> "I was initially shooting for an examination of the basic assumptions of modern western society"
> "Non westerner here.... What are the basic assumptions of modern western society?"
OK, excellent questions. To better understand what the assumptions of modern Western society are, we also need to understand what the assumptions of other modern cultures are and what came before all modern cultures.
That last question is particularly crucial. We here in a Paleo forum have more inkling about it than most moderners. We know that the modern diet is terribly screwed up and that the diets of our "savage" ancestors were superior. How is it that our diets and our knowledge of nutrition got so far off track and why is it that we don't hear more about stuff like Paleo diets in our schools and other institutions? Why do we know so little about alternative ways of living among today's surviving hunter gatherers and those of the Stone Age? It is knowledge that was once shared by all human beings but then was lost by most in what Daniel Quinn calls "The Great Forgetting":
"Now I hope - I sincerely hope - that there are many among you who are burning to know why not a single one of you has ever heard a word about the Great Forgetting (by any name whatsoever) in any class you have ever attended at any school at any level, from kindergarten to graduate school. If you have this question, be assured that it’s not an academic one by any means. It’s a vital question, and I don’t hesitate to say that our species’ future on this planet depends on it." --Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael
The Great Forgetting began with the Neolithic Revolution and only started to be significantly corrected with the advent of evolutionary biology, anthropology, Paleoanthropology, Paleopathology and other fields (though there were earlier revolutionary amateur thinkers as well). Scientists started to investigate other "primitive" cultures of today and cultures of the Stone Age. At first, most of them sought to justify modern Western culture and to denigrate other cultures. Then some of them started looking with a more objective eye and learned some startling things that call into question many of the basic assumptions of modern Western culture.
Learning that many of the foundational assumptions and principles of our modern society, what Quinn calls "Mother Culture," are mostly or completely bogus or destructive is very difficult for many moderners to accept. I find that if I just tell people the facts about them, they tend to get defensive and dismissively reject what I've shared without really considering it. But most of it is pretty intuitive and can be arrived at by using the Socratic method--asking ourselves questions and doing our own research. We tend to accept things better when we arrive at conclusions ourselves than have them dictated to us. I will make some attempts at that, with some help from Quinn, but I really recommend reading Ishmael, as Quinn is much better at helping people question the assumptions of Mother Culture than I am. He has a talent for nurturing "the genius of seeing that which is so evident as to be unseeable." Of course, Quinn is not to everyone's taste, so you can also learn more directly what Quinn learned by reading anthropology and Paleoanthropology books and everything you can about the hunter gatherer societies of modern and Stone Age times.
One assumption in the U.S., my country, seems to be that children will go to school, get a job, work hard until they're sixty or so, and hopefully accumulate enough money so that they can retire and move to Florida or another warm place, where they will then spend much of what they accumulated and then die. Of course, many people end up spending more on health care, elder homes and nursing homes and less on Mai Tais and recreational boats than they had planned. When they get to Florida, they find that people talk more about their chronic health problems than they do about their latest fishing trip and they find that instead of a quiet rural paradise it is increasingly noisy, congested and urbanized as more and more people move there (at least until the recent recession). Isn't it ironic that we spend most of our lives toiling away so that some day we might be able to spend it living the way hunter gatherers live every day, and when we get to the point where we can do that financially, many of us are too sick to carry it out?
Over the years I've heard people ask questions like, "Isn't there more to life than this?" "Why am I falling apart?" "Why does society seem to be degenerating even as we 'progress'?" "Why am I here?" "What is my purpose in life?" "Why do things seem to be out of sync with the natural universe?" "Why do I feel like an alien on a planet where I don't fully belong?" "Why do I feel like a caged animal?"
Why is it that even with the greatest accumulation of economic wealth in human history, Americans have higher rates of depression than were found among the traditional Inuit? Which society is more "civilized," that which has lots of prisons full of thousands or millions of hardened criminals, or that which has no prisons and very few criminals?
I'll paraphrase what I believe is the first of Ishmael's Socratic questions: among the people of modern Western culture, which want to intentionally destroy the world, including their own corner of it, their own tribe and family, and themselves? In other words, what peoples are consciously destructive and suicidal (and I'm talking about sane nations and cultural groupings here, not insane individuals)?
