Historically in most mythologies around the world Chaos (Nun,Tiamat, etc) seem to have came before order (Logos, Maat, dharma etc).

As sedentary civilisations and writing gradually became the norm, Chaos starts to disappear in these mythologies and notions of order become more primary.

The most straightforward explanation for that historical evolution seems to me simply that ideologies evolved in tandem with changes in the societal organisation, from oral nomadic groups based around movement to the more static hierarchical organisation of civilisations.

For those interested I got this from Thomas Nail who is writing a book on the subject:

I’m tempted to get into a rational, nitpicky non-Taoist discussion of the intricacies of what Taoism means, e.g. The human world is not part of the Tao because the Tao doesn’t have parts. All
I can tell you is it doesn’t feel that way to me. There is the Taoist idea of return. The Tao continually manifests as the 10,000 things—the multiplicity of the human world—which then continually returns to the Tao. It’s all happening over and over again all the time.

I don’t think I’m really disagreeing with what you said though. — T Clark

I don't think we disagree either, it's just difficult to speak about. Language fails to some extend, hence that what can be named is not etc...

About the human world being a part, I was looking for the right words, but I'm not necessarily committed to it being an actual quote unquote 'part' of it. What I think I would commit to is that the Tao is ontologically prior to our conceptions of it.

The idea of returning to "the source" is important IMO, that is to some extend what is missing it seems to me in Western tradition where we get hung up on fixed conceptions without returning.

I don’t know enough about the Socratic or Christian view of life to make an intelligent comment on this. — T Clark

That's fine, it's basically Nietzsches idea of how nihilism was already inherent in the Greek and Christian root of the Western tradition and the reason why we eventually ended up with the "dead of God". It do think he's onto something, though it's probably only part of the story.

On the other hand, Taoism is full of seeming contradictions and paradoxes. This is from Verses 25 and from Mitchell’s translation.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness…

Mystery and manifestations—as I understand it, the Tao and human conceptualized reality—come from the same place. The Tao it’s not above or better than the human world, they arise and return together. — T Clark

I wouldn't say the Tao is above or better than human conceptualisation of it in a directly valuative sense, but prior ontologically... the human world is part of it. And insofar conceptualisation is only partial/perspectival, and presumably can lead us astray for that reason, maybe it is a reason to put a little less stock in it.

EDIT: To make the point a bit more salient for this discussion maybe, that is the issue with the Socratic view on Life, and Christianity consequently, that it presumes that it can box in Chaos, conceptualise the whole of it and make life entirely predictable and planable on the basis of these fixed conceptions.

From revelations, 2.1

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,”[a] for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea (read 'no more Chaos'). 2 I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”


Blinded by the light!

UFC has certainly been on the rise the past couple of years. I don't know if we'd see a show where actual lifes are put on the line because human life is still a core value of Western Christian tradition, and things perhaps don't change that fast, but maybe if it's about lifes that aren't considered part of the group. MAGA Christianity for instance seems to be develloping a pagan heresy where Christian universality is questioned.

The current conversation isn't about morally black (bad) people, but about morally gray people. That is, those who live entirely outside the good/bad paradigm. The phenomenon I'm talking about has a somewhat different nature. These heroes seem bad, but they are a reflection of us—they're just like us, with everyday problems. And we no longer know whether they're bad or not, or whether we can justify them (because we're all a bit like Walter White). — Astorre

Won't this usher in a "moral decline" we can't even imagine? — Astorre

That's presumably exactly what will happen over time... gradually from one generation to the next.

They are a reflection of the world that has created them, and is creating us... The subtext of the series is that the world is an a-moral place, and therefore Walter White's actions seem justifiable to some extend, or at least an improvement on being a moral do good guy everybody takes advantage of.

It's not that different from ancient Greece. Plato also saw the necessity to curb the influence of the poets, and advocated for a turn to rationality to anchor morals anew. In Nietzsche's analysis that turn to rationality was not an improvement on what came before, but a symptom of the Greeks desperately trying to ward off a decadence that had already set in.

