A natural World Order, Part II
More on how we lost our way
Part I proposed that pretending we’re all equal is goes against nature that differentiated us like it did animals and plants. Here is a little more on that.
Update: added another example in italicised §7. See also Part III here.
I’m exploring a new relationship where devotion goes hand-in-hand with support. We’ll model authority without oppression, where roles of man leading and woman supporting has worked for millennia however imperfectly. But the fix is to address the underlying distress the causes oppression, not to dispense with the authority that partitions tasks according to natural talents!
Email me for a review of roots and processes from a co-counselling perspective.
That’s where Man has lost its way and is currently backsliding to authoritarianism. For democracy won’t work if we don’t address the underlying dynamics that foster oppression — in my view scarcity mentality that capitalism fosters as a way to reintroduce feudal authority masquerading as democracy — same was as Communism had great ideas counter to then prevailing feudal tsarism, but it was destroyed by its leaders distresses they carried along. We all carry distresses… we don’t just all get to spread it over millions of people over many generations! And Communism resolutely turned its back on religion due to religious malpractices over time, true, but did it not throw out the baby with the bathwater?
That’s where we need faith in a superior entity that crystallised millennia of practices into a structure that governs our behaviour. For today we behave as if the Ten Commandments didn’t exist — and it doesn’t matter who created them and how they reached us, we’re just tribal brutes without them. In other words Man is lost without God — as mentioned before, Man’s hubris is to think it’s better than God, for science has taken us to the edges and to the origins of the Universe… Yet it cannot cure the common cold or stop the battery of women and children! And did someone mention the current climate emergency? Lord help us as we head to the next extinction event as, say, here!
At a recent Quaker Meeting, a new version of Our Father was introduced from from the New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book. Adding women and nature into the mix, however, expands a succinct 11 lines into 15 lines: that difference is greater counting words that jumping 2½ times from 55 to 132; not only that but poets like me will notice to tight metrics on the original vs. the expanse on the derivative. What I’m trying to say is, will the expansive rewrite replace the tight original?
Another case in point is the Hail Mary, even more compact at 7 lines & 42 words. Did you know that was the result of a very long process of making it memorisable for recital in the Rosary? The first written Hungarian text, O Magyar (Old Hungarian) Lamentation of Mary was the transcription of a Latin sequence (sung poem) depicting Mary at the Calvary. Informal discussions among linguists at a Zolnai Bela conference suggested that prayers were distillations into compact memorisable form or previous longer text: might that Lament been an distant parent of the Hail Mary?
By distant I mean unrecognisably so: The same Zolnai Bela suggested the link between Finnish and Hungarian — basically common roots for words relating to the earlier nomadism, then separate roots for words to do with fishing by Finns near Baltic Sea vs. pastoral Hungarians in Pannonian Basin, after their migrations separated — but this goes back into the language development roots… but Finns won’t understand Hungarians and vice-versa!
Another example comes from my year in Kuwait, where a blogpost on Languages and Mores contrasted earlier merit-based with later Common Law based practices. To further elaborate, Islam which codifies social pratices and law as well as relgion, developed since rougly 600AD on a separate path from Europe, where Common Law, Democracy and the Industrial Revolution developed since roughly the end of the Roman Empire.
Did you know that the begining of Islam and the end of the Roman Empire are just over a century apart, 135 years to be precise? Respectively 610 for Mohammad (Wikipedia) and 475 for Roman abdication (Wikipedia).
The Gulf region was basically trading between W Asia and the Mediterranean, pearl-fishing locally and timber trading down the E African and W Indian coasts (see §5 in my Kuwaiti blog) until the oil boom hit starting early 20th century (1908 in fact, British Library). That is when the global geopolitics really kicked into gear, with the colonial division between the British and the French during WWI (Wikipedia) and the birth of Arab states at the outset of WWI (end §3 in my Kuwaiti blog). In other words, the Gulf region had a scant century to aborb 1500 years of development in Europe: the millennial-and-a-half distillation of socio-historic processes can simply not be compressed into a century… no wonder importing democracy into the Middle-East has largely been a failure!
All this is to say that customs and religion are long-term distillations of practices and faith over millennia. And while they’re not perfect by any means, are a few centuries of scientific discoveries that eclipsed religion going to improve customs developed over millennia? Quite the contrary… we cannot even tackle the current climate emergency with all the facts to hand… but none of the political will to do so! I argued in previous posts indexed at the top, that science in not enough, faith is needed in addition, and the two are not incompatible.
