News media and social media alike these days are full of people speaking and writing as if those who oppose them could not possibly be rational human beings. If you don’t like this state of affairs, you can join the “Why can’t we just all get along?” chorus, which rings out occasionally to deplore it, but it never seems to change. No one can understand why, in a country supposedly built on shared values, so much passionate disagreement collects around particular policies and their results.
But what if we were to suspect, dimly, that our differences actually started with our core values? With thoughts and beliefs and assumptions so deeply held that challenging them would be tantamount to challenging our life itself? Then it would not be surprising that differences of opinion on school choice or fracking or whatever the issue of the moment is should incite us to suspicion and anger, because then we might see every difference of opinion as, ultimately, a challenge to our existence.
These core values, these deeply held thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions, constitute what is called a worldview. A worldview is a vision of reality, and reality can be thought of, in Dallas Willard’s amusing phrase, as “what you have to deal with when you are wrong.” But it is really not all that amusing. Because if my worldview is a mess, my life is going to be a mess, too. Continual close encounters of a very distressing kind with reality are characteristic of human beings whose worldview does not accurately portray how the universe really is. (I am NOT saying that such encounters don’t happen at all to people with more accurate worldviews, only that, all other things being equal, it happens more frequently to people with less acurate worldviews.)
Now one trouble with worldviews is that we all have one whether we know it or not. Much of our worldview comes to us by osmosis, as it were: from our parents, extended families, friends, schools, churches, books, media, state and national mythology – a thousand sources. And not knowing what our worldview is does not save us from the above-mentioned close encounters of a very distressing kind. Reality is like that. That’s why examining our worldview is so important. On the one hand, to question deeply held beliefs is deeply unsettling, even frightening, because we are attached to our worldview as if to a security blanket. On the other hand, if the security blanket is full of holes and infested with vermin, we need to get rid of it.
C. S. Lewis’s essay “On the Reading of Old Books” encourages us to challenge our worldview, to consider that – The horror! The horror! – we might be wrong in one or more of our deeply held beliefs. And that is what this blog is about. (You thought I was never going to get to that, didn’t you?) What worldviews are out there on the market? What are their implications? What is my worldview? What effect does my worldview have on how I think about social and political issues? What old books does this study give me an excuse to read? What do these books say? Where are they right or wrong? Where do I need to change my thinking? I don’t know whether it will be of interest to anyone else or not, but if it is, you’re welcome to come along for the ride!
Verba Antiqua 