I certainly don’t want to go back to the pre-enlightenment world, the world of the divine right of Kings. That doesn’t mean I don’t recognize some of the issues you highlight. I have made the argument here a number of times in several different contexts that man is the measure of all things. That’s right at the center of my understanding of what Lao Tzu has to tell us. Taoism recognizes both the human and non-human worlds without conflict. As I sometimes put it—the world is 1/2 human.

So, do we reform rationalism? I am not at all sure that’s possible. On the other hand, I don’t want to go back to the values of the old way, as if we could. — T Clark

Isn't one of the first things the Dao de jing tells us that 'the Dao that can be named is not the real or eternal Dao', essentially indicating that logos or reason cannot be primary.

You have similar ideas in most of the oldest creation myths where the formless, the indeterminate Chaos, often symbolised by the sea (for instance Tiamat), almost uniformely comes before order.

With Greek philosophy and later Christianity the West took another turn, where the eternal forms and the logos became primary.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"

It seems to me that Descartes and the enlightenment is merely downstream from this essential (mis)valuation.

And so a 'reform of rationalism' would come from putting it in it's propper place, a recognition that reason is not the be all, end all.

Opium for the people... crowd control.

We might take that as something unequivocally bad, like Marx for instance... or as something that is a part of a society, but not necessarily for everybody, like Nietzsche.

Yes the greening-effect of CO2 by itself is real enough, but it doesn't seem like it will compensate for the other negative effects of climate change, i.e. the more extreme temperatures and droughts etc.

There is also concern about the opposite issue: data from orbiting satellites indicates that the earth is getting greener, probably due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere. Humans don't do well in the kind of hot, humid conditions that will prevail in some areas, and that's because of microorganisms and parasites. I think it's actually easier to live in semi-desert conditions than in a jungle. I live in an area where parasites are becoming more of a problem because they don't die out in the winter anymore. — frank

The greening effect is interesting, I'm not sure how it interacts and combines with all the other changes, but it certainly is a factor.

What we’re doing to insects in particular is striking. It’s not all due to climate change, of course — but it’s a very serious issue that is exacerbated by it. — Mikie

Yes this is I think one of the most underestimated risks we face. People seems largely uninformed on this particular issue and kindof assume we stand apart from nature and will be able to insulate ourselves from it's deterioration... but that seems very optimistic to me.

I'm curious how you came to that conclusion? It seems to there's to much uncertainty of what all the consequence could to be to make such definite statements with any confidence.
— ChatteringMonkey

I think this. But the failure of climate models to-date (and Antarctic ice recession) gives me hope. — AmadeusD

What failure are you pointing to exactly? Aren't they generally a bit conservative in their estimates in that they don't really account for the complexity of feedbacks and such (which seem more likely to be positive than negative)?

A mass extinction is an event in which there's a breakdown in a biosphere's ability to support life. I don't think there is any reason to believe that kind of event is likely due to global warming. — frank

It's not only about the ability to support life in a general sense, and it's not only about global warming. It's the rate of change that will cause a lot of species to die on top of those that are already gone and will go because of other factors. If it will qualify as a mass extinction will depend partly on how you define that and on how bad it will get... But even in a moderate case scenario, a lot of life will be gone for a long time, so we will have to live in an impoverished biosphere for the foreseeable future which is bad enough already.

There should be a large spike in the global temperatures that will last for a couple of thousand years, then a long ramp down as the CO2 is absorbed into the oceans. Civilization has never faced that kind of volatility. I'm guessing that cultures that remain high-tech will adapt and ride it out. I could see some areas regressing culturally. In other words, I don't think the human species is going to go through this as a global community. The present global scene might disappear. — frank

Who knows right? The big wildcard is human agency itself, how will the global system deal will all these added tensions is kinda anybody's guess.

We have no food. You have food > War. Planning ahead would be nice and there are schemes in place already to try and diversify. I doubt it woudl be truly global tbh, but I can see some nations losing out if farming became unpredictable for several staple crops in just one season. — I like sushi

Yes some countries rely on imports for a lot of their needs already, and it is hard to see how some places would still be viable for agriculture if we get another couple of degrees of warming and more irregular weather.

