This is a continuation of my earlier post of “humanity has a soul”. It deals with the expansion of the awareness of norms, the normativity, in the “worldsoul” towards the values which are collectively the “worldspirit”. The worldsoul informs the worldspirit, and the resulting values are the irrevocable moral basis of all human activities in the real world, leaving each individual in control by this empowerment and responsibility for the common good.
Human activities follow various life streams, and in each stream the principles required to prepare plans for action need to allow for flexible approaches because they will need to be sensitive to the local cultural and historical environment. Non-the-less, they must always remain within the irrevocable values of the worldspirit.
Margaret Mead in her anthropological study, “Culture of Commitment” (1970), divided human activities into three cultures of commitment: religion, commerce, and government. Johannes Heinrichs in “A Model of Value-Based Democracy as Condition of Ecological Sustainability” (2009) prefers to talk of four levels of parliament: economical, political, cultural, and basic values.
In my suggestion of three life-streams, I decided to follow Mead’s idea, although I prefer ‘spirituality’ instead of ‘religion’ as this can then include a wider field of spiritual activities such as art, atheism, philosophy, etc. My scheme naturally has also some similarities with Hendrichs’ although I make no separation within the stream of spirituality as he does with cultural and basic values.
For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in his “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) , the a worldspirit (“Weltgeist”) is a central concept of his speculative philosophy. To Hegel the total historical reality, the “totality”, is the product of the worldspirit, by which the ultimate purpose of the world’s history is realised, namely Reason within history.
Plato was the first to suggest a worldspirit as ‘Anima Mundi’ in ‘Timaios’. His worldspirit could be seen as a mover of the world’s psyche and actions simply from its origin in the individual’s normativity. According to Plato, the Demiurg created the ‘anima mundi’ first and then the material universe. This ‘anima mundi’ was the commanding entity and consisted of two principles: Sameness and differentness representing reason and chaos, and he then mixed the two into a third essence. He tells us that the creation of the cosmos was not ‘ex nihilo’, out of a nothing, as there existed ‘structures’ in the form of ‘categorical ideas’ beforehand, which existed by ‘necessity’ and could not be altered or annihilated but allowed the ‘Demiurg’, the creator, some processes and denied others through which the resulting cosmos represents the product of ‘necessity’ and ‘reason’.
“Therefore this world order is caused by a mixture, which resulted from the unification of necessity and reason. Indeed, reason reigned over necessity, because it was able to persuade it to direct most of ‘the created’ toward the best. For this reason then [ … ] this universe came into being from the beginning.” (Plato, Timaios 48 a, my translation from the German text}
My version of the worldspirit is, however, much more banal. It is simply the collective term of the moral values informed by the worldsoul, and which are both ubiquitous and irrevocable, and as such will be central to reason within historical progress. Because they need to be irrevocable, it will be necessary to be sparing and intelligent, out of ‘necessity’ and ‘reason’ as by Plato, to include only those values that can be applied throughout mankind in all cultures. By corollary, some cultures may need to modify some aspects of their belief systems where they are irreconcilable with the innate human world order that is for the common good. The values of the worldspirit can therefore be: Civic virtue, tolerance, justice, fairness, honesty, truthfulness, altruism, cooperation, and discourse ethics. Justice is not what is written in the laws, but what represents the ethic that will need to be applied in writing and enforcing the law. Discourse ethics (Karl-Otto Apel) is a system that refers to a type of argument that attempts to establish normative or ethical truths by examining the presuppositions of discourse.
The three life-streams or cultures of commitment, namely spirituality, commerce, and government, do each have separate disciplines within that I will not specify here. Their governing principles are developed through formal pragmatics (Jürgen Habermas) and can be summarised under the following headings: For spirituality it is the ‘global ethic’, for commerce it is ‘moral capitalism’, and for government say ‘social contract’.
Each stream requires a culture of commitment by the individuals striving to develop the moral consistency for building the action plans in keeping with the values set in the ‘worldspirit’.
