Shared Cosmic Narratives and Civilizational Value

Cosmoerotic Humanism situates the meta-crisis not primarily at the level of infrastructure or social structure — material systems, Institutional arrangements, governance failures — but at the level of Superstructure: the collapse of what Charles Taylor calls the 'Inescapable framework,' the orienting horizon within which human beings make meaning, assign value, and act with purpose. This framework is not merely philosophical; it has a narrative structure with three temporal dimensions — a shared memory of the past, a mode of engaging the present, and what one Hasidic tradition names a 'Memory of the future.' When that narrative collapses at civilizational scale, the result is a Global Intimacy Disorder: the loss of the shared story of value that makes collective life coherent.

The modern rejection of this narrative framework was not arbitrary. Pre-modern cosmologies were routinely weaponized: particular Institutions claimed exclusive authorship of the cosmic plotline and used that claim to consolidate power, justify persecution, and suppress dissent. Modernity's disenchantment project — its deliberate stripping of telos from the Cosmos — was a structural correction to this abuse. But the correction carried a catastrophic cost: it left human beings inhabiting a universe without direction, and nature abhors a vacuum. Rival pseudo-narratives — nationalist, ideological, algorithmic — rush in to fill the void, often reproducing the very domination dynamics the Enlightenment sought to escape.

The constructive proposal is to move beyond both pre-modern capture and modern rejection toward a post-critical, post-rivalrous account of cosmic direction — one grounded in evolving first principles that are publicly accessible and structurally resistant to Institutional hijacking. This is the explicit ambition of Cosmoerotic Humanism's reconstructive project.