This is hyperbole. — I like sushi

It's not hyperbole, but a possibility... I don't know what the chances are, but the speed at which we are changing the climate, together with other factors of course (like just taking over ecosystems for ourselves), could result in the kind of mass-extinction that would take millions of years to recover from. Maybe it wouldn't take millions of years to have something good enough for civilisation to be viable, but it would take a while let's say.

Anyway the more important point is I think that we really don't know what the consequences will be. We have crude models that point to a couple degrees of warming, but how certain changes (like say the amoc-collapse, burning down of forests, loss of ice-caps, acidification of the oceans etc etc) will amplify changes or not, is unclear I think.

A potential globewide famine is kind of serious. — I like sushi

It is serious, but I can see solutions to that... there's ways to adapt and produce even more, in more resilient and sustainable ways.

Biospheres being wipedout is not ideal, but nature would recover faster than I imagine human civilisation would in the event of widespread famine. — I like sushi

Yes as long as you have enough of it left, it could recover quite quick. But biospheres rely on enough bio-diversity as a kind of network to keep itself going. If you go below certain thresholds of bio-diversity the whole network could collapse, and then we're talking millions of years to recover.

The only serious threat from climate change--and it is serious--is unpredictable weather cycles that disrupt farming. Other than that there will be bumps in the road not a a collapse of civilisation. — I like sushi

I'm curious how you came to that conclusion? It seems to there's to much uncertainty of what all the consequence could to be to make such definite statements with any confidence.

I think the effects of climate change on bio-diversity for instance might be a very serious problem going forward, not just for the loss of the intrinsic value we might attribute to it, but as something that civilisation tacitly relies on.

Yes by and large, but i don't think they come to these convictions by reasoning or considering evidence.

This is probably way beyond the scope of this thread, but the way I see it, is that we inherently/biologically have an emotional wireing, of shame, guild, empathy etc etc that isn't formed or shaped yet in the sense that it is tied to specific moral rules.

Then we get educated into tying these emotions to more specific moral rules according to what the group one gets educated in, deems important. Usually there some people who, rightly so or not, have more of a say in determining what those are.

Because of the interplay of human biology and certain structural demands the world places on us, these will often be similar across different groups. That is maybe a bit similar to something like convergence evolution where different species develop similar attributes, like say wings, because the physical demands are the same.

After all of that we get adults with already formed moral intuitions, moral intuitions that are not properly basic, but the result of biology and eduction. If nothing's going particularly wrong they tend to follow that moral 'programming' by and large the rest of their life.

And then some become philosophers for whatever reason, and question these things incessantly, but one shouldn't presume that everybody is like that.

I also think it is natural, once someone starts thinking for themselves, to require evidence for beliefs. — Janus

I generally agree, but not for moral beliefs because those are not or at least not easily verifiable with evidence. How many people do actually change their minds about those when confronted with evidence or rational argument? Not that many I'd say, even on this forum, and if they change their minds it's often because of some life-changing experience they had, not because they examined their beliefs rationally.

Forget the moral or ethical challenges―given all the physical challenges humanity faces, do you believe human life will look anything like it does today in a couple of centuries? I mean do you believe there will still be a huge population, technological societies, preservation of historical culture, religion? — Janus

No, I think a lot will change given the physical challenges, how that exactly will look like I wouldn't know... But I do think these changes will inevitablely also included societal organisational and ideological changes. That is what I see myself doing, looking at a different ideas and how they might fit with a changing world.

The problem is that religion asks people to believe things for which there is no evidence. That works as long as people give lip service because they are cowed by fear of punishment, as was the case in the Middle Ages, or as long as they are illiterate and impressionable, which was also the case for most of human history, or as long as they are not capable of critical thought.

So what do you propose? A return to imposed beliefs, theocracy?

I really don't have a concrete proposal in mind, I'm mostly exploring the possibilities... But since religion (and not necessarily organised religion like we have had it) has been an important part of most of human history except maybe for this small slice of Western history we happen to be living through, it seems like something worth thinking about.