The term ‘streams’ reflects the idea that the activities in the three cultures of commitment flow downstream like a river that springs from a rich source of inspiration of the individual and spreads its nourishment into the valley of human activity to sustain the life-world of mankind. To lead into the discussion of the three streams, here is a brief introduction into the concepts that, combined, will be the driving force for actions and the means that will result in the desired ‘concrete ends’ in each stream.
The necessary process of human interaction relies on controlled discourse. It must follow rules to ensure that communication will not become biased by the inequality of the participants, but takes place in an environment of truth, validity, truthfulness and therefore trust, as proposed by Jürgen Habermas, who developed the ‘theory of communicative action’. My project analyses the processes of a person’s forming a set of moral and ethical norms, a normativity, and engaging in discourse with other people to achieve an outcome of a ‘good’ acceptable to both ‘actors’ (Habermas). I deal with this in more detail in my book.
The link, http://bit.ly/gx4wb5, shows a graphic outline of an individual’s involvement in these three streams and the mind processes that are involved and described below, beginning with the development of a shared social normativity in the person’s mind as the categorical and irrevocable prerequisite for the ‘worldsoul’. This will in turn inform the ‘worldspirit’, which is the set of values central to and binding for the three action streams, the cultures of commitment. The participants in each stream then focus on developing the ‘principles’ for the activities on the ground, the ‘facticity’, to achieve outcomes in the ‘life-world’ as well as in the ‘system’ (Habermas) in accordance with values and principles agreed and established by communicative action.
This will be applied in a family situation or a larger group of people with common principles, in a business environment and in a religious activity. It will apply in our attention to the environment, and it will filter up into various levels of government and in the end to a world community.
By necessity, such discourse will take place on two levels:
First of all on a personal level in dialogue between two people, either as individuals or as representatives of other individuals, where the subjects will be comprehensive as in dealing with social, spiritual and political philosophy. This will be the process establishing the values of the ‘worldspirit’, and hence setting the irrevocable values and principles for the three streams of activity. These values will be common to most cultures, as for instance the ‘golden rule’, which has been the basis for the ethic of reciprocity.
Second, on another level of discourse between citizens as citizens within a people, and among peoples as peoples within a society of peoples, where the subjects may be more focused on political philosophy, but not to the exclusion of cultural, spiritual and social philosophy.
Three cultures of commitment cannot, however, exist as entirely separate entities within a people. They must communicate with each other and provide and receive input for the proper functioning of the community.
As the values and principles were developed so that each stream can prepare suitable plans for each culture of commitment, they would have tended to develop somewhat independently from each other. In the end it is essential that the three streams come together in an embrace, a culture of pooled commitment. This means that spirituality will influence commercial decisions in the stream of commerce, and influence citizens in their development of political constitutions and institutions in the stream of government. By corollary, government will influence spirituality when comprehensive doctrines are being modified to make the change possible from ‘overlapping consensus’ (John Rawls) towards ‘true consensus’, always retaining the separation of state and religion. Commerce will influence government in the financial and moral support towards cultural endeavours such as a wider curriculum in education to include subjects like history, languages, philosophy, art and religions, and support institutions in similar fields.
As all three streams come together in an embrace, a culture of pooled commitment, it will set the scene for creating a World Gemeinschaft made up of regional societies of peoples. I am not the first individual who suggested that a formally united world community is possible. Before me were Immanuel Kant, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and John Rawls in particular, but all of them had a preference for a political entity.
My suggestion (as described in my book) is for the formation of regional societies of peoples, who will be liberal, democratic and just, and will have pluralism at least to the extent of "overlapping consensus" (John Rawls). This has similarity with the EU.
The ultimate target in the three streams will be for outcomes towards ‘a global common good’ in a World Gemeinschaft.
• Shared spirituality, where people of different cultures and religions can live co-operatively together in harmony and in a communal spirit of true pluralism.
• Shared wealth resulting from profitability in commerce will create opportunities for more employment, a reduction in poverty and a consequential decrease in population growth for many burdened peoples in the world.
