The Biggest Picture
“It’s the worldview, stupid” (with apologies to James Carville)
Imagine that you and a friend are discussing a controversial issue — immigration, say (or school choice, the Middle East conflict, or [insert your hobby-horse here]).
“We are, and must continue to be, a nation of immigrants,” you declare.
“Build That Wall!” replies your friend.
After 20 minutes, the focus of your debate has shifted a bit: Now you’re exploring whether our immigration problems are caused by U.S. foreign policy, which has (or hasn’t) aggravated the refugee crisis in Central America. This might prompt a discussion about nationalism, multiculturalism, social cohesion, citizenship, and patriotism… And before you know it, you’re sharing your basic assumptions about human personality and identity, the arc of (American) history, and maybe even the meaning of life and the existence of G*d.
Shorter version: Pull long enough on any conversational thread, and you’ll eventually unravel all your “positions” until you’ve exposed your core beliefs, your First Principles — your worldview.1
(FYI for the youngsters out there: James Carville, paraphrased above, is the Democratic strategist who helped elect Bill Clinton in 1992, and who coined the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid.”)
What exactly is a worldview?
Here’s a definition from James Sire, author of the two books pictured above:
A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live…
A worldview is… generally unquestioned by each of us, rarely, if ever, mentioned by our friends, and only brought to mind when we are challenged by a foreigner from another ideological universe. …
We should realize that we live in a pluralistic world. What is obvious to us may be “a lie from hell” to our neighbor next door…
Your worldview, says Sire, emerges from your answers to a set of questions, including:
What is a human being?
Why is it possible to know anything at all?
How do we know what is right and wrong?
What is the meaning of human history?
With questions like that, you might assume that the number of possible worldviews equals the number of people on the planet — 8 billion or so. Yet even though we are all individuals, we share many core assumptions and “fundamental orientations of the heart.” These common denominators enable us to organize worldviews into some broad categories — a taxonomy of worldviews.
Here is James Sire’s taxonomy with eight categories:
Christian theism: The Triune personal god of the Bible exists; he has revealed himself to us and could be known; the universe is his creation; human beings are his special creation. … Looked at in this way, history itself is a form of revelation. That is, not only does God reveal himself in history, but the very sequence of events is revelation. [Alan’s note: Sire subsumes Judaism into Christianity, and mostly ignores Islam, which, in my Book, are two simplifications too many. But let’s overlook that for now.]
Deism: A transcendent god, as First Cause, created the universe but then left it to run on its own. God is thus not imminent, not fully personal, not sovereign over human affairs, not providential... Human beings, though personal, are a part of the clockwork of the universe.
Naturalism: Matter exists eternally and is all there is. God does not exist. The cosmos exists as a uniformity of cause and effect and a closed system. Human beings are complex “machines”; personality is an interrelation of chemical and physical properties we do not yet fully understand.
Nihilism: Strictly speaking, nihilism is not a philosophy at all. It is a denial of philosophy, a denial of the possibility of knowledge, a denial that anything is valuable. … Nihilism is the negation of everything — knowledge, ethics, beauty, reality. … Nihilism is what is left of naturalism when it is realized that human reason, if autonomous, does not have the power to explain nearly as much as was first thought.
Existentialism: The cosmos is composed solely of matter, but to human beings reality appears in two forms — subjective and objective. People make themselves who they are. Each person is totally free as regards their nature and destiny. The highly wrought and tightly organized objective world stands over and against human beings and appears absurd. The authentic person must revolt and create value. Existentialism affirms the intrinsic power of the individual self to will into being its own conception of the good, the true and the beautiful or to affirm by faith what cannot be proved by reason.
Eastern pantheistic monism: The soul of each and every human being is the soul of the cosmos. Many if not all roads lead to the One. To realize one’s Oneness with the cosmos is to pass beyond personality; to pass beyond knowledge, beyond good and evil…. Time is unreal. History is cyclical.
New Age: The self is the kingpin — the prime reality. As human beings grow in their awareness and grasp of this fact, the human race is on the verge of a radical change in human nature. The core experience of the New Age is cosmic consciousness, in which ordinary categories of space, time, and morality tend to disappear. Or as celebrity New Ager Shirley MacLaine once said: “Know that you are God; know that you are the universe.”
Postmodernism: Those who hang on to their metanarrative as if it really were the master story, encompassing or explaining all other stories, are under an illusion. We can have meaning, for all these stories are more or less meaningful, but we cannot have truth. All narratives mask a play for power. Any one narrative used as a metanarrative is oppressive. Human beings make themselves who they are by the languages they construct about themselves. Ethics, like knowledge, is a linguistic construct. Social good is whatever society takes it to be.
(James Sire’s proposed taxonomy is one of many. For example, there’s also this and this and this and this.)
Oh, c’mon, you say. These types of lists — “Behold the six basic ways of understanding the world!” — are painful oversimplifications. People are far more complicated and interesting.
Yes, that’s true.
Songs of Ourselves
Consider my friend “Lauren.” She believes in Naturalism, a materialism that says what you see is what you get, nothing more and nothing less. But since she’s a child of the ‘60s, Lauren adds a sprinkle of New Age feminism, plus a dash of multicultural wisdom via Unitarian Universalism.
