World View & Ethos

World View “The cognitive, existential aspects of a given culture.” “Their picture of the way things in shear actuality are, their concept of nature, of self, and of society.”

World View It is structured: “It contains their most comprehensive ideas of order,” including where humans fit into that order. Symbols ‘store’ meanings that reflect or embody the world ‘as it is’. Confirmed through systems of religion, but also of history, politics, economics, etc.

Ethos “The moral (and aesthetic) aspects of a given culture, the evaluative elements.” (so what is deemed good, right, and beautiful and what is bad, wrong, and ugly) It is “the tone, character, and quality of their life, it’s moral and aesthetic style and mood.”

Ethos In other words, it is how we engage with the world ‘as it is’ (“as it is” means how the world works according to the cultural worldview).

Religion, World View, & Ethos “Both what a people prizes and what it fears and hates are depicted in its world view, symbolized in its religion, and in turn expressed in the whole quality of life [ethos].” “Its ethos is distinctive not merely in terms of the sort of nobility it celebrates, but also in terms of the baseness it condemns.” (so what is seen as right and beautiful and what is wrong and ugly)

Religion, World View, & Ethos “Morality has thus the air of simple realism, or practical wisdom; religion supports proper conduct by picturing a world in which such conduct is only common sense.” This is important. Ethos/morality is made to seem so obviously common sensical that it would be unimaginable if not impossible to question it.

Religion, World View, & Ethos Essentially, a religion (or other ideology) synthesizes world view and ethos by saying: This is how the world actually is… and this is how you should live in it because the world is that way. (So, yes, this is a circular, self-reaffirming process.)

World View: Problems? Geertz, however, does not address variation within a culture, nor cultural change. How may world view and ethos be affected in pluralistic societies such as in the US?

Thought Experiment: Neo-Pagan World View & Ethos? Many scholars find Pagans are most often environmentalists. Regina Oboler (2004) found most Pagans held a ‘Nature-spirituality’ world view prior to identifying with a Pagan religion. Oboler, R. S. 2004. Nature Religion as a Cultural System? Sources of Environmentalist Action and Rhetoric in a Contemporary Pagan Community. Pomegranate 6(1):86-106.

Neo-Pagan World View & Ethos? One informant told Oboler, “I think pagans who worship nature, or parts of nature, or symbols derived from nature, should feel morally enjoined not to pollute the medium in which they locate that spirit. I can at least understand why Christians or Buddhists, who worship a completely transcendent and immaterial spirit, might be indifferent to the fate of mere matter on this planet. But if in your worship you invoke the spirit of Air or Water, then surely your deity must be angered if you defile its element. Even a Catholic won’t spit in the holy water, right? But if all water is holy to you potentially . . . then you’ve got to at least worry about your attitude toward water.”

World View & Ethos: Neo-Paganism? The world is… The ethos is…