• True consensus in peace supported by ‘stability for the right reasons’, general health and a thriving global civilisation amid cultural development.
• The environment will be carefully managed in the interests of all and will be able to support all life, human as well as diversity in flora and fauna.
Each of the three streams needs to embrace the other streams in a culture of pooled commitment in order to coordinate their activities under the overall banner of the ‘worldspirit’ and promote the principles to be followed on the path towards a World Gemeinschaft.
In the stream of spirituality, true rather than overlapping consensus between comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, achieved through negotiated modification of doctrines to remove irreconcilable paragraphs, will pave the way for the stream of government to develop constitutions for true pluralism that can derive from those modified doctrines. These negotiations will be supported by education and the building of social capital together with the stream of commerce in underdeveloped nations and burdened societies, made possible by moral globalisation, which will result in ‘rules-based’ replacing ‘relation based’ governance in their economies resulting in decreased population growth.
The streams of government and spirituality can build a communal spirit and charity beyond their boundaries to support the principles of ‘the common good’ and ‘stability for the right reasons’.
This may all sound like a dream, a wonderful utopia that could never be achieved. Never say never! It has already started to be fulfilled with intergovernmental organisations and in a small way with the example given by the European Union, a project in progress.
In the end, a World Gemeinschaft must not be a political entity or government as such, but an integral global community that shares common interests towards peace in the way that the European Union is evolving and proving itself to function successfully. The World Gemeinschaft will however be the most pluralistic in that it will globally embrace all peoples with their different histories and disparate cultures. As such it can sustain a world without war.
Let’s think anew with new insight and courage
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Humanity has a Soul
(Much of this article is drawn from my book: “world without war, made possible by empowered individuals” - http://amzn.to/hAGSBH).
Why is Homo sapiens so successful? You’ll say it is our intelligence and our innovativeness. Sure – they are most important attributes as was also a highly developed language, which were also our distinguishing traits among all our relatives, whether human or hominid.
The scientific study of human evolution encompasses the development of the genus Homo, but usually involves studying other hominids and hominines as well, such as Australopithecus. ‘Modern humans’ are defined as the Homo sapiens species, of which the only extant subspecies is Homo sapiens-sapiens, us; Homo sapiens idaltu (roughly translated as ‘elder wise man’), the other known subspecies, is extinct. Anatomically, modern humans appear in the fossil record in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
The most accepted model for the extremely rapid development of skills and abstract thinking since then relies on studies of the diversity and mutation rate of nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA in living human cells. It is believed that all humans now living are descendents of a woman who is the ‘matrilineal most recent common ancestor’ (MRCA) for all living humans, who probably lived around 140,000 years ago. The existence of ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ and ‘Y-chromosomal Adam’ does not imply the existence of population bottlenecks or a first couple. They each co-existed within a large human population. Some of these contemporaries have no living descendants today, and others are ancestors of all people alive today. The Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution proposes that a small, relatively isolated population of early humans evolved into modern Homo sapiens, and that this population succeeded in spreading across Africa, Europe, Asia an America, displacing and eventually replacing all other early human populations as they spread.
With man forming larger groups and consequently communal living, came a need to understand more of the world. Decisions were more and more made by reason rather than experience and conditioning (see Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s dogs), and inventiveness and planning became the background to human dominance over the world. There is evidence found in sites in Spain that a predecessor of Homo sapiens about 300,000 years ago also “buried” their dead, but this was more likely a necessity rather than spirituality. Other carnivores were able to consume carrion and to avoid being detected by predators, humans had to dispose of their corpses.
The world man lived in was not perfect as Leibniz or even Kant wanted us to believe. Neither was it as salutary as the world in which the ‘natural man’ of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s early writings lived, often falsely referred to as the ‘noble savage’, a term Rousseau never used. He believed that man living in nature, not in civilisation, was good until humans came to live together with other humans, because from then on there would be the evils of jealousy, envy and competition.
