24
NOV
30
Fictions and Frauds
British stewardship of global history has been neither benevolent nor benign.
It has served as an instrument of colonization by which the contributions of non-western civilizations were either appropriated, or when they could not be appropriated, erased.
Some of those fictions and frauds remain a part of our modern governance systems, where they contribute to biased, suboptimal decisions by our governments.
Meritocratic societies cannot be built on fictional and fraudulent foundations.
I will periodically post them here.
1700- 1000 BCE
Aryan Invasion Mythology
Between 1849 and 1874 Friedrich Max Müller worked for the British East India Company creatively translating Vedic texts to create a European origin story for almost 6K years of social and scientific progress on the Indian subcontinent. Müller's world-building efforts resulted in the Aryan Invasion Mythology, which was the most recent thinking at the time of Canada's confederation.
900 CE
Origins of Democracy
Possibly the longest running fraud is that democracy has a European origin, rather than Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, origin.
1956 CE
False Binaries
There remains a widely held belief in western societies that cultures can be divided into mutually exclusive binaries like
- cultures of law / cultures of law;
- individualist / collectivist;
- etc.
I doubt they mean to that cultures of law are dishonourable, but the implication is there nonetheless.
2010 CE
WEIRD Bias
In 2010, University of British Columbia researchers (Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan) released a study entitled The Weirdest People in the World demonstrating a selection bias in the sampling of published psychology papers, which meant that the conclusions of those papers could not be generalized. In the legal profession, this distorts the "reasonable person" test.
