Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Speculating on the nature of the civilization I see coming


With so many healthy things lost and being lost in the world, let me comfort myself at least, and perhaps a few others, by speculating on the nature of the civilization I see coming.

I don't think man is the measure of all things, as Protagoras said, Godhood is, but a Godhood grounded in the material and supermaterial evolution of living things to Godhood. That is what is to be judged the highest good. The old symbolic inward God can be retained but transformed in the outward path of of material evolution to real Godhood.

Once the evolutionary standards are set, this time including the synthesis of science and religion, then the values and virtues of culture follow. But will this new world change as the classical Greek world changed, eventually sinking, until revived in the Renaissance? I don't feel that neoclassicism quite revived classical Greece, the sculptures, for example, were slightly off, a head slightly too big for a body.

What was missing in the traditional religious world, the classical world, and the neoclassical world, was the material evolutionary religious ethos, in which the evolutionary view of Godhood can lead to a civilization surpassing even classical Greece, this time based in the evolution of real material life to real Godhood. Change is part of the process.

But human nature remains today much as it has always been long before ancient Greece, that is, kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, with group-selection as the primary unit of successful selection. Modern liberalism has not changed human nature. The politics of the real world grounded in real human nature necessarily leads to ethnopluralism, protected by federalism.

We can then all get on with evolving toward Godhood on earth and out into the cosmos, with variety, even helping one another, while remaining distinctively different. I believe human beings are capable of this new civilization, but we will be even more capable the more we evolve.

No comments:

Post a Comment