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-flows 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 nation-sized groups, humans cannot ignore this truth for long. Live in the ways that your environment calls for or else die out.

                                        

   

                       Ruins of ancient Beit She’an  (credit: James Emery, via 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 which guide their citizens’ actions in all phases of living—with their society’s worldview. Thus, a society’s worldview is crucial to its staying in a favorable part of the energy streams physically near that society. A society’s worldview, its way of picturing reality, informs its value system, then its morés and behavior patterns, and so determines whether that society will survive.

A worldview is a way of understanding the real world. It is a way of organizing our sense data, memories of sensory data, and categories of these data. Every society that survives arrives, by consensus of generations of its people, at a system for organizing people’s perceptions of their universe and then of the roles of humans in that universe. The people then are programmed to perceive their society’s “way of life” as being correct, appropriate, and natural. "We are just people being people", said every society ever. 

Whether a worldview precedes, parallels, or follows a set of values informed 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 values shifts which that change leads to, and the behaviors the new values foster all interact in one large complex in a nation’s ways of doing, thinking, talking, 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 interpreted 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 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.