Cultural and Moral Language

For those of you who follow these blogs, you are somewhat familiar with my use of CML. I often call it a game and I am often critical of it. I am at least critical of when humans confuse it with reality.

What is CML?

Simply put, it is a layer set over the real. Think of it like this: We have the Freudian "real" and then a covering over it, like a blanket, that contain our interpretations and constructions. The covering is a language over the real that helps us to understand it: it is our words and codes that allow us, in our uniquely human way, to enter the real. It is a construct, like the Matrix. We would have to say it began in a popular way with Plato, who described the phenomenal world as a carapace over things-in-themselves. But access to this idea is best found philosophically in Kant, prior to Western Philosophy going south.

Kant believed the world was divided up into phenomenal and noumenal. The former is the world we can access, the world of things. This world contains "things" that have qualities in themselves and are also defined by us - we contribute time and space to them. A better way to understand this is my explanation of a physical object. I have always said that the object is real (via Thomas Reid) but certain qualities we see in the object are not. I have always said that "straight lines," for example, are fake. We see a table, but the straight-ness of the lines are our construction. We contibute this to the table in such a way that the actual table and our contributions make up the totality of the table. This is roughly what Kant meant and I edited my story about it to be more Kantian.

The noumenal for Kant is the world of ideas and truth and things beyond our comprehension. He gets in trouble with this because if its beyond our comprehension, how do we know enough about it to say this. Kant is comprehensive and wants to construct a whole "philosophy" around this and explain as much as possible, as reason, to consctruct the explanation. This includes a complex explanation of how we know, a transcendental process by which we can "know" certain things that we don't immediately experience.

Back to our story. The CML layer is our construction to explain the world. It is our rules of reality, independent of nature. For example, killing is not a prohibition in nature and despite a natural argument against random killing and the consequences for all (I kill and then encourage killing and them myself can be killed) nature's view of killing is very different than the human/moral view. CML is the often unspoken, somewhat arbitrary rules, that, when out of control, don't often correspond to real life.

The modern phenomenon called "cancel culture" is the best example I have ever seen of CML out of control. There are certain attributes that must be understood to see the connection and to make it comprehensible to a critical mind. CML is not created intentionally by humans. They are not capable of this. It organically evolves within societies to what it becomes. It is the greatest indicator of the health of a culture or society. It has the dangerous quality of magnetizing herd mentality; which is to say that CML can become a controlling process, capable of leading societies into, for example, genocide.

CML, like rote thinking, is neither good nor bad. It is neutral. When done righ, it is a necessary component of the evolution of a society. When done wrong, it is war and destruction.

Properly identifying our CML layer is essential to understanding the critical components of our world. Withouth intentionality and without specific goals for CML, which are impossible, it is hard to track down the system from start to finish. If nobody creates it, there is nobody to explain in. In a world defined by a herd CML, like ours, there is also no motivation within the society to see it and question it. This is, by the way, what Orwell understood so eloquently.

Next we will discuss in detail the phenomenon of "cancel culture" and the pervasive misunderstanding and lack of irony in our modern world. This will be an excellent introduction to the study of CML, in general and in specifics.