Chapter 10 – World Views and the War Digression

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

  

                                                           Ruins of ancient Beersheba

Recognizing that survival, if it is to happen at all, must happen in material reality, not the dimension of Plato’s forms or the soul or cyberspace, all societies including prehistoric 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 worldview. Thus, a society’s worldview is crucial to its staying in a favourable part of the streams of the energy flowing around that society. A society’s worldview, its way of picturing reality, gives rise directly to its value system, then to its morés and behaviour patterns, and finally, to its survival.

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

Whether a worldview precedes, parallels, or follows a set of values favoured by that worldview is difficult to say. Worldviews and the value systems and morés that go with them are subtly intertwined. A change in a society’s worldview, the value shifts that change leads to, and the behaviours the new values foster, probably all arise sporadically as one large complex in a nation’s ways of thinking, talking, and living—its culture, in other words.

                

                                          Aztec calendar (a neatly condensed world view)

In any case, a society’s world view, 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 behaviours that they teach to their children as being good and right. The word right has two meanings 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”). Upon 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 the universe really works.

Another digression is in order here. It is an important digression that has been lingering at the edge of this topic for several chapters already, so I will indulge in it for a few pages here.

If we strive to be rigorously logical and objective at this point, we can also become very discouraged. Every society has its own world view, its own values, and its own morés (accepted patterns of behaviour). The natural trend for human societies seems to be for each of them to keep moving ahead with its own way of life while simultaneously diverging from, and becoming increasingly alien to, all other societies and their ways of life.

Does an analysis of human value systems involve the corollary that we can never arrive at a set of values that would be good and right for all sentient beings? Will people in the world’s many different human societies continue to be loyal to incompatible sets of values? Even worse, will citizens of the world’s societies continue to follow their own codes of values so rigidly that they will tolerate no other way and will feel motivated to kill other folk whose values and behaviours clearly differ from their own? The answer, unfortunately, seems to be yes.

Analyzing the background physical situation in which societies evolve adds to our sense of hopelessness at this point. The environment around us is always changing, so our value systems and morés must too. When new conditions arise, several different societies’ responses to them may all prove effective, as happened with lions and hyenas.

  

                                                            Hyenas attacking a lioness

Lions and hyenas occupy the same habitat and hunt the same prey. Their relative competitive advantages and disadvantages interact in complex ways, but they each flourish at the same time in the same habitat.¹ In this, they are akin to human societies, whose bases are sociocultural rather than genetic, but whose competitive situations are analogous to those of lions and hyenas. Lions and hyenas coexist in the same habitats and remain extremely mutually hostile. They exist as hostile neighbours, drive one another away from kills, and fight to the death regularly. Examples of human societies in similar circumstances don’t just riddle history; they are what history is about (e.g., the Apache and Pueblo, Huron and Iroquois, Ghiljais and Durranis, Croats and Serbs, Poles and Ukrainians, Gauls and Germans, Catholics and Protestants, Sunnis and Shia, etc.).

 

  

                                         Police confronting Catholic rioters in Belfast

  

                                                 Police confronting Protestant rioters in Belfast

In other words, estrangement between societies comes about by a natural process. Widely different, often neighbouring societies, each with its own values and customs, arise and make war, inevitably as the real world simply rolls along. Such has been the case for all of human history so far.