Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) June 3, 2023: Because I have a subscription to the electronic version of the New York Times, I tend to visit its homepage each morning. I usually look over the titles of the op-ed commentaries. For example, I recently noticed (1) the title "A Major Problem With Compulsory Mental Care Is the Medication" (dated June 2, 2023) and (2) the title "If You're Reading This, You're Probably 'WEIRD': The anthropologist Joseph Henrich parses how culture shapes our psyches" (dated May 26, 2023)
I propose to borrow a technical term from the most recent of these two selections, by Daniel Bergner, and then apply it here to Joseph Henrich's catchy acronym WEIRD in Ezra Klein's earlier selection.
Before Daniel Bergner, the author of the 2022 book The Mind and the Moon: My Brother's Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches (Ecco), wrote his most recent op-ed commentary "A Major Problem With Compulsory Mental Health Is the Medication," in which he uses the technical term anosognosia, he wrote the lengthy profile "Doctors Gave Her Antipsychotics. She Decided to Live With Her Voices: A new movement wants to shift mainstream thinking away from medication and toward greater acceptance" in the New York Times Magazine (dated May 17, 2022). It is about Carol Mazel-Carlton. I wrote about his magazine profile of her in my OEN article "Daniel Bergner on Hearing Voices" (dated May 19, 2022):
My OEN article contains a link to Bergner's magazine profile of Carol Mazel-Carlton.
In the present essay, I want to write a bit about Bergner's recent use of the technical term anosognosia, which he operationally defines and explains as meaning "the state of being too sick, too far beyond reason, to recognize one own mental illness." But I do not want to use the term in its technical sense. Rather, I want to use the term in a more metaphoric way, as I will explain momentarily.
Next, I want to refer briefly to the New York Times columnist, and podcast host, Ezra Klein's provocatively titled piece "If You're Reading This, You're Probably 'WEIRD'" (dated May 26, 2023). WEIRD is an acronym. It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Harvard's Joseph Henrich uses it in the title of his 2020 book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Klein's piece prompted me to order Henrich's 2020 book - which I have looked over but not read carefully.
Wikipedia has an entry about Henrich's 2020 book that highlights reviews of it.
According to Professor Henrich's CV at his personal website, he received his Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA in 1999; his M.A. in anthropology from UCLA in 1995; his B.A. in anthropology from the University of Notre Dame (with high honors) in 1991 - when he also received his B.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Notre Dame (with high honors). Henrich's "Index" (pp. 657-680) includes an entry on the Western Church (Roman Catholic Church) (p. 680) and numerous sub-entries referring to it.
Because Henrich's acronym WEIRD is catchy enough to catch Klein's attention, let's engage in a thought experiment about each of its major components.
Henrich's term Western calls to mind the contrasting term non-Western, which, of course, includes a vast number of other cultures.
Henrich's term Educated calls to mind the contradictory term "not educated" (or at least "not educated" in formal Western education?). But in American today, we often hear of college-educated versus non-college-educated (e.g., many of Trump's white supporters). However, as Henrich uses the term Educated, it appears to mean functionally literate in vowelized phonetic alphabetic literacy - which presumably includes most non-college-educated Americans.
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