Survival depended entirely on the co-operative strength man could muster. After all, there was no design in the creation of that world, nor was there a Paradise, but a process of development and competitive forces for survival. And man was not very well equipped as a predator. Its nearest relatives were mostly herbivores and man’s preference for hunting left it short with regard to speed, strength and natural weapons. The only way humans could succeed was by grouping together and working as a team, with some division of labour. Mostly men and some women went out to hunt, and most women and some men gathered food near the fixed home base, where they tended to the offspring and defended the camp against predators. This is an exception in the usual habit of apes, as pointed out by Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal):
“This act of returning to a fixed home base is typical of the carnivores, but is far less common amongst the monkeys and apes.”
In order to achieve trust among the team members, a man and a woman would be allowed to become a couple without the risk of the head of the group taking his share as among primates. The exception to this is in the closest relative of ours, the Bonobo or Pigmy Chimpanzee, where sexual activity has a socially important role.
About 60,000 years ago, survival for man became more and more difficult, even competitive between rival groups of humans, as with an increasing population the availability of hunting grounds began to come under pressure. Because of man’s physical inadequacies compared to its predators and prey alike, coordination of the individuals within groups became an essential requirement not only for hunting and gathering, but in the end also for the defence of territory. How else could they drive a large herd of animals bigger than themselves over a cliff to get the meat? Such coordination does not happen without leadership, and with leadership comes power, and competition for that power. Such co-operation is not reserved for humans alone, as there are many animal species that rely on their co-operation for survival, even using signals to communicate. We all know about the co-operation among bees, ants, wolves and whales, and between different species as in humans and dogs chasing and cornering larger prey, and more recently killer whales co-operating with humans when hunting larger whales involving established rules about who gets what of the spoils.
In order to ensure cohesion it became necessary that rules had to be formulated and enforced, together with a chain of responsibilities and a code of conduct. It was around that time, when spirituality became evident, where the importance of a code of behaviour, hunting success and the dependence on climatic changes had created the need for understanding more of nature and its effect on tribal co-operation in difficult times. That is most likely the period when a spirit or spirits were created to help in providing the cohesion of the group.
This was the way communities developed, and in principle remained as a Gemeinschaft until the industrial revolution. Such a community had what I call a “village conscience”, where everyone knew what everyone was doing, and the communal moral code was expected to be adhered to or else there would be social sanctions. This meant that the perpetrator of an unacceptable deed would be frowned upon, isolated, or severely punished. The moral code was one of cooperation for the common good, as simple as that.
The industrial revolution cause considerable social and cultural changes. Communities became separated as people went to the cities for work, and in the end individuals became anonymous to the extent that they might not even know their neighbour in the same apartment block. As a consequence their moral code became their own individual responsibility.
Not all was lost, however, as this code was still embedded in each person’s psyche from early childhood on. Social behavioural norms are initially acquired during childhood in the context of behavioural patterns involving others and are merely pre-norms. The child learns through role-playing, often without others present, where it might imagine a situation in which it changes actors and is interchangeably for instance the shop owner of the stolen items, the thief, the policeman and the customer. It will also be exposed to the imperatives for life taught by its parents or carer. It will learn to behave within the restrictions of these imperatives, because if they are not obeyed, the child will encounter sanctions. It learns this not simply because of the positive or negative sanctions, but importantly as part of the caring environment, and becomes aware of a behaviour pattern to be followed. This behaviour pattern then becomes internalised and forms the character of the little person who as a result acquires the authority of its willpower.
During the teens, when ‘team games’ are played, the norms and imperatives will be reinforced and developed through the involvement of other players. By now, the play involves communicative roles, equivalent to the perspective of coordinated participants, where the reciprocity of the interchange of perspectives represents a cognitive structure. This developed from the ‘ego’ to ‘alter’ and self to other situations acted out as a young child. It then develops into a behavioural pattern involving recognition of signals such as speech or action through interaction with others, the ‘alter ego’ as the participating ‘opposite’, as well as through an awareness of the presence of observers of the game with them as a ‘neuter’, all being members of the same group.
