One of the premises of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity is that much of our worldview is influenced
by the collective beliefs of our culture. We are programmed to think the way people
in our culture do. A trip to another country is an interesting way to see this
programming in action. Culture shock is the way we describe the experience of
visiting people who have different assumptions about reality. A favorite
example of mine is the time I went to Fiji, and saw big strapping policemen wearing skirts. That conflicted with
one of my culture’s sillier assumptions, that men can’t wear skirts.
But the assumptions that make up our collective reality are not all
silly by any means. In fact they have profound consequences in how we think and
interact with each other.
One that has been on my mind lately has to do with war. As I noted
in a recent post, after Syria used chemical weapons why was the Obama
administration so focused on bombing to the exclusion of diplomacy? Why do we
have so few non-violent mechanisms for enforcing international norms?
David Barash, professor of psychology at
the University of Washington, recently published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled Are
We Hard-Wired for War? that argues that our fundamental assumptions about
human nature affect our attitudes toward violence in general and war in
particular.
