My use of worldbuilding draws directly on its use in fiction, both in doing it in my failed attempts at SF/F novel writing, and in genre and literary criticism’s listing of examples. I cover that as an introduction in Worldbuilding 101.

This building of worlds has been greatly commercialised in all movie 'franchises' since the 1970s. More recently in computer game development which almost inconceivable without it. The examples are endless, and include minecraft, World of Warcraft, halo, grand theft auto, indeed open world style games drive this to an extreme form. While virtual realities assume worldbuilding in some fantastic escape of the real world, in some cases in order to capture it in a capitalising privatising “everything is X app” or choke hold metaverse, they seek to corral human drives in a totality which they know not what it does.

And here I would like to add to this unlisted set of drives, the urge to worldbuild.

But while the pathway from myth-building to backstory J.R.R.Tolikien’s conlang in his fantasy novels to today’s MMORPGs is easy to track down, my own pathway to claim humanity in the very urge to worldbuild, as critical, was not found in completing an online adventure.

It was found talking to people in a museum, where I had time to think and ask, myself and others, the question with which I subtitled under this blog why we should :

¿what is the ethical response to morality?

Here, again, there is a recursive-ness allowing one, me, to re-frame the question, and ask a better question. (Ethics and morality are the Greek and Latin for the same community building framework of expectations. They circle and occlude each other like twin stars now, blinding our want to see clearly. see What’s the Difference Between Morality and Ethics?)

In the original essay entitled Why we should : an introduction by memoir into the implications of the Egalitarian Revolution of the Paleolithic, or, Anyone for cake? I used the term ‘moral urge’ as I wrote it, as that is what came to mind when I “discovered” the moral urge. Even in that moment I was moving away from it.

For I was uncomfortable with “moral” for a couple of reasons. One was becasue it was a little like the ‘sleep inducing factor’ example of yore. What urges us to moralise? Well a morality-inducing factor, so let’s rename this X as the moral urge. I kept it to honour its breaching power.

As well I had inherited from somewhere the sense/use that morality always seemed a very top-down affair, and had become distinguished from ethics only in the last century or so, the usages for each of these words is slippery. People, I found when talking to them about the two words, would contrast them in opposing ways (and give ethics as top down-- and given the usage of meanings like down/up or object/subject swap places through time, it is another example of contranymic confusions).

For example dear readers, swap in/out "moral" urge for "ethical urge". It seems to me bizarre to say this for ethics.

But these discomforts meant I had to keep asking questions.

“Ethical” of course is perhaps lost to us completely as we now pften use it to worry about individual consciences and their trolley car dilemmas, or organisational conversations about implications and consequences of actions by members of an institution, or where individuals report to ethics committees on their plans.  Ethics is lost to us in worrywarts, whereas with morality we can should about, like cranky olds with socks-in-sandals.

What does the 'moral urge' urge then?

No particular thing, but just about everything. It bothers everything, every little thing, as well as all of it. The world… —it urges us to 'build' a world. It’s an animal thing that must bother about and so world and so makes its place its own as much as it grows a body from substance of the terrain, while abjecting a landscape along the way, in a confounding confusion of possibilities and extinction, where everything can turn to shit…

—all this means, unfortunately, we must re-define “moral” "build" and “world” by uncovering old usages in odd new ways, and in doing so, practice what we do do. Already.

Already.

I now see, that to feel the word morality was a bad top-down word means I had been colonised or theologised by the empires that are always with us. Imperial directives had taken the world over so they could take over the world you see and make you take it for granted. For normal.

You were always a slave. It makes sense you are a slave. Slaves are always with us.

To try and re-cover ‘morality’ and ‘moral’ from top-down expectations, means I am in the process of decolonising or de-theologising myself as I worldbuild along. Those are heavy words, it just means to reframe my wording working world. I learned me some new ways to do things.

I will make mistakes.

As a moral urge (or as an x-inducing itself factor) worldbuilding is an intensification of what, in English, as feelings, we label, what should be.

This is all indication. It is all intention.

This living that we often label feeling, holds in mind, in heart, in soul, what… —should be, and in that half-subjunctive, half-futured, and half-hopeful way that shows that even if we cannot add up when we are scared, or famished, or stressed in some way, we are still alive in those mistakes. Attention scatters when we seek to ease our needs. In the bones of us.

The urge does not judge us on our mistakes or efforts. Success can arise in making do with nothing, as long as you make do. Doing nothing is less effective unless non-action is its own reward. In such a crazed set of contexts, the figure in intention is only ground with expectations. A litter of attempts unnumbered.

Within that craziness, the confounded confusion of life, the moral urge is a worldbuilding attitude that seeks to furnish our lives with shelter, food and water, usually in a made-safe security of others, as we are social animals. It seeks insurance in assurances.

What should be done is… —don't you agree?

Part of the process of decolonising myself (or to heal the soul) could be to recover what had been ‘repressed’, but more likely 'palimpsest-ed'. [Taphonomy will be of greater use than genealogy.]

By labelling such shouldy behaviour or notices as ‘normative’, usually within in schemas where non-judgmental, and/or objective, data collection is required (don't let the ought interfere) misses the phenomenalogical truth we live (there is no true self but).

This is of course a normatively prescriptive methodology in itself, that we should should as much as I say we do should is a truth now apparent to all of us (at least if we speak English).

What I argue is that we ought to should, because we do should, but do so consciously. To eshew all normative considerations is to should unconsciously. Badly. Bad worlding outcomes descend then upon our futures.

Bad worlding arrives when we ignore the world we should should.

We will still survive, but only just, not justly.

One of the bad ways any of this can be done is by… —judging the future.

The moral urge to worldbuild doesn’t care if you do it in a bad way. As long as you do.
So let’s see now…
One way I world build, is to say… —you should not judge the future. That’s a normative statement that criticises the criticisms of normative statement avoiding positions. Non-judgemental, supportive, at least the mistake is made out of empathy.
However…
We should not judge the future—
Now you can hear an echo of this empathy in the mother’s house rules of relativism, but relativism judges the future of judgements to come child, it judges the generality by refusing to judge today, it refuses to discuss, if one refuses to discuss one refuses to meet with one’s fellow humans, it defers without differing, or tries to). It becomes a distraction from the reality of the world, even when it explores the world in its diversity, outside the family.
So, mistakes are unavoidable when we do good and nurture the day. The ‘moral urge’ does not care. The worlding urge does not care except that you world… —something.

We should not judge the future.

That is a world I would like to build with you all.

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First appeared in May 2023 on substack.com