The set of norms that develops does then not merely represent the awareness of a behavioural pattern of a group, but also includes the linked expectation that all members of the group, the ‘generalised other’, will act in a certain way in certain situations and by corollary they each have the duty to perform such actions as expected by the others. This reciprocity of mutual expectations and reactions in the surrounding ‘Gemeinschaft’ is referred to as ‘institution’. An institution is the mutual reaction of all members of the ‘Gemeinschaft’, and includes the police, the court and a public hospital, which we mutually expect will react in certain ways if called upon to assist, and who will attract sanctions if they do not. I suggest that such a ‘village conscience’ environment can one day be revived in a wider community like a global village, if the world’s societies want to become a ‘World Gemeinschaft’. Perhaps it already applies in the Commonwealth of Nations.
This social code is innate in homo sapiens, as it existed since man walked on this earth. It starts with the basic normativity of each individual. Normativity is the individual’s abstract realm of thought and awareness. A person’s awareness and sense of justice and a sense of the ‘good that is equal to all’ are the basic elements that inform decisions as to what one ‘ought’ to do in the world. Through interaction with others, it will be developed into an irrevocable set of norms that becomes the ‘social normativity’, which I call the ‘worldsoul’, as it is ubiquitous throughout mankind. The responsibility to firmly hold and follow this set of norms is held by all who agree to its validity.
My concept of the ‘village conscience’ is perhaps similar to the ‘Kollektivbewußtsein’ or ‘collective awareness’ that leads to the collective identity of an individual who is part of a group, as suggested by the French philosopher Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) and also discussed in detail by Jürgen Habermas (Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns: Zur Kritik der funktioalistischen Vernunft):
“The single man for himself possesses the essence of man neither in himself as a moral being nor in himself as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community and unity of man with man; it is a unity, however, which rests only on the reality of the distinction between I and thou.”
So here is the “worldsoul” that binds us together. It allows us to imbue all our activities with these basic norms. They can then be expanded into principles for the many activities of man.
According to Habermas, Durkheim separated the ‘sacred’ from the ‘profane’, and tried to find the origin of the ‘sacred’, morality and religion. He concluded that rituals existed first, and they were later joined and to some extent replaced by developed language with semantics and syntax, which were able to formulate clearer worldviews than mere symbols. A consensus on moral values was very much part of the first communities, and became part of the religious context. In more developed societies, these worldviews were seen, by consensus, as an opportunity to use them for the legitimisation of political leadership, and in this way supported the individual’s ‘moral authority’ and the validity of basic norms. This then was the basis for the development of ‘institutions’, which received their energy from the moral worldviews.
Moral values permeate all activities and are therefore applicable to each of the cultures of commitment, the three streams of human activities, namely spirituality, commerce and government. The ‘worldspirit’, that I will explore next time, represents in one concept the combined values of civic virtue, tolerance, justice, fairness, honesty and truthfulness, altruism and co-operation.
Why is Homo sapiens so successful? You’ll say it is our intelligence and our innovativeness. Sure – they are most important attributes as was also a highly developed language, which were also our distinguishing traits among all our relatives, whether human or hominid.
The scientific study of human evolution encompasses the development of the genus Homo, but usually involves studying other hominids and hominines as well, such as Australopithecus. ‘Modern humans’ are defined as the Homo sapiens species, of which the only extant subspecies is Homo sapiens-sapiens, us; Homo sapiens idaltu (roughly translated as ‘elder wise man’), the other known subspecies, is extinct. Anatomically, modern humans appear in the fossil record in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
The most accepted model for the extremely rapid development of skills and abstract thinking since then relies on studies of the diversity and mutation rate of nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA in living human cells. It is believed that all humans now living are descendents of a woman who is the ‘matrilineal most recent common ancestor’ (MRCA) for all living humans, who probably lived around 140,000 years ago. The existence of ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ and ‘Y-chromosomal Adam’ does not imply the existence of population bottlenecks or a first couple. They each co-existed within a large human population. Some of these contemporaries have no living descendants today, and others are ancestors of all people alive today. The Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution proposes that a small, relatively isolated population of early humans evolved into modern Homo sapiens, and that this population succeeded in spreading across Africa, Europe, Asia an America, displacing and eventually replacing all other early human populations as they spread.