I think the picture you paint of religion there is a bit one-side, evaluated from a perspective of the Western tradition that elevates reason or critical thought itself as the summum bonum. It's also merely a belief that it is good that everybody be taught critical thinking skills in order to make up their own minds... as we estabilished earlier, not everyone can or is even interested in doing that.

We "impose" beliefs on people anyway, no matter what societal and religious organisation, just by virtue of the fact that humans don't suddenly pop into existence as blank slate adults.... there's allways a set of beliefs and underlying assumptions people are enculturated in. And if secular states teach people they should look for evidence and examine their beliefs critically and rationally, then yes that would make any mythopoetical belief problematic.

None of this is to say we should do away with critical thinking, if such a thing were even possible, just that perhaps we have overvalued it.

Is that what you'd like to see? — Janus

No ideally not, but I'm just not convinced that the current way of doing things will work out in the long run, if you project that forward say a couple of centuries. What I don't want to see is things devolving again like they did in the 20th century.

I disagree with you that the state is "value neutral"―the laws of the state reflect the most significant moral injunctions. So, what is missing according to you? Are you advocating something like the "noble lie" when it comes to instilling religious belief in children?

I don't see why we would need a transcendent authority (God) as lawgiver, when we already have the state as lawgiver, and I think it is arguable that most people do not think murder, rape, theft, corruption, exploitation and so on, are acceptable. So just what is it that you think is missing? — Janus

The noble lie maybe doesn't work anymore, after the 'dead of God'. But the need religion fulfilled before the dead of God presumably hasn't gone away. What is missing in secular states is a sense of the mythopoetical, the Dionysian or however you want to call it... something that moves or inspires people to des-individuate into or unite with the group. There is still some kind of tribal desire if you will to be more than atomised individual subjects of a rational state.

And what we precisely don't want it seems to me, is the state taking up that role, because that is to road to nationalism or worse... fascism. If you don't have some other force like religion, you always risk some great leader type stepping up and using these unfulfilled desires for his ends.

Not according to this site:

Europeans who consider themselves atheists are a small minority, except in France and in Sweden, where about 20 per cent say that they are atheists; a vast majority of all Europeans nominate themselves as religious persons. — Janus

These numbers maybe are a bit surprising, not for south and east-central Europe, but certainly for North and Western Europe where I'm from. Very rarely is religion something that is discussed or practiced in public, not with people I meet, but also not more generally in various public media. So in so far they are religious it certainly seems something more private and individual.

Further down the site it says the following:

With the word of the sociologist Grace Davie, it’s a kind of ‘believing without belonging’. People pick and choose religious beliefs, doctrines, and practices and they are mixing and matching them, as they would select food in a cafeteria, so we can talk of ‘cafeteria religion’, or as ‘church-free spirituality’. Europeans remain religious, their approach is eclectic, and they borrow ideas from several traditions. Meanwhile, many institutionalized churches are running empty, especially in the West.

I'd say maybe they are 'spiritual' rather than religious. It seems to me religion implies something more public with practices and institutions that curate a certain tradition. It's Protestantism, the lack of central organisation, but then without the Book or local church even.

Maybe one could just say that is fine, people can make up their own minds. But as I alluded to earlier I doubt that is true, maybe for the philosophical types it is, but not for most.

I think a lot of people learn by mimicking and copying others (children certainly do), hence the success of all these influencer types today. And so if you don't have organised religion anymore and the state is supposed to be secular and value-neutral... the only ones left with enough resources can almost only be commercial actors, who end up molding the minds of people, for their interests.

My child likes to play a game where she points her finger at me, almost touching my face, but stops just an inch away, saying, “I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you.” This is trolling. By contrast, when she sits in the back seat arguing with her brother, and I tell them to stop, she might protest, “I’m not touching him.” That is bullshit. The latter feigns innocence for the sake of impression management. The former goes beyond this and delights in provoking a reaction. — Colo Millz

This was very funny, especially the dry serious way you conveyed it.

