A Summary of August’s Posts

For readers of this Blog who have joined us only recently and may have neither the time nor inclination to read all that has been posted thus far, the following is a summary of what has gone before. If it tempts you to check out some particular post(s) and perhaps respond with your own comments, you are most welcome.

_____________________________________

Each species has its own way of experiencing the world – its own way of extracting meaningful information in order to survive and play its part. Each, in other words, has its own worldview. As species and their awareness systems (their sensory receptors and nervous systems) evolved, so did their worldviews.

For humans, our worldview consists of a set of high-level, abstract mental categories into which we sort the raw data of our experience. Our meaning-system is not limited to identifying what something is or whether it is beneficial or toxic. We want to know what’s happening and why it’s happening – which can only be answered in a narrative, made possible by language. 

Fundamentally, our worldview answers three questions: (1) What game is the universe playing? (2) Who am I and where do I fit in the overall scheme of things? (3) How then should I live my life? Our answers comprise a largely unconscious set of beliefs and values that shape our experience and help us make sense of it. They orient us. They tell us who and where we are in the larger scheme of things, provide a map to guide our behaviour, and give us a satisfying sense of meaning and purpose.

These questions and our search for answers arise inevitably from our uniquely human level of self-awareness, our ability to symbolically objectify our world, and our consequent need to understand the role we play in the cosmic drama. This mode of consciousness is linked to the relative size and complexity of our brain, which is the product of evolution’s movement in the direction of ever greater complexity and heightened awareness. That movement over four billion years of life on this planet is marked by a spectrum of awareness – ranging from simple awareness (possessed by the simplest organisms) to consciousness or perceptual awareness (possessed in varying degrees by all animals with nervous systems), to self-awareness (possessed in varying degrees by a few animals, including us, with more elaborate nervous systems).  It is this self-awareness that requires us to make sense of our world by creating a meaningful worldview.

It also carries with it an insatiable curiosity and a very great sense of wonder. We are surrounded by mystery. The more we learn, and the more sophisticated our worldviews become, the deeper runs the mystery and the greater is our wonderment. It is, for me, part of the huge privilege of being human.

More than an individual requirement, however, worldviews are culturally created and essential for a society’s survival. They enable members of a society to share a similar experience of their world and a common sense of meaning and purpose. Only by agreeing with one another on what we and the world are about can we have human societies and cultures.

The narratives with which a culture’s worldview is presented – the stories about what’s happening in the universe and why – always have a mythic as well as a rational-scientific component. The mythic component, which should complement and never contradict the scientific, is required because the questions addressed cannot be answered by science alone. Science is a limited mode of inquiry that looks at repetitive aspects of the empirical world and is unable to say what the meaning or intention of anything may be. So we need as well a metaphysical or spiritual mode of inquiry, recognising that our answers to the BIG questions of our existence are always beliefs that can neither be proven nor refuted.

It is through the mythic component, often enshrined in religion and expressed in rites and rituals, that a worldview is imprinted on the psyche of children. By absorbing the cultural myths and participating in its rites, children internalise the worldview that qualifies them to become full-fledged members of their society.

Whatever worldview we adopt is never the final truth. It is always and only a construction of our minds. The test of its validity is not its truth but its usefulness as a perceptual and interpretive filter that generates adaptive behaviour and delivers a satisfying sense of meaning and purpose. So our worldviews themselves are continually evolving. Under pressure to adapt to changing circumstances, how we experience our world changes accordingly. In fact, it’s how we adapt. Human cultures adapt by changing their worldview – whether to mitigate some threat or to incorporate new knowledge that will make our worldview a more reliable map to the future we want.

This is precisely the situation in which we find ourselves today. Driven by evolution’s relentless movement towards greater diversity and more inclusive communities, humanity, with its huge diversity of cultures, is now being drawn together into a global community. And yet we remain deeply divided. It is a highly volatile situation in which our globalization heightens the danger arising from colliding worldviews. More than this, the dominant Western worldview continues to promote behaviour resulting in global crises of potentially catastrophic proportions.

So we find ourselves confronted with an urgent need to adapt. Our old worldviews no longer serve us well. Can we together create a shared worldview that can unite our global community while still leaving room for a rich diversity of cultural expressions? Can we reach consensus on at least the foundational pillars or core architecture of such a worldview? It is the adaptive imperative of our time.