With man forming larger groups and consequently communal living, came a need to understand more of the world. Decisions were more and more made by reason rather than experience and conditioning (see Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s dogs), and inventiveness and planning became the background to human dominance over the world. There is evidence found in sites in Spain that a predecessor of Homo sapiens about 300,000 years ago also “buried” their dead, but this was more likely a necessity rather than spirituality. Other carnivores were able to consume carrion and to avoid being detected by predators, humans had to dispose of their corpses.
The world man lived in was not perfect as Leibniz or even Kant wanted us to believe. Neither was it as salutary as the world in which the ‘natural man’ of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s early writings lived, often falsely referred to as the ‘noble savage’, a term Rousseau never used. He believed that man living in nature, not in civilisation, was good until humans came to live together with other humans, because from then on there would be the evils of jealousy, envy and competition.
Survival depended entirely on the co-operative strength man could muster. After all, there was no design in the creation of that world, nor was there a Paradise, but a process of development and competitive forces for survival. And man was not very well equipped as a predator. Its nearest relatives were mostly herbivores and man’s preference for hunting left it short with regard to speed, strength and natural weapons. The only way humans could succeed was by grouping together and working as a team, with some division of labour. Mostly men and some women went out to hunt, and most women and some men gathered food near the fixed home base, where they tended to the offspring and defended the camp against predators. This is an exception in the usual habit of apes, as pointed out by Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal):
“This act of returning to a fixed home base is typical of the carnivores, but is far less common amongst the monkeys and apes.”
In order to achieve trust among the team members, a man and a woman would be allowed to become a couple without the risk of the head of the group taking his share as among primates. The exception to this is in the closest relative of ours, the Bonobo or Pigmy Chimpanzee, where sexual activity has a socially important role.
About 60,000 years ago, survival for man became more and more difficult, even competitive between rival groups of humans, as with an increasing population the availability of hunting grounds began to come under pressure. Because of man’s physical inadequacies compared to its predators and prey alike, coordination of the individuals within groups became an essential requirement not only for hunting and gathering, but in the end also for the defence of territory. How else could they drive a large herd of animals bigger than themselves over a cliff to get the meat? Such coordination does not happen without leadership, and with leadership comes power, and competition for that power. Such co-operation is not reserved for humans alone, as there are many animal species that rely on their co-operation for survival, even using signals to communicate. We all know about the co-operation among bees, ants, wolves and whales, and between different species as in humans and dogs chasing and cornering larger prey, and more recently killer whales co-operating with humans when hunting larger whales involving established rules about who gets what of the spoils.
In order to ensure cohesion it became necessary that rules had to be formulated and enforced, together with a chain of responsibilities and a code of conduct. It was around that time, when spirituality became evident, where the importance of a code of behaviour, hunting success and the dependence on climatic changes had created the need for understanding more of nature and its effect on tribal co-operation in difficult times. That is most likely the period when a spirit or spirits were created to help in providing the cohesion of the group.
This was the way communities developed, and in principle remained as a Gemeinschaft until the industrial revolution. Such a community had what I call a “village conscience”, where everyone knew what everyone was doing, and the communal moral code was expected to be adhered to or else there would be social sanctions. This meant that the perpetrator of an unacceptable deed would be frowned upon, isolated, or severely punished. The moral code was one of cooperation for the common good, as simple as that.
The industrial revolution cause considerable social and cultural changes. Communities became separated as people went to the cities for work, and in the end individuals became anonymous to the extent that they might not even know their neighbour in the same apartment block. As a consequence their moral code became their own individual responsibility.
