Worlding on Saturday morning
I put Saturday morning aside to write on the world and moral philosophy from a framework based in evolution’s minimum viable product. It means most of the time I am pointing out that things are outcomes and not causes, or, worse, causal explanations of many things are not necessary for them to be done in the first place. Examples of these things are categories that are so attached to our lives that we ask why? or where did they come from? Or even worse, say that the world will collapse without them.
A lot of these things can be lumped together, not because they are the same, nor that they are in some kind of set and subset relationship, but because they arise in the same urge.
As such this writing I do on Saturday mornings is often very cross-disciplinary, seeing analogies between processes, but often it is just annoying that most of the frameworks we use to separate out useful aspects of the world, create, by their language, separate world for each discipline or area of investgation or practice.
It is a worlding hope here that the discipline of worlding can find a way to world these back together.
Recently I have been migrating the basic stuff on worlding and how it differs from world-building. When I started writing the terms moral urge and worlding and worldbuilding where all a bit of a mush in my head.
It has changed over the year or so I have been blogging, so here I will step through it.
Moral urge/worldbuilding/worlding
I particularly didn’t like using moral urge as it defined the whole deal of all these things, I realised over time, in terms of one outcome of the said urge.
So I thought about it and started using world-building urge. This is because the urge gets people to organise their world, that social thing, and world-building is an example of this in genre literature like high fantasy and science fiction.
See Worldbuilding 101 for this stage, where I imediately leap onto worlding.
Whether I use worldbuilding or the hyphenated world-building depends on the day of the week I write, and the time of day.
The over the months I thought about it some more. I 'think' by writing and blogging 'aloud' on the web where I can be safey ignored. This is like writing in a cafe where I can work quite solidly with all the noise. I am more productive with all the noise. My monotropism is to filter out what is not useful and work on the rest, allowing for input as might be serendipitous.
For perhaps someone will stop by and ask what I am working on. And we can world from there.
Anyway, in the next step, I grew increasingly uphappy with world-building, and started using worlding for this ability we have to world, as a verb. I dropped the 'build' bit to describe the often unreflective ability to produce an extended phenotype of relations and objects such as tools from our socio-economic-familial… or world—
The world is a thing we grow.
The abstraction here has grown even as I write the notice down as a very simple sentence. Clarity is only clear if one knows the framework used, otherwise the simplicity strived for becomes a highly coded message, hiding what is wanted to be conveyed.
The example for 'to world' is not really worldbuilding but examples from zoology and ecology. Extended phenotype and umwelt being the main examples. Worldbuilding is a subset of those and not the other way around. In this pass over the topic I get distracted by imperial structuralisms andthei grammarian apologists.
Comparing Moral urge/worldbuilding/worlding to the originary urge
So, to world is more accurate than moral urge, because it is a wider defintion, freeing us from some stupidities of history.
Morality is only one part of one of the outcomes of worlding, even if it was my ethical questioning of morality that got me started on this path.
Subsequently my use of Worldbuilding was an intermediate stage of mine, that I also had to unpack.
World-building requires a built world, but the built world is an outcome of the urge to organise the world around us… —with and among others.
And lot of that world is not built, not 'constructed'. The world exists without being built intentionally. We just world along like we have the urge to breathe, or eat, to keep warm, to keep in touch. All depending on our animal natures wherein we go over that which we world-build song and dance and meals and dreams and plans and meetings and…
Sure.
Yes, you can use ‘structuralism’ to analyse or unpack the structures one has overlain or built over the phenomena to explain the world.
Whether these structralisms are tarot decks, Lacanian versions of Freudian psychoanlysis, travelling song cycles, or an astrologically-numbered pantheon of blood fed gods, makes little difference, even if some are better than others.
Comparing world-building to worlding, it is even more intentional. It is a practice that seeks to intensify worlding into a built/creaed/design even more considered, or more controllable, things. And thus aplied clarity to previous attempts at clarity, some worlding, some world-building attempts, some meta world-building attempts. Explanations are very similar to the urge to construct. Why am I cold? Because I have no house.
No, the house is an outcome:-- Why do I have a house? Because i was cold.
That's how worlding urge works. Turns everythings into a thing. A built thing is a likely outcome in explnation and in construction.
I use the word thing in an originary sense, and thus is almost, but not quite idiosyncractic to me and this blog on moral philoosphy, I'll migrate those 'thing' posts soon, but one is currently avaialbe at If the world is a thing we have made, then all things are in the world.
World-building doubles-down and intensifies in the same way a grammarian doubles down on language-use prescriptively to annoy people who just use language to communicate and get by with. Grammarians, under their urge to should on other speakers, will morallistically talk about clear language creating or maintaining a better world through clear thinking (conservatives think creation only happend once in the past and our job is to maintain it), but grammarians are exactly the example of clarity leading through moral certitude to the outcomes of worldly confusion and chaos. Which clarity, whose tradition?
The drive to make everyone one is strong in this one.
What is 'worlding' then?
Worlding is a practice, a way of moving through the world one worlds. Animals do it, humans do it even more socially, such that we are clever enough to claim we built it, which is true, but it is so true to us in our world, thus built (doubled-down on) it then becomes an option to idolise our abilities, so much so, we build a temple in which we then humbly give up our agency, and create gods inthe temple, so we can worship them, instead of ourselves, as if we had not create the ability yo world-build. I.E. we give up our responsibilities and we turn to idolatry by giving the credit for creation to a creator god we have made in our own image. An we do all that by world-building.
The worlding urge is blind. Mistakes and beauty are all the same to it. It gives us power, but no insight.
We have been corrupted by that power that refuses to acknowledge itself, and in that corruption seeks to avoid blame for the corruption by shifted blame, via giving credit for the powerful corruption to god as creator. (While in some cases retaining guilt to cower in a corner of the temple).
Doubling down leads to weird things, grammarians will list these things as good things, like doctrine and dogma. They will say attachment is good, that order lies in obedience etc etc.
The worlding has been turned into a morality, the urge has been captured by the state, or at least by war host leaders come to protect us from war host leaders, who need also to eventually worry about this peace thing called the economy.
Practice
It was reading neo-Pyrrhonism that opened my eyes to the difference between a practice (to world) and a system of attachments that intentionally double down on some focus like worlding, and turn it into worldbuilding as a doctrinal version.
In the case of poltics and war, an outcome of the worlding urge to get stuff organised, is the dogmatic, imperious seeking of dominion of one oneness (a narcissism aligned with psychopathic coercive control in the name of order BTW) over the world, as in the example of Alexander the Great over the known world (this just means a previous empire, which was a new thing back in the day, notice the slippage between world & empire).
At that time the worlded empire thus enforced was personal and only later, hundreds of years later, was a governmental practice intentionally developed to create parallel departments, institutions like Christian Churches (cathedral to parish) which sought to world-build a consistent approach in aligning loyalty, and thus obedience, from peoples’ consciences up to one leader of the world under the one god, and the god’s chosen leader, or chosen people, or chosen whatever… —who happened to be in power at the time.
World-building fits that perfectly as it combines the idolatrous conceit of building as creator giving the originary right to rule, which is used to police the native ability of all humans to world. A mental emotional slavery.
Building is so important to worlding we can now see it no other way. We have made gods in our own image as makers. Considering how late intentionally building anything comes in evolutionary time, it was only a matter of time before it became obvious what a load of rubbish creation is. Creation explains nothing. Creation cannot even explain itself. Which is why the one god is thrown into the gap.
On this imperial religion, see also: To build a better world, we should destroy the Catholic Church and Sister Wendy on love as an obedient art.