I would say if it weren't for Plato rethorics would be considered the 'natural' way of using speech. And Protagoras would consider appeal to truth just another form of sophistry.

Bullshitting then is perhaps a more honest self-conscious way of using speech in that it recognizes and plays with the inherent rethorical nature of speech. And trolling would be a way to actively undermine the force of the rethorical game the sophists that appeal to truth play.

If rethorics was the name of the game in pre-socratic Greece, than there is nothing essentially nihilistic about it.

Right, but it is not as though religion, as opposed to theocracy, has been "done away with" (in the West). — Janus

Well in Europe that's probably more the case than in the US. Most non-muslim Europeans are secular nowadays. There have been concerted efforts to do away with it, from different groups over the past few centuries (bourgeois liberals, socialists, academia, hippies etc etc). And that's not to say they might not have had good reason to do so, but there hasn't really come anything in its place.

I think that what the OP complains about...the disenchantment of Nature due to a supposed decline of reverence for nature is a furphy, a strawman.

There is a tendency in all transcendence-based eschatalogically motivated religions to disvalue this world as the source of suffering, the veil of illusion or the vale of tears in favour of an imagined perfect realm.

So it is not really a case of the disenchantment of Nature, but of the disenchantment of the transcendent accompanying a return to nature. This begins with Aristotle...think of Rafael's painting 'The School of Athens'...Plato points to the heavens and Aristotle points to the ground — Janus

Yes I agree with that I think. A lot of these analysis of the crisis of meaning gloss over the fact that Christianity might itself already have been a part of the problem. They kindof loosely equate Christianity with any religion, whereas it was already a very peculiar kind of departure from the mythological polytheistic religions that came before. Those did enchant the natural world by embellishing it, not by transcending it.

But the societies we are a part of aren't recognized as being an end in themselves, they are just there to fulfil the desires of it's members.
— ChatteringMonkey

If the desires are conditioned into the people rather than being critically realized by them, then of course that's a problem. We come to be blind followers instead of critically active members in our communities.

Today we might say we are brainwashed by culture in the form of advertising and popular media, whereas in the past, in theocratic and aristocratic societies, and today in autocratic societies, critical thinking is not only implicitly discouraged, but explicitly banned under penalty of punishment. — Janus

Yes I agree, that's why I've always thought this whole free speech debate we had recently was a bit of a red herring.

The idea that we are these autonomous free agents self-determining what we will be and want to do based on this market of free ideas seems fundamentally misguided. By the time we are mature enough to really begin to discern we have already been enculturated in some or other mores and have inherited certain hierarchies of values we use to discern... doing away with religion only creates a void for advertisers to jump in. Edward Bernays certainly figured that one out.

Science remains indispensable, but it cannot by itself tell us what anything means. One can retain plenty of respect for science while recognising that fact, which is built into the very foundations of the method. — Wayfarer

Maybe you can't. Religion and myth is build on a certain non-literal and wholistic understanding of the world, where the values and meaning naturally flows from.

Literal use of language to describe the world and to accumulate knowledge eventually ends up dissolving that mythical super structure.

Okay, that's an assertion―can you provide an argument for it? I mean, we all, as members of a society, and to one degree of consciousness or another, play a part in a larger whole―we have no choice but to do that. — Janus

But the societies we are a part of aren't recognized as being an end in themselves, they are just there to fulfil the desires of it's members. And maybe that works to some extend for those that have their desires met for the most part, probably not so much for those that are less fortunate.

What counts as evidence? In the 20th century you had a couple of big ideologies fighting it out and trying to fill the void left by religion. People do seem to crave being a part of a larger story, if it isn't religion, than maybe nationalism, or maybe just supporting a sports club or saving the world from climate disaster etc etc...

I'm not the most religious person, but even I do also intuitively feel like just fulfilling my individual desires doesn't quite do it.

Maybe because meaningful is only really meaningful if it transcends mere individual preferences, because it plays a part in a larger whole... that would be the reason for it.

Yes ok you were making another point indeed, namely that improving welfare would be hindered by not also making the mitigation efforts.