Or consider my friend “Tom,” a recovering Catholic who remains within the orbit of Christian Theism via anthroposophy, minus the baggage of any formal doctrines or established church.
Then there’s “Heather,” who is “spiritual but not religious.” She combines Eastern pantheist monism (“all is One”) with a generous dose of Naturalism that enables her to be an environmental scientist: the river systems she works to save are not and should not be One with the toxic sludge spewing from the factories upstream.2
So, yes, worldviews are simplifications. People are complicated. Yet I still believe these frameworks can help us understand the path we’re on as a nation — and where we might be heading.
Slouching toward autocracy
After the 2020 presidential election, the results were clear: Joe Biden won. The Loser challenged the election results in court dozens of times and repeatedly lost, but he insisted, and still insists, that he was and is the winner; that various indictments and guilty verdicts against him in civil and criminal court are proof that the judicial system is corrupt; that all news he doesn’t like is fake news; that climate change is a hoax; that he is a “stable genius”; and on and on, ad nauseum.
Tens of millions of Americans believe this Loser and will vote for him again.
Why? Because “all narratives are a play for power.” Because people “make themselves who they are by the languages they construct about themselves.” And because “we cannot have truth.”
Sound familiar?
We live in a Postmodern age.
Ideas have consequences
In his book, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis…
… Leon Kass presents the Tower of Babel as the Biblical archetype of the secular, technological city, much like the one we live in now. Kass also suggests that Babel’s rise and fall is a description and indictment of the Postmodern worldview:
The project of creating order, the meaning and goal of Babel, is rooted in logos. Speech and language, reason and the arts are at the heart of the story…. Poetic craft and linguistic subtlety are enlisted to sound an alarm about language and crafts.
Human reason gradually creates in speech a complete linguistic world, layered over but distinct from the given, natural world. This second, shadow world, though it was invited by the articulated natural world, gains independence from it.
To which the MAGA Postmodernist would say: Yes, precisely. MAGA is a shadow world, our parallel universe. It’s where we live, and it’s as real as your world. There is no objective truth or reality. Facts don’t exist. There are only the words people wield to acquire power.
But because speech is colored always by human perceptions, passions, interests, and desires, the world as captured in language is necessarily partial — both incomplete and biased — and ever pregnant with the human impulse to do something to it. Language, therefore, conveys less the world as it is than it does the self-interested and humanly constructed vision of that world.
MAGA: The partial, incomplete, biased nature of language is our most powerful weapon.
Leon Kass: The partial, incomplete, biased nature of language is potentially disastrous.
Mistaking their crafted world for the whole, men live as cave dwellers, ignorant of their true standing in the world and their absolute dependence on Powers not of their making and beyond their control. The city that does not look beyond itself to the truly transcendent realm cannot be a home for what is best in the human soul.
This, says Kass, is why Babel failed… and may well fail again: The only power we acknowledge is our own.
This, says the MAGA Postmodernist, isn’t a bug but a feature. We despise what the world has become, so our ultimate goal is to burn it all down.
Okay… but then what?
If the Postmodern worldview ends in rubble, then it seems we have only four options:
Embrace the rubble’s chaos and violence, and give up on civilization.
Pick something else from the menu of existing worldviews.
Create a new worldview from scratch. (Scientology might qualify as one recent attempt.)
Revive or tweak some old worldviews that James Sire didn’t include in his catalog (above). Judaism pops to mind. So does Islam. 3
The problem with “Judeo-Christian”
Do Jews and Christians share certain values, priorities, and stories? Yes, absolutely.
But is the “Judeo” worldview the same as the “Christian” one? No, it’s not.
That said, you don’t need to be a Christian or a person of faith to acknowledge that something world-shattering happened 2,000 years ago. A new voice, a new vision, a new presence walked among us, in the flesh — and the world was transformed. So profound was this change that we recalibrated our calendars, and reset time to Year One AD (Anno Domini: in the year of the Lord). History was born again for billions of people… but not for the Jews, whose Story was already well underway. (According to the Jewish calendar, the current year isn’t 2024; it’s 5784.)
Please know that I’m not evangelizing for Judaism here. But I do believe that when the Jewish Story gets subsumed by the Christian one (as Sire does, above), then we’ve lost something valuable.
Christian supersessionism — the belief that the Jewish Story reached its glorious climax at Calvary and that a New Covenant has replaced the Old one — effectively eliminates a worldview that still has something to offer.
Long ago, Abraham (or Theodore, Bernice, Kevin, Chantelle, Ralph… or whatever you want to call him or her) embarked on a journey toward that Something.
The journey is still underway.
Or is it just me?
Re: Eastern pantheistic monism and “many if not all roads lead to the One”: “Love, the sublime emotion, requires at least two things, the lover and the beloved. So does consciousness. As the Hindu sage Ramakrishna said, ‘I want to taste sugar, I don’t want to be sugar.’” — from “Don’t Make Me One With Everything: The mystical doctrine of oneness has creepy implications,” by John Horgan, Scientific American (online), November 12, 2018.
James Sire is a Christian, which may help explain why a Jewish worldview isn’t featured in his catalog: Judaism is “a commitment… that can be expressed as a story” which, in the eyes of some Christians, has been updated, revised, and substantially improved, making the old Story outdated and irrelevant.