Human Instrumentality

How do we deal with the world? *note*a drawing is to be added later*

As mentioned in the previous post, and paraphrased here as “We are driven by our thoughts and Cats by their feelings”, I began to focus this way with a view to solving the long preexisting English pathology called Russophobia: Why, in the Third Millennium, are we heading blindfold into the Charge of the Light Brigade version 2, this time with e=mc*2 as our banner? - and then, Who Exactly is driving this?

Well, I will deal in another post with this social pathology, and for now it’s sufficient as a peg on which to hang a novel, perhaps interesting, description of an important aspect of humanity.

I live, adopted and exiled, in the sociology of modern urban Indigenous America. If I mention this to someone of my motherland they will immediately imagine whatever you see on a tex-mex movie of the Latin American. And if a compatriot here sees me he will certainly imagine an aloof and maybe unfriendly trader, miner, or other exploitant. This comedic paragraph is intended to set the scene, nothing more. But it is basically true that one works and walks alone, not smiling too much, while the other can work only in company and at other times enjoys his leisure only in company.

So, I made a drawing of two crossed lines, one heading north labelled Mentality and the other balanced east-west labelled Sentimentality. Then I put them within a circle and laid it flat and then - for reasons becoming clear soon - I covered them with a transparent dome.

You can imagine this for the moment until I develop the relevant computer drawing skills …

So, the north arrow shows the direction of Mentality - seeking objectives - and the other shows the oscillations of Sentimentality - seeking consensus.

I then turned them anticlockwise 90 degrees so that north is now west, and so on.

With appropriate colouring we now have the image of a North American First Nation Medicine Wheel, as in the logo above.

East is Sunrise, West is Night, and Mentally corresponding, we start out from what is known seeking what is in the Unknown, Yellow to Black.

North is Ice, South is Hot, representing the extremes of Sentimentality whereby a group of humans combine their personal Assemblages of Emotion aiming at a judgement acceptable to all.

Of course, the Medicine Wheel has many other functions, of which I encourage study.

In the next post I will explain how this image can pan out in actuality and illustrate the process by which some Siberians created a group migration that, not in too great a time, populated two enormous continents - and, by the by, created an agronomy that eventually fed the whole of Eurasia and nourished the Renaissance and the modern world.

But, for now, I mention that we have here only two dimensions, that of thought and that of feeling. Is there not something missing?

However you play it, this is not all there is to our world. It is much more than physicality: and thinkers, prophets, sorcerers and grievers, all these and more have given evidence that another form of world exists, shall we say (although incorrectly and childishly) in parallel with ours of the physical. To be direct, this world, or dimension, is where exist what some call spirits, so I call it the Spiritual dimension, and those things that {do something or other} therein are the Entities which we can consider are charged with the duty of Balance, and sometimes how they discharge that duty is annoying, distressing, disruptive, or even truly shocking.

My take on that is that, well, we, us lot, very often get things to an appalling and irrecoverable position, so then {so what}.

So, from the centre of our crossed lines, we raise a vertical line, and from its apex construct a dome around the circle we just drew, we make the circle green and we make this dome very transparent sky blue.

This dome is the Human Instrument of Spirituality.

We now have three dimensions around which we can discuss human activities, Instruments, with the three independent qualities of the Mental, the Sentimental, and the Spiritual.

When I mentioned earlier that I use the last-named in a special sense, this is not entirely true. My claim is that it is used in a general, universal, sense, and that existing usages are specialised.

The great Temujin, on encountering different spiritualities in the domains he incorporated into his Empire, noted quickly that their leaders were far from noble, always attempting membership enhancement, and his first degree as Mongol Emperor was to make the work of missionaries a capital crime, Yes, you got that right. Genghis Khan saw religious activity as the seed of Imperial Destruction. You can fast forward to 2025 or whenever if you don’t yet understand.

Very well!

I am going to use this framework to discuss many different sociological tropes, aspects, developments, and problems. One of its beauties is that we can consider mental processes and sentimental processes independently, and spiritual processes equally so.

I will in the next post consider how we can distinguish these instrumentalities. But primarily:

The mental instrument is that concerned with precision,
The sentimental instrument is that concerned with working together, and
The spiritual instrument is that concerned with sensitivity to other things.

The main difference between Mental and Sentimental can be discovered by residents of the Old World spending some isolated time in the New World, and Vice Versa. We east of the Atlantic and west of the Pacific specialise in: calculation; solitude; self-sufficiency; while those in the Americas (whose ancestors originated there) specialise in: estimation; collectivity; and group-sufficiency.

The thrust of this series is to provide Europeans and those of European stock with the social panorama enabling successful collaboration with those of Ancient American stock, and to give the latter a few clues as to how to adapt the deeper interface of understanding. The first of these tasks is by far the more difficult. Never mind, eh?