The tribe is the herd.
While our technology is certainly more advanced, our social evolution is still back in the days of chariots and bronze tipped spears.
Ancient Israel was a monarchy.
Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures.
Rome adopted a monotheistic sect as state religion as the Empire was rising from the ashes of the Republic.
When the West went back to democracy and republicanism, it required separation of church and stare, culture and civics.
The universal is the elemental, not the ideal.
Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through the film, than the narratives played out on it.
Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals.
Every culture needs core ideals around which to form, whether gods, codes, or heroes. Like the grain of sand at the center of a pearl. The eye of a storm. The black hole at the center of a galaxy.
The function of these codes and heroes is to provide a map, models and point of focus for a healthy society. Which can only exist as a function of collective responsibilities, not necessarily rights. Rights are reward.
If they fail, the culture will break down. Tower of Babel.
Yet they are not absolutes. There is no one universal culture.
To culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict, between the forces of righteousness and evil, while in nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.
So culture is like stories we tell children, to get them to behave, while nature is some enormous computer, that keeps coming up with answers we don't always like.
The problem with making an Almighty God the moral policemen, is that when fear of God died, there was no other framework to replace it.
Morality is not an absolute, because if it were, it could not be transgressed. Like a temperature below absolute zero. Morals are ideals.
So what rose was the Will to Power. Yet it is not the knights in shining armor who are best at that game, as they represent a code of conduct. It is the amoral assholes who lie, cheat and steal, as a matter of principle.
The problem is that as they have the moral character of bacteria, they have the strategic aptitude of bacteria as well. Since they break down the social organism that is the basis of humanity.
Given there is no universal code in our globalized world, the economic medium of money has become the message.
Though as a medium, it functions as a social contract, not the commodity our current models, aka, capitalism, assume it to be. To store the asset side of the ledger, there has to be equivalent debt to back it.
In the body, blood is the medium, fat is the store.
Consequently much of society is forced into debt, to back the illusion of wealth by those at the top.
Which all goes to say, our culture wouldn't even live up to Bronze Age standards, as they at least had the perception to install debt jubilees as circuit breakers to the feedback loop of compound interest.
It will crash and burn. Hopefully some lessons are learned.
