics: A Journey Into the Mind of Humanity's Greatest Thinker (2018) ISBN 978-952-7065-69-3

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/06/opinion/jordan-peterson-canadian-deference.html

"It is worth remembering that Mr. Peterson can be more accurately described as a previously obscure Canadian academic who believed, erroneously, that he would soon be forced by law to use gender-neutral pronouns and who refused to bow to that hypothetical demand. The proposed human rights policy that made Mr. Peterson famous is now Canadian law, and no instance of “compelled speech” has occurred as a result of it or resulted in criminal charges, as Mr. Peterson feared. On the issue of legal requirements for pronoun use, things remain the way Mr. Peterson wanted them — the same.

"Mr. Peterson was taking a stand not against power in that instance but on behalf of it."

The other side, if you're prepared to stomach it at this point: https://www.thepostmillennial.com/major-new-zealand-book-store-bans-jordan-petersons-book-in-shocking-act-of-censorship/


This may be coincidental.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmillennialism

oops https://hungarytoday.hu/orban-meets-jordan-peterson-in-budapest/

This came up on a social media feed. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/05/29/criminalizing-compassion-trial-begins-humanitarian-facing-20-years-prison-giving?

sure and what inspires that in your view?

I think we have a different interpretation of “concerns about PC” . They’re overblown because there are far more pressing issues than PC threats to free speech. You are referring to concerns about representing PC views?

Ugh. It's the opposite. Concerns about PC have been leveraged by the far right IF those digesting social media accounts do so in McCarthyist spirit. So my ernest friend, you've missed the point by a mile or two.

Pinker's modus operandi is take a typically a downward long term trend, and presenting the current state of this trend as acceptable, or that solutions to these problems would be a mistake etc. In this example, a downward trend of terrorist attacks from the 70's to the present is used as an argument to downplay the increase of right wing terrorism (despite, as I've shown deaths have remained fairly consistent) — Maw

There's something else going on here as well. For lack of words is a misunderstanding of nuance in favour of a pedantic reductionism. (Both in SP and in various comments to this thread esp. TS who I suspect might actually know better and is small p politically driven.) But if we have to get scientific, I'd say SP had forgotten Gould's "punctuated equilibrium" and I'm pretty sure the coming punctuations are going to hurt badly.

So why then the ferocious attempt to link terrorism and political correctness? What's the link? — ssu

You might be confusing me or Maw with I like sushi here.

So the basic argument is that the topic is somehow wrong, because ...there's right-wing terrorism. — ssu

No. For the third or fourth time, here is the position:

Critics of extreme PC do have a point, but what I am concerned about is that they
also seem to be rejecting PC at large and
in doing so are inadvertently feeding into the deeply regressive political movements
in evidence throughout the world
(e.g., Farage, LePen, Hungarian leadership, Brazilian leadership, Trump, new xenophobic legislation in Quebec, etc.),
which ought to be much more of a concern to them
since it is far more deadly. — Izat So

And here is how it has been addressed by critics.

Critics of extreme PC do have a point - No one disagrees, as far as I can tell.

Critics of extreme PC seems to be rejecting PC at large and in so doing are INADVERTENTLY feeding into deeply regressive political movements - MAW's cartoon and my posting of JP with Proud Boys and Pepe, the mascot of the alt right, and the proud islamophobe provide evidence, regardless of how JP et al might feel about them. The point is JP has APPEAL to those groups, whether or not that is his intention (but if he has any sense at all, there is no way he should be surprised).
Farage, LePen, Hungarian leadership, Brazilian leadership, Trump, new xenophobic legislation in Quebec, etc. ought to be much more of a concern to public intellectuals than threats to free speech on the part of PC defenders since it is far more deadly, so the question is why are they far more motivated to attack PC and thus to inadvertently appear to be defenders of the right wing, as opposed to taking a stand against rightwing extremism because it (not PC) is becoming horribly normalized the world over!

But to Izat's point, the concern over political correctness is largely overblown — Maw

By far.