World War of the World Views

David Brin had an article way before 9/11 of the struggle for four world views to dominate the 21st Century and the future.

The four memes are Paranoia, Machismo, the East (homogeneous meritocracy), and Dogma of Otherness (tolerant anti-authoritarianism.)

I've thought of an amusing experiment you might play, using these four protagonists. Try to picture what might happen if a ship full of extraterrestrials landed in a Macho culture, or a Paranoid one, or in the East.

You get three wildly different scenarios, don't you? Now imagine if aliens made contact with people brought up in the fourth way I mentioned -- under the Dogma of Otherness. Forget Hollywood pathos about nasty CIA types and trigger-happy rednecks. Try to picture a flying saucer setting down in today's Los Angeles. The National Guard might be called out to encircle the vessel, but they wouldn't face inward. They would be far too busy facing in the opposite direction, protecting our alien visitors from autograph hounds, groupies, and hordes seeking novelty.

The first thing that Californians would ask aliens is -- "Have you got any new cuisine?"

...Before, fathers, mothers and teachers used to say, "I shall keep all alien notions and foreign ideas away from my children, in order to protect them." None of those ancestors would have felt uncomfortable, as so many of you out there are feeling right now, with the very notion of winning and losing. They simply took it for granted.

Now, though, for the first time, we have a cultural mind-set that has parents saying to their kids -- "I've taught you basic values. Therefore, I don't care what ideas you play with, because I know you'll be a decent person, whatever notions you're exposed to."

If this worldview wins, naturally there will be Kabuki theater and Bantu dancers and Sufi dervishes and all manner of diverse cultural treasures preserved from the past and around the world. Being of a mind to romanticize anything that is different, children of the west will rebel against the very thought of such things ever going extinct. They'll be trained from birth to hunger for diversity.

Perhaps this is nothing other than the development of the wold's first multicellular meme. The first in which exclusion has turned into inclusion. If so, we are, indeed, in for interesting times.

The Bush administration is composed of machismos and paranoids.