ENDING THE COSMIC WAR: A VERY BRIEF INTRODUCTION

A warm welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, a weekly blog on a most important topic

For the last 4,000 years we have believed we are fighting a Cosmic War. By a Cosmic War I mean a war

-         between ultimate good and ultimate evil,

-         that takes place in metaphysical and physical realms,

-         that drives human history,

-         and that is endless, until the world ends and good triumphs.

This great Story about the Cosmic War began with the earliest Proto Indo-European cosmology that we can reconstruct. It has filtered itself through all the great western hemisphere religions, but it has its best expression in Christianity, where it is integral, and which propelled it throughout the world along with colonization. It has survived the age of reason. It is impervious to atheism. It has become so backgrounded culturally, spiritually, and psychologically that we know about it even if we are not religious, we even believe it without thinking about it. It is like capitalism; it takes up the horizon.

I know this about the Cosmic War only because I have a view from underneath. I have stood on the margins of many different communities. I have pulled together ideas personal, political, cultural, and spiritual, concrete and abstract, trivial and serious, without privilege, over many years. I have pulled up a corner of the horizon.

The Story of the Cosmic War served us well. It unified us when we lived in small groups, gave us a sense of belonging and told us that we matter, that our moral choices have metaphysical heft. It has given us noble characters such as saviour heroes and bands of virtuous rebels. It has given us Satan, heaven and hell, the afterlife, personal salvation, and the end of the world.

This great Story is no longer useful and meaningful for us.

The Story about the Cosmic War now gives us conspiracy, conspirituality, religious extremism, traditionalism, accelerationism, fascism, long termism, and spiritual elitism. It divides us. It makes us talk in Capital Letters. It others, marginalizes and discriminates. It tells us the world does not matter and is not even real, and there is no need to hope or plan because it will all end soon.  

Worst, it cannot deal with the complex problems we face as a whole world. Especially it has nothing to offer the issue of climate catastrophe. We think of the end of the world in apocalyptic terms, whether we do that consciously or not. We expect Jesus or Luke Skywalker or a bunch of light workers or Q to save us. We can’t grasp the ragged, uneven, discriminatory decline that is happening now because we are so used to discounting history. After all, we have been in the middle of the end times for 4,000 years. The end is always now.

It is time to tell better Stories. There are many of these to explore. Animism, indigenous cosmology….and many thinkers consciously telling better Stories, ….and many activists building communities and caring and hoping…and there is you.

No one is coming to save us. If the end of the world is real, it has already happened. There is only us.

I declare the Cosmic War over.

With hope

Karen Effie