PANENTHEISM

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PANENTHEISM:

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I take Whitehead to have been wise concerning panentheistic, morally-connected feedback that operates synchronously among various and particular levels of holisms, fluxing within layers of more encompassing holisms. That moral connection is amenable of reasonable enhancement when it is respected in meditations, prayers, ceremonies, and rituals that are intuited as appropriate to context and society. Understandings among members of societies that evolve consistent with like apprehensions may more likely sustain certain kinds of societies. A society whose members function in reasoned and empathetic appreciation of a panentheistic Source or sponsor — whose members are inculcated with high regard for individual responsibility, liberty, opportunity, and respect for social decency — will more likely assimilate and evolve to a meaningfully sustainable city on a hill. A society that is not so inculcated may more likely remain subject to perpetual noise, confusion, conscience-less duplicity, meaningless competitions with like minded neighbors, and unguided change.

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People who lack intuition or insight for believing in any basis for moral meaningfulness will less likely establish or experience a society that enhances moral meaningfulness. They will be unable to sense or condemn sociopathic, conscience-less chiefs. They will be prone to rationalize moral outrages, such as the morality of annihilating respect for morality. They will look for spiritual rightness in material specifications, but will blind themselves to this: that to want to do right deeds is rather empty unless one believes there are right deeds. They will acquire material wealth, but will remain unhappy and hollow in spirit. They want to force other people to envy their wealth, thus to enlist company in their misery. They will seek to found civilizations on amoral conceits and corruption of cronies. Their holy grail is to use the substance of signs to prove that no source of meaning, essence, or aspect of spirituality can abide except quantifiable substance. By banishing notions of meaningfulness, they hope to establish peace — the peace of brain having proved mindlessness. In short, they seek to establish the Inferno in order to disprove it.

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What distempers the conscience-less is a strangely twisted notion of evolution. Thinking people tend to perceive that evolution occurs, but do not necessarily twist to rationalize from such a trite observation in order to deem that all experience, artistry, and communication of signs and significations must therefore be devoid of moral meaning. Thinking people do not necessarily believe that human culture cannot be part of the feedback that is appreciated and factored into unfolding determinations of evolution. Thinking people do not necessarily believe that culture is mere epiphenomena of factors that operate entirely and determinatively at a far smaller, dumber, essentially meaningless level. Thinking people do not necessarily believe that all of culture can be accounted for purely in a terminology like “the selfish gene,” or the regeneratively recurrent pattern, or the polarized and charged particle or potential of a bubble.

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Rather, thinking moralists tend to ask: Does evolution unfold in synchronizing respect of relations of feedback among fluxing levels and layers of wholes and parts, such as qualitatively contextual fields and locally quantifiable particles? Do apprehensions and appreciations of qualities meaningfully factor in evolution, along with quantifiably measurable combinations of variously charged particles? Is the “selfishly” unfolding conservation of quantifiables co-dependent for the direction of its unfolding upon a synchronizing, interconnecting, and immeasurable quality of evaluative appreciation?

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At bottom, the main questions are: Is the unfolding path of evolution determined by (1) random happenstance, (2) predetermined settings, or (3) choices in respect of contemporaneous feedback and relations among apprehensions and appreciations? Must each attempted “explanation” remain incomplete and meaningful only in respect of qualitative interfunctioning among (1) holistic context, (2) individual perspective, and (3) cooperative participation and choice-making in respect of moral purposefulness? What is the quantifiable measure of God, and what is the qualitative im-measure of Nature? What is the sound of one hand clapping? Can a part enjoy a range of freedom (or selfishness, or charge), apart from freedom (or selfishness, or charge) that is innate to the whole? Those who intuit a connecting source of empathy, who seek to establish and defend a city on a hill, will tend to believe one way; those who do not will tend to go another. It seems best that they not live together more than is required.

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