Worldviews evolve and change

As species evolve, so do their awareness systems (i.e. their sensory receptors and nervous systems) and their consequent experience of their world. In other words, species and their worldviews evolve together.

The same is true of humans. 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. Ever since Homo sapiens emerged some 200,000 years ago, human cultures and their worldviews have evolved together. Changes in our mental representations of the world underlie all the major events in our evolutionary history. Every revolution begins with a new way of seeing the world. Every cultural transformation is born of a new understanding of how things are and what is possible.

Such changes, however, do not happen easily. Because our worldviews hold everything together and enable us to make sense of the world, we are understandably reluctant to change them. Over the course of history, worldviews have usually changed only when people with one worldview conquered and imposed their worldview on those with another. In some instances, such changes have occurred by persuasion, as when missionaries or scientists persuaded people to adopt a new worldview. In every case, however, the change can be seen as an adaptation – whether to mitigate the threat presented by a conquering and occupying power, or to incorporate new knowledge that will make our worldview a more reliable map to the future we want.

That cultures adapt by changing their worldview further underlines the fact that there is no one, true, and complete worldview. It is not a question of truth but of utility. Yes, our worldview should reflect our best knowledge of the world. But we always have only partial knowledge, and what we do have is continually changing. Our understanding of the universe and of our place within it has altered greatly over the millennia. So the final test of any worldview can only be how well it enables us to get along in the world when we use it as a map to guide our behaviour.

Even when we suspect that our worldview may be a less than useful or accurate map, we usually find it very hard to let it go or reconstruct it. We cling tenaciously to what has for so long provided a stable and meaningful understanding of our world, and even twist new information to fit it. It is usually only when the new and anomalous information is so overwhelming, or when we can no longer avoid seeing that our worldview is maladaptive, that we are prepared to consider something new. Indeed, we are usually so accustomed to assuming that our worldview is reality that we aren’t even conscious of it. Its fundamental precepts are so taken for granted that we remain quite oblivious to them until some cultural or individual life crisis forces us to see how maladaptive our behaviour has become. Only then is the worldview that has generated this behaviour likely to surface and become available to us for critical review.

We are precisely at this point in our history now. Our traditional religious worldviews seem so anachronistic, so out of synch with contemporary scientific views, that they have become quite untenable to a great many people who want cognitive consistency among their beliefs. The claims of these various worldviews to be the sole repository of divinely revealed truth,  moreover, has become dangerously divisive in an emerging global community. Nor is our scientific-secular worldview any less hazardous. With the universe stripped of purpose and our lives reduced to nothing more meaningful than the accidental collisions of atoms or mutations of genes, we try vainly to assuage our unease in an orgy of entertainment and consumerism – with only now some dawning awareness that, in the process, we are despoiling our planet and sabotaging the very systems on which our life depends. It seems often to require some measure of cultural decline before we can recognise and challenge the maladaptive nature of our dominant worldviews.

Only when a prevailing worldview is thrown into crisis are new ideas, or previously discarded ones, seriously considered. As a new worldview begins to emerge, an intellectual battle takes place between proponents of the new and defenders of the old. The worldview finally changes when a certain critical mass is reached. When it can no longer explain the nature of reality in a credible way, or enable us to adapt, or guide us toward goals that satisfy, it recedes and eventually becomes extinct. The transition can be painful, however, since we are often left, for a time at least, without shared values or a common sense of purpose.

When all is said and done, it may simply require time. What the great physicist Max Planck said about changing scientific paradigms applies equally to evolving worldviews: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."