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 Beit She’an (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

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 energy available physically near 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 physical universe. Every society that survives arrives, by 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 then perceive their society’s “way of life” 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 – these probably all arise sporadically as one large complex in a nation’s ways of thinking, talking, doing, and living—its culture, in other words.

   

                 Aztec calendar (a neatly condensed world view) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

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.