Chapter   10           World Views And The War Digression                   Part A

            Protoplasm moves forward through time only in certain limited ways. If a branch of the living community of the earth strays outside of those shifting boundaries, it is cut off from the energy flow patterns of the planet’s ecosystem, it shrivels, and it dies. The extinction, from the Earth's perspective, of a species, a culture, or an individual is neither sad nor ironic nor comic: it is simply over. Humans cannot, even in complex, nation-sized groups, ignore this truth for long.

 

                                       ruins of ancient Biblical city of Beersheba 

            Recognizing that survival, if it is to happen at all, must happen in material reality, not the dimension of the forms or the soul or cyber-space, all societies, including pre-historic ones, historical ones, and contemporary ones, have always tried to integrate their value systems – the codes by which their citizens choose and carry out their actions in all phases of living – with their society’s world view. Thus, a society’s worldview is crucial to its staying in a favorable part of the streams of the energy flowing around it. A society's worldview, its way of picturing reality, gives rise directly to its values system, thence to its morés and behavior patterns, and finally, to its survival.

               

            A “worldview” is a way of understanding or organizing all of our sensory perceptions, memories of sensory perceptions, and categories of perceptions of the material universe in which we exist. Every society that survives arrives, by the consensus of generations of its people, at a way of organizing the people’s perceptions of their universe (and the roles of humans in that universe) which the people in that society perceive as being correct, appropriate, and natural.

Whether a worldview precedes, parallels, or follows a set of values entailed by that worldview is difficult to say. Worldviews and the values systems and morés that go with them are subtly and inextricably intertwined. A change in a society's worldview, the values shifts that the change leads to, and the behaviors that the new values foster, probably all arise in starts here and there as one large complex in a nation's ways of thinking, talking, and living – its culture, in other words.

               

         

                                        Aztec calendar (a neatly condensed worldview)

            But in any case, a society’s worldview, if it is analyzed closely, can be thought of as a condensed version of, and guide to, that society’s values. In conjunction with their basic view of what the universe is, a society's people design systems of values and attached behaviors which they teach to their children as being “good” and “right”. Note the two meanings of the word "right" here: "right" in the sense of "accurately describing things in the material world" ("Is that thermometer right?"), and "right" in the sense of being moral ("Do the right thing."). In a close analysis, this ambiguity is not ambiguous at all. We want deeply to believe that our idea of moral rightness is consistent with the way that the universe really works.