Not all was lost, however, as this code was still embedded in each person’s psyche from early childhood on. Social behavioural norms are initially acquired during childhood in the context of behavioural patterns involving others and are merely pre-norms. The child learns through role-playing, often without others present, where it might imagine a situation in which it changes actors and is interchangeably for instance the shop owner of the stolen items, the thief, the policeman and the customer. It will also be exposed to the imperatives for life taught by its parents or carer. It will learn to behave within the restrictions of these imperatives, because if they are not obeyed, the child will encounter sanctions. It learns this not simply because of the positive or negative sanctions, but importantly as part of the caring environment, and becomes aware of a behaviour pattern to be followed. This behaviour pattern then becomes internalised and forms the character of the little person who as a result acquires the authority of its willpower.
During the teens, when ‘team games’ are played, the norms and imperatives will be reinforced and developed through the involvement of other players. By now, the play involves communicative roles, equivalent to the perspective of coordinated participants, where the reciprocity of the interchange of perspectives represents a cognitive structure. This developed from the ‘ego’ to ‘alter’ and self to other situations acted out as a young child. It then develops into a behavioural pattern involving recognition of signals such as speech or action through interaction with others, the ‘alter ego’ as the participating ‘opposite’, as well as through an awareness of the presence of observers of the game with them as a ‘neuter’, all being members of the same group.
The set of norms that develops does then not merely represent the awareness of a behavioural pattern of a group, but also includes the linked expectation that all members of the group, the ‘generalised other’, will act in a certain way in certain situations and by corollary they each have the duty to perform such actions as expected by the others. This reciprocity of mutual expectations and reactions in the surrounding ‘Gemeinschaft’ is referred to as ‘institution’. An institution is the mutual reaction of all members of the ‘Gemeinschaft’, and includes the police, the court and a public hospital, which we mutually expect will react in certain ways if called upon to assist, and who will attract sanctions if they do not. I suggest that such a ‘village conscience’ environment can one day be revived in a wider community like a global village, if the world’s societies want to become a ‘World Gemeinschaft’. Perhaps it already applies in the Commonwealth of Nations.
This social code is innate in homo sapiens, as it existed since man walked on this earth. It starts with the basic normativity of each individual. Normativity is the individual’s abstract realm of thought and awareness. A person’s awareness and sense of justice and a sense of the ‘good that is equal to all’ are the basic elements that inform decisions as to what one ‘ought’ to do in the world. Through interaction with others, it will be developed into an irrevocable set of norms that becomes the ‘social normativity’, which I call the ‘worldsoul’, as it is ubiquitous throughout mankind. The responsibility to firmly hold and follow this set of norms is held by all who agree to its validity.
My concept of the ‘village conscience’ is perhaps similar to the ‘Kollektivbewußtsein’ or ‘collective awareness’ that leads to the collective identity of an individual who is part of a group, as suggested by the French philosopher Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) and also discussed in detail by Jürgen Habermas (Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns: Zur Kritik der funktioalistischen Vernunft):
“The single man for himself possesses the essence of man neither in himself as a moral being nor in himself as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community and unity of man with man; it is a unity, however, which rests only on the reality of the distinction between I and thou.”
So here is the “worldsoul” that binds us together. It allows us to imbue all our activities with these basic norms. They can then be expanded into principles for the many activities of man.
According to Habermas, Durkheim separated the ‘sacred’ from the ‘profane’, and tried to find the origin of the ‘sacred’, morality and religion. He concluded that rituals existed first, and they were later joined and to some extent replaced by developed language with semantics and syntax, which were able to formulate clearer worldviews than mere symbols. A consensus on moral values was very much part of the first communities, and became part of the religious context. In more developed societies, these worldviews were seen, by consensus, as an opportunity to use them for the legitimisation of political leadership, and in this way supported the individual’s ‘moral authority’ and the validity of basic norms. This then was the basis for the development of ‘institutions’, which received their energy from the moral worldviews.
Moral values permeate all activities and are therefore applicable to each of the cultures of commitment, the three streams of human activities, namely spirituality, commerce and government. The ‘worldspirit’, that I will explore next time, represents in one concept the combined values of civic virtue, tolerance, justice, fairness, honesty and truthfulness, altruism and co-operation.
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