My point was that the goal of improving welfare is itself something that goes against the goal of mitigation, because in practice you end up using more fossil fuels, illustrated by the graph @frank posted.

If Asia-Pacific coal consumption is surging because of poverty alleviation and industrial development, then mitigation isn’t optional. It’s the condition for those gains to be sustainable. With no mitigation, alleviation efforts become attempts to refill increasingly rapidly leaking buckets. — Pierre-Normand

I can see how one gets to this conclusion, the reasoning makes some sense. It does assume however that we can increase welfare and reduce the use of fossil fuels at the same time, which seems like a big leap considering that the whole system we build after the industrial revolution is build on the energy from fossil fuels.

Isn't the more straightforward conclusion that increasing welfare for 8 billion people isn't possible without destroying the earths biosphere (which would eventually also destroy our welfare)?

Accepting that conclusion is a big ask however, because it is essentially incompatible with progressivism.

In other words, the very process of filling other buckets (economic growth, poverty reduction) is widening the hole (climate destabilization). This makes Hayhoe’s metaphor vivid, not refuted. — Pierre-Normand

Aren't you essentially making the same point here, that resolving our problems (growth and poverty reduction etc) makes the problem worse (cause more warming because of CO2)?

"People often think of climate change as a separate bucket at the end of a long row of other buckets of problems we're trying to fix that are wrong in the world," Hayhoe told Axios.

"This includes poverty, disease and access to clean water."

"Climate change is not a separate bucket," Hayhoe said. "The reason we care about climate change is that it's the hole in every bucket." — Pierre-Normand

And the reason we can't get off of fossil fuels, is because without them we wouldn't even have buckets.

I don't know how you're seeing divine knowledge as a component of dualism. How does that work? — frank

I don't see it necessarily as an aspect of dualism, that was the point I was trying to make. Pre-socrates I think it was mostly a matter of a wider or better perspective on the same world. The Gods had a birds-eye perspective and humans merely a frogs-perspective or some such, less complete and more flawed. The difference is merely one of scale on the same continuum, not a real dualism which assumes another transcendental world (a real difference in kind).

I think the dualism came from Plato and Socrates (who probably had their inspirations too no doubt), where an emphasis is put on reason, that is consciously thinking things through logically in non-metaphorical literal concepts, in universals (i.e. dialectics). To me that seems to be the way you get to the idea of an immaterial, eternal and transcendental realm, because universals are a-temporal and immaterial.

Yes globalisation and offshoring would suggest one has to look at things at a global level, and not at the level of national economies. A lot of the most pressing ecological problems and key resource reserves are also to be looked at globally.

Maybe so, they certainly had a concept of the divine in general, and 'divine knowledge' for instance. But the Gods generally don't seem to have come from another realm, but were part of and interacting with this world... they lived on mount Olympus.

What I envision as 'divine' and 'divine knowledge' for the pre-socratic Greeks, is not necessarily something coming from another transcendental realm, but just something more perfect and complete because they had a better point of view from on high. Like you have a better and more complete view of the earth from orbit then from the surface.

There is the underworld where souls go after dead yes, but that doesn't seem to be the kind of place where one would go looking for divine knowledge exactly.

No doubt you had all kinds of dualisms before, but the christian spirit-body dualism, and the emphasis on the word of God (religion of the book) seems like a new thing coming out of a culture that put a lot of stock in reason. Philosophy was an invention of the Greeks.

My perhaps ideosyncratic take is that a misunderstanding, or deformation, of the 'logos' by Plato, later taken over by Christianity, is the origin of this dualism.

Consider that in Heraclitus metaphysics of becoming, "logos" is the regularities or patterns in the world that can be apprehended by us because we evolved from this world. We can to some extend intuït them, or understand them because we have an innate abilty to recognize patterns.

Note that 'reason' doesn't necessarily come into play here, we do not need to consciously think through formal arguments to be able to derive patterns from our experiences.

Heraclitus was no dialectician!

