Back away from the edge!

A lot of people seem to think that a world-wide catastrophe of some sort is not far off.

Who knows? Maybe in the near term there simply is no cultural collapse. No extinction event like thermonuclear war, or radical climate disaster, or civilization-ending pandemic. Maybe it just doesn't occur. What then? Beyond a lot of disappointed doomsayers, I mean?

The same old same old, I guess. We'll continue as we now are. The same quandaries — along with their threats of cataclysm — linger on. And they will keep building toward some sort of titanic finality. That is embedded into what humans have become.

Fractious tensions worsen as more frequent interactions aggravate discontents among people of differing cultures and traditions. So even should disaster fail to manifest next month, its terrible prospect lingers. It will keep looming for so long as humans cannot accommodate to new and ever-changing global circumstances.

I suggest that such dread mirrors a collective guilt, of sorts. We have yet to resolve ancient tribal anxieties that continue to spawn and fuel modern conflicts. We hear that "all are God's children" even as we slaughter each other in the name of God.

When assertive actors of any nation don't get along, when they fantasize threats and then react aggressively to their own imaginings, globally we all pay the price. Commonweal and tolerance fray and are diminished. Until humanity successfully addresses lingering and irksome artifacts of earlier cultural struggles, resentments will build. Like a reliable entropic engine, gathered antipathetic energies must combust in recurring explosions of episodic violence.

At least three broad circumstances mutually aggravate and exercise our global conflicts, even where none is necessary:

• rigidly persisting, yet invalid C2-legacy ideas about kinds of things and beings, along with God-given dominion over all creation,
• misconstrued C3-legacy of relative values among kinds of things and beings, joined by aberrant beliefs that hinge upon an abiding horror of gender that brands itself divine 'love',
• modern C4 and C5 media-fed tastes for schizo-tribalism wherein people enact fantasized roles within imaginal scenarios gathered from movies, television and video games.

See chart Cultural Orders:

From my previous post: "Every moment, we choose, either through action or inaction, from among available options. Specifics of one's context, as well as past events, constrain the range of available options."

In the diagram, each large circle represents a moment. Smaller circles at the edge suggest possible options that are available. As an elected option matures, fed by an individual's behavior and experience, it becomes the next moment. Because each person matures within a social culture of behavioral patterns, their thinking unconsciously has gathered many assumptions. Such latent memes inhabit the way individuals think of themselves in relation to others. They infest personal crusades that are taken up to become breaking news of shootings outside abortion clinics or slandered pizza parlors supposedly trafficking child sex slaves.

Rigid championing of inappropriate or confabulated ideas, especially ones that operate unconsciously, acts to limit a person's awareness of future possibilities. Or such fatuous notions create expectations of false opportunities, options seen where none actually exist.

False hopes distract and divert what otherwise could be constructive engagement with actual circumstances. But, where any sort of interaction with specific kinds and classes automatically is ruled out, nothing happens beyond chance. Fruitful relationships that might have flourished never are realized.

On the cognitive scale of Manifest Orders "kinds of things and beings" are factors dealt with at attentive level M2.

See chart Attentive Domains.

Eons ago, as part of the Neolithic agrarian revolution, people began to differentiate themselves beyond family, clan and even tribal affiliation. Agriculture made possible larger populations. And greater masses were organized into classes, or "kinds" of beings. Social roles became tied to notions about classes of people. Places and allotments of land became contexts of social interaction that grew and evolved into ancient empires of Babylon, China and Egypt.

At C2, "common sense" attentive patterns sort "kinds of people" in terms of perceptions of lineage, diet and appearance, gods that are worshipped and type of work done. A warrior becomes an essentially different entity than a priest and both are held apart from, and somewhat above, a "mere" tradesman or farmer — who actually do all the productive work!.

Such patterns of affiliation, along with notions of essence and worth, long ago became embodied in C2 cultural patterns that spread as memes to be inherited by later generations through narratives, scriptures, and myths. They are preserved fruits of ancient struggles within and among different civilizations.

Such ancient C2 patterns have persisted over centuries through successive C3 elaborations into trading and medieval societies and finally into a modern C4 cultures of mechanized bureaucracy. They always have been factors within social conflict, especially where a novel idea is assumed to be the looming outcome of some dark conspiracy.

Ancient conflict-laden memes live on in assumptions and practices of people among us. They once sought to justify slavery through scriptural quotations bandied about by plantation owners and slave traders in a land declared to be opened for the brave and the free.

Even today we categorize people in terms of their dress, their cuisine, their work and their religion. In the West, very old and aberrant C2 and C3 memes are at the seat of alliances between otherwise unlikely political partnerships between monied-right, corporate-right, alt-right and Christian-right. And globally they inform and inspire willing pawns among both militant jihadis and equally militant champions of liberty and oil-rights.

Modern pretensions of schizo-tribalism excite these ancient memes toward new venues of conflict.

Jay Martin's Who Am I This Time? examines the emergence of what he calls "fictive personalities". Traditionally, people have identified and interacted with friends, family and associates. They also have related to ancestors and famous people about whom they've only heard. In the modern era, people identify with characters from motion pictures, television, pop music and advertising — entities that do not and never have existed!

Media morality plays have ranged from early Cecile B. DeMille Biblical spectaculars through later cinematic characterizations of The Good, The Bad, The Ugly and on into video's Breaking Bad. Still greater immediacy and impact is had through virtual- and augmented-reality media titles like Doom, For Honor, and Injustice where ancient memes live on, militantly fomenting and answering pretensions of conflict that help feed anxieties of the actual.

Individual process-relational experiences arise from interactions among causal and aesthetic, or kairotic, (having to do with kairos) factors. If we are to prolong our tenure on this planet we must recognize that ethics is actually a variety of social aesthetics: ethical people act with a holistic sense of right-behavior.

A. N. Whitehead's and Charles Hartsehorne's philosophies of organic wholesomeness see individual experiences as emerging from transmuted earlier moments that gather and build into each present moment the constituents from which each person is bodily and experientially made.

Thus, swarms of subatomic particles gather their activities into atoms which similarly gather into molecules. And protein and mineral molecules gather contributed experiential events that are the living responsiveness of organs. And organs create vital experiences for human and animal bodies. And in turn, each individual atomistically contributes to experiences of greater societies of corporate, institutional, regional, national and planetary organs of cultural life.

Perhaps we have arrived at the verge of an extinction event, one that includes our very selves among the soon-to-be-departed. Even so, I reluctantly sit upon this particular ledge of Now, among so many fellow beings that seem bent on cascading over that darkling edge.

Meanwhile, plants and animal species dwindle. Warming oceans rise. The climate grows more erratic in wild swings of extremes. Super-microbes are said to fester and swarm. Health seems ever more precarious within ever more heroically expensive medical treatments. Thermonuclear armies bristle. Clowns and jackals swarm for votes. Money pretends value. Mammon laughs.

But, as a child of the cosmos, of all that is, was or ever may be, Aliswasmaybe, my reveries are of some holarchically-aware species on some planet, if not this one.

Eventually some organic entity shall attain to the holistic exuberance of becoming that is C5 culture. They shall prosper in moderation among all other living forms, participating in, rather than seeking to dominate, this natural cosmos. To have glimpsed it is in itself gratifying. To know that ultimately it is possible is almost sufficient.