‘Dinnertime?’Photo by: University of Liverpool Faculty of Health & Life Sciences
The purpose of a new coinage is to illuminate a manifestation of reality that has always been there, but which we have overlooked because we didn’t have a name for it.
Shaling is the actions taken in observance, celebration, propitiation or palliation of the god of a cargo cult. I can demonstrate the ontology of shaling, the form and functioning of all acts of worship, as pre-conceptual animal behavior. A simple example? When your dog campaigns for dinner, he is shaling.
That’s interesting to me, because I can distinguish religion from worship from community, with the community being what is of interest to me. At its best, a church is the storgic love of the family scaled to the larger congregation. Diluted, of course, since the relationships are much less intense, but still a place for families to turn when they need more than they can do on their own.
That’s a good thing, but it’s hard to make those connections in worlds where we are evermore distant from each other, and evermore divergent in our views.
In my everyday praxis, I’m playing with The Affectionate Display as a vector-changing agent in human social environments, a very simple way of building communities of shared interests out of aggregations of strangers.
That means what? I’m establishing a cargo cult of pandemic habituated friendliness as a way of building a very informal, hugely ecumenical community of serious, thoroughgoing, very loving parents.
Said another way: I’m shaling for grown-ups.
