February 17, 2006
Reflections on Worldviews
I've heard a lot about "worldviews" in my short life (at least, I think I've heard a lot about worldviews). They were a popular buzzword in my high school experience. It was very important to have a right worldview, they were the fundamental reason anybody did anything.
The best simile I ever heard for a worldview was a pair of glasses. They shape how you see the world. This is very true. I guess what this entry is about is my reflections on exactly what that means ... or, at least, what I'm coming to understand it to mean.
I guess I would define a worldview as "that which determines the stories you believe in." What I've noticed as I've run across people who believed different things than I do is that they have a truly different view of the world. It shows up most distinctly, for me, in a person's view of history. I think that a person's response to the question "tell me the story of the United States' war in Vietnam" would allow me to make very shrewd guesses as to what they believed in a lot of other areas (as long as they knew what I was talking about). Same for similar topics like the Civil War, or the history of Christianity, or the story of the Americas. Liberals and conservatives (as we use those terms today in the States) have extremely different answers to those questions (well, maybe not about the Civil War). We have a widely divergent view of history. What was the primary motivating force in American history? What were the most dearly cherished ideals of the Founding Fathers?
I suppose this observation really is terribly obvious to anyone. But it still interests me. The thing that interests me is that a person's worldview determines the stories they tell. How they tell the story of Christianity depends on what they believe about it. I guess the thing that so intrigues me is the way that all sides of a issue start with (more or less) the same facts. They have the same data points.
The schoolboy's version of the scientific method describes the first step as noting the facts, and the formulating a hypothesis to explain the facts, and then coming up with things the hypothesis predicts and seeing if they come true or not. It seems to me that a modified version is how we come by our worldviews ... people tell us their stories of "how the world works." The first stories we're told have a huge impact on what we believe ... any story told afterwards has to either fit with or overcome the first story. As we go through life, we accumulate experience ... data points. Say a boy is told his first stories by a libertarian who despises the welfare system. As he grows up, he accumulates experience points (hopefully) and actually might get to know someone on welfare. That's a point on the graph of life that our stories are supposed to predict. A libertarian's predictive model describes what this person on welfare ought to be like. And, of course, real life will differ a bit. It always does. This boy will have to find a way to fit his experience to the predictive model ... the story he was told. He may find a way to do so without modifying the model. He may modify it a bit.
I guess the thing that fascinates me is the way a person's worldview shapes what one sees. What one believes. When one is told the story of the Vietnam War by a hard-core conservative veteran who describes it as a noble enterprise destroyed by pansy peaceniks, that story may cause friction with the predictive model one already has. If one grew up only hearing stories about how everything the United States has ever done ... at war, anyway ... has been unremittingly evil, this story from the veteran will cause problems. The problem can be remedied by classifying the veteran as a "right-wing kook," as deluded, or in a number of other ways that cause no significant damage to the worldview. And, of course, the vice versa case is true as well.
But a worldview isn't immune to challenges from the real world of data points and stories. The more stories and data points that need explaining away, the weaker a worldview may become. In time, all sane people moderate their worldviews, coming to see the awful truth that "all men do what is right in their own eyes," coming to doubt the infallibility of one's own story and predictive model.
The symbiotic relationship between a worldview and the real world is fascinating. A worldview shapes how you see the world, because it predicts certain things. A person has a way of making the data fit the model, of fitting data points to predictions. How delicate and twisty the road between massaging the data and twisting it! What a razor edge life often is, as we struggle to make sense of the world around us!
