Philosophy | But, What Kind of Culture is Coalescing?

But What Kind of Culture is Coalescing?

©2021 by Vernon Miles Kerr, VernonMilesKerr.com

Orignally posted to Twtter as a rough draft on 9/5/2021

This is a follow up to the blog post of Sept. 3, 2021. For the reader’s convenience, that post is included in its entirety on this page, below, followng this one.

#FirstCuppaJoe for 9/5/21 (thread)

Yesterday I commented again about a seeming coalescence of a worldwide culture, via digital communications. As a near-80 year old who has always been acutely observant and introspective— and who has witnessed more than half of the 20th Century and nearly a quarter of the 21st—I can tell you, flat-out—world culture is coalescing.

   But here’s the rub, Horatio: what kind of culture is it?  Very materialistic and hedonistic — mostly. Why? Since that 19th Century manumission of humanity from religion by Freud,Darwin, et al, we have thrown “the baby of morality out with the bad water of religiosity” (to quote my profile page.) 

   But, here’s another rub:  Who’s going to dictate a morality upon which everyone can agree?  No one.  The days of an invisible power dictating a set of rules-of-behavior —all of which carry an eternal death-penalty as their sole sanction— are gone. Been there; done that.

   What we need now, is to instill a vision of Utopia in our youth: a possible future world with no theft, no crimes of violence, no war. Along with the vision, teach a simple method of achieving it:  Living it daily.  Each choice to do right, is a vote for Utopia.  No, it’s more than a vote, it’s an actual contribution to turning a vision into a worldwide reality.  A morally-cognizant and unified worldwide culture.

Orignally posted to Twtter as a rough draft on 9/3/2021

A few millennia ago, Earth was a like a planet of virtual human-habituated islands, separated by vast distances, sprinkled across a great global ocean. We humans had developed physically, mentally, and socially into coherent, local hunter-gatherer societies, each with its own culture, manners and rules of mutual interaction (manners). Since humans are incurably curious and obsessively mystery-averse, each of these “islands” of humanity also developed a mythology which explained every iota of observed Nature. This  generally produced “Peace on Earth” because each of those local societies had these workable rules of mutual engagement and logical explanations for nature, and—relative to the small population—an abundance of food and natural resources. 

But, while these little islands of homogeneous culture—these, mini-societies—were effective locally, each had evolved differently with different manners and different mythologies.

Later, with the advent of agriculture, sailing ships, and still later, even more rapid forms of transportation—in only a few millennia, a chaotic Earth erupted due to culture-clash. The chaos continues to this day as thousands of local “cultures” are forced to live together in a limited territory (relative to our huge population.) That which rapid transportation started, instant communications and the Internet has exacerbated.

But not to worry. As our ancestors evolved each of their local societies in to workable units, the Earth will evolve a new planet-wide culture, including a set of mutually agreed upon manners and a new “mythology” called Science to explain the mysteries of Nature.