In Plato (and Socrates) dialectics became the dominant form of arriving at truth, that is via conscious logical arguments. Concepts and language are the building blocks of these arguments. And a feature of language is that in abstracting concepts from the world, from particulars to universals, it pulls them out of their spacio-temporal context.... concepts are immaterial and eternal. That is the spirit.

Plato takes these unchanging forms as primary or real... eternal being instead of constant becoming. An understanding of the structure of the world, i.e. Logos, then is arrived at via conscious reasoning in terms of a-temporal concepts.

From the patterns of a temporal world of becoming we are a part of, Logos morphs into a transcendental realm of reason, and later into 'the word' of God... and so you get a spirit split from the body.

The Chinese knew not to make the same mistake as the dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao.

The resulting debate, therefore, concerns the epistemology of moral improvement: whether justice is better secured by refining the wisdom of the past, or by subjecting that past to rational critique guided by universal moral principles. — Colo Millz

I would submit that neither works at this point.

Reason was never all that great at the task at hand.

And refining wisdom of the past doesn't work anymore because the world has changed a lot since the scientific and industrial revolution and is changing at an ever increasing pace, so that refining the tradition incrementally can't really keep up with that pace.

IMHO the most important parameter is “carrying capacity”. This is the number of living organisms (crops, fish, trees, people) which a region can support without environmental degradation. This concept explicitly recognises that there are physical limits to growth. However, you rarely hear economists talk about this. — Peter Gray

Ooh you hear them talking about it, but almost exclusively in disparaging terms. Limits to growth is not to be taken seriously and actively fought against because it's an ideology set on destroying our civilization.

And to be fair, it would probably destroy civilization as we know it, if we were to actually try to take these limits into account, because growth is assumed and necessary to keep the system going. But then again, if we go ahead and reach the limits it's only a matter of time before civilisation collapses anyway because of ecological degradation and resource depletion... so it's not much of an argument.

Carrying capacity, and bio-physical limits are also not entirely fixed, in that one can increase the capacity and stretch limits with technology... but that also is only delaying the inevitable it seems to me. Still that is I guess the main argument against limits to growth, technology will solve the issues as we encounter them. It has in the past, for instance the green revolution or fracking (peak oil), and so it will do so again in the future. Again, a tentative argument at best if one thinks things through for a couple of seconds, but people will believe what they want to believe I guess.

Cyrus the great seems to have been the first in recorded history, maybe/probably it goes back further, as an answer to religious conflict as empires formed and tried to incorporate diverse religious traditions in one political entity. It's an empire 'meta'-valuesystem it seems to me.

Yes I think I can agree with that. I have come to see it also less in binary terms.

I left something out of my last post. I said that we are born with certain things. That’s true, but we also learn things from what we observe and experience. Those are not necessarily traditional or conventional, or even social. — T Clark

And yes we are part of the world, which puts some structural demands on us.

We have a nature, the world is a certain (changing) way... within those bounderary you can have diverging traditions, but not with infinite variation.

It was reading some scholarly article this afternoon about Nietzsche and his views on the laws of Manu, and on laws in general, which one could see as a kind of tradition, or a convention if you will.

He seems to think that these things do not form arbitrary exactly, but also not as a result of reason strictly speaking, but rather as the result of an artistic vision with a certain kind of society in mind.

This then gets codified and passed over the generations as the Truth, the law, the word of God etc... a holy lie.

Tradition then precedes people... it educates and forms them into what they are. So insofar as the OP is asking for a justification for tradition, he's got it exactly backwards if we follow this line of reasoning. Tradition, convention is typically what can be used as a justification.

One could say we have moved past that, and rely on reason now for justification, but reason will, as you say, necessarily have to go back to some kind of value because it doesn't say anything on its own.

I would say the assumptions, what values are deemed more important, are ultimately a matter of convention... of tradition. To say otherwise one would have to assume some objectivity to values, and that is a whole other can of worms.

Aah ok, but then I would just say this isn't about logic. That is, when people say they follow a tradition because that's what they did in the past they aren't making a logical argument, nor should they I think. Do you think people should be able to make a logical argument for everything they do, that seems off to me.