Worldview as Medium for Dialogue
Human societies tend to be built and become oriented around the ‘big ideas’ that emerge from their most influential thinkers and institutions. Another term for such big ideas is ‘mythic narrative’; in this case, mythic doesn’t imply, ‘false’, as that term is received and expressed in common language, but ‘symbolic reflection’ or ‘essential meaning’. These ideas tend to gather around a few central and timeless themes—or archetypes—that either emerge or are clarified following periods of intense conflict.
In prior documents, we acknowledged that we, in the global West—and, we in North America in particular—find ourselves in the midst of such cataclysm, a massive societal change of paradigm that requires wisdom and compassion of its members if it is to be navigated with success. While the threads of this cataclysm can be articulated along several lines, the main shift that we are attempting to address for the purposes of *Human, is that from Christendom to a new apostolic era.
Societal change at the level of paradigm requires that we identify helpful modes of exchange between individuals and groups; that we locate vehicles for communication that can carry the full weight of the considerations that are required of us in such an epoch. It is into such a change in paradigm that the medium of worldview has been proposed. To review, worldview, when properly understood, becomes an accessible means through which differences can be honoured between individuals and groups who nonetheless face the demand to engage and sort through those ‘big ideas’ with which society must contend if it is to continue to provide a context in which people of varying perspectives can nonetheless pursue the deepest interests of mind and heart in established freedom. In such an era as ours, the quest for helpful modes of engagement among human neighbours—to locate a means of finding solidarity among spouses and parents, business owners and front-line workers, educators and tradespeople, cultural in groups and cultural out-groups—remains. Given the interests of the Explore platform, its participant members will be thrust into routine encounter with the deep interests of such people. Explore guides will be faced with the heavy burden of meeting their neighbour in need in an era where the reliability of nearly every institution one can think of is actively called into question.
Since the beginning of recorded history, humanity has struggled to displace existent ideas in pursuit of truer or better ideas without revolution or war. While war is not always ideologically or principally waged (sometimes it is simply the result of base greed or hatred), the adoption of new or reclaimed ideas at the heart of a society tends to involve such upheaval. Therefore, while the mythic narratives by which we live are rarely held in ways that are explicit or consciously chosen, such narratives will boil to the surface during social strife in a manner that makes them more visible. Bolle and Buxton’s remarks below speak well to our current state of affairs:
While the outline of myths from a past period or from a society other than one’s own can usually be seen quite clearly, to recognize the myths that are dominant in one’s own time and society is always difficult. This is hardly surprising, because a myth has its authority not by proving itself but by presenting itself. In this sense the authority of a myth indeed “goes without saying,” and the myth can be outlined in detail only when its authority is no longer unquestioned but has been rejected or overcome in some manner by another, more comprehensive myth…
Because myths narrate fantastic events with no attempt at proof, it is sometimes assumed that they are simply stories with no factual basis, and the word has become a synonym for falsehood or, at best, misconception. In the study of religion, however, it is important to distinguish between myths and stories that are merely untrue.We ‘live’ and demonstrate our adoption of these central stories as guiding myths in the common moments that comprise our very lives. They show up as an integrated view of things— as a view of the world, or worldview—in the way that we carry ourselves in common social dynamics