It seems Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the RSA, former chief political strategy advisor in the UK, is popularising grid/group cultural theory on his blog – and provoking an interesting discussion within and beyond the RSA.
City air makes you free but that’s not all it makes you
In the morning at the railway station the woman sitting next to me gave a big sigh and said,
‘Doesn’t this beat looking at all those city buildings!’
Given the view from the platform, you might see why I felt I had to agree. But are city buildings really all that bad? For instance, Ely Cathedral or the Chrysler Building can surely be inspiring, not least because they seem to enhance their wider context. The former dominates the Cambridgeshire Fens; the latter sets the pattern for Manhattan.
Jonah Lehrer (editor of Seed Magazine) recently wrote an article that tries to explain why city life hurts your brain, and what you can do about it. He even manages to mention one of my heroes, Frederick Law Olmstead.
What’s more, Jonah Lehrer’s blog is so interesting, in a ‘popular science’ kind of way, that I’m adding it to the Fourcultures bookmarks on Delicious. Follow the ‘Related Bookmarks‘ link at the right of this page.
How to drive more traffic to your web site…
You could probably do it by writing a post with a title like this. But why bother worrying about your web traffic when the rest of the Fourcultures web site is so much more interesting?
Grid-Group Cultural Theory: a way of trying not to fool yourself?
Two recent blog comments are critical of the way I have presented grid-group cultural theory’s four cultures.
At journalist George Monbiot’s Guardian blog, TheNuclearOption says:
Meanwhile, over at economist John Quiggins’ blog, KieranO says:
Fourcultures, i like what Richard Feynman says ….
“Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”These four cultures that you describe, simply find and fool themselves. Science is about discovery.
To take the first criticism first, why are there only four cultural solidarities – why not two, twelve or more? Continue reading Grid-Group Cultural Theory: a way of trying not to fool yourself?
Grid-group cultural theory and hierarchical churches
It came to my attention recently that there are still churches which don’t let women preach or lead worship.
Choosing the leaders because they are men is a hierarchical approach to social organisation and needs to be set in a context. The other ways of choosing leaders should be noted:
Egalitarian – ‘priesthood of all believers’ (become more like the Quakers and be suspicious of activities that require structured leadership)
Individualist – ‘work out your own salvation’ (become more like the new age and construct your own tailor-made religion out of bought pieces. Leaders are entrepreneurs).
Fatalist – ‘the lot fell upon Matthias; and he was numbered with the eleven apostles’ (Acts 1.26) (become more like a lottery and embrace chance. After all, leadership is pointless – who remembers what Matthias ever did?) Continue reading Grid-group cultural theory and hierarchical churches
Is it misleading to say there probably isn’t a God?
The Atheist Bus Campaign story just keeps rolling along.
The latest is that after more than 400 complaints, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority is considering an investigation.
Meanwhile in Australia no such problems have been encountered, since the advertising industry is already censoring itself by refusing to work with anti-God ads.
It seems the ASA may be putting itself in the unenviable position of ruling on whether the claim that ‘There’s probably no God’ is misleading. To help the process along I can definitively advise that there is in fact a God in England and he has been located in Oxford, York, Manchester, London and Chester (see image), as well as at a number of places in Northumbria. This is obviously bad news for atheists, but it may be equally bad news for Christians, Jews and Muslims. The God in question is none other than Mithras, the subject of a popular ancient Roman mystery cult. In fact, evidence of his existence is to be found all over western Europe.
Paganism was banned in 341, but London’s Mithraic temple is due to be re-established by developers in 2009.
There is a serious point to this: by denying a certain type of god, contemporary Atheists risk lending that god some backhanded credibility.
FourCultures as a wordcloud
How to Combine Eastern and Western Philosophy
It’s Christmas time and all around people are revisiting the cultic practices of an ancient oriental sect, as though they were at the very heart of Western culture.
The longer I live the more annoying I find the maintenance of the fairly rigorous distinction between two traditions of philosophy – Eastern and Western. This can be defended as a necessary specialisation – as though ‘world philosophy’ would be just too much for any one brain to comprehend. But the more I think about it the more it seems like an ideology, a deliberate dualism to go with those rightly exposed and criticised by some feminists and some readers of Foucault. The West is active, the East passive, the West emotional, the East inscrutible, the West masculine, the East feminine and so on. Do we really need this distinction between East and West? What is it for? Who does it benefit? Continue reading How to Combine Eastern and Western Philosophy
So… what should I believe?
Psychologist Dorothy Rowe has a book out about religious belief, entitled What Should I Believe? She says,
it is possible to create set of beliefs, which allow us to live at peace with ourselves and other people, to feel strong in ourselves without having to remain a child forever dependent on some supernatural power, and to face life with courage and optimism.
What I find interesting about this is the acceptance of the idea that belief as such presents itself as some kind of choice, while the content of belief is in need of construction by each and every would-be believer. It seems that DIY religion is not so much an option – it’s the only real possibility.
But I think there may be at least three alternatives… Continue reading So… what should I believe?
Four Cultures and Bounded Rationality
Recently this site suggested grid-group cultural theory as a type of bounded rationality could explain certain economic behaviour (that of pirates) more completely than rational choice theory could. But is grid-group cultural theory actually a version of bounded rationality, or are there important differences.? A forthcoming article in the Harvard Law Review should shed light on this:
Kahan, D. M., & Slovic, P. (in press). Is cultural cognition a product of bounded rationality? Harvard Law Review.
Update:
I’m informed that the above article is already available on-line. It is part of an in-print discussion with Cass Sunstein. Sunstein’s response to the review essay, Fear of Democracy: A Cultural Critique of Sunstein on Risk, 119 Harv. L. Rev.1071 (2006) is also available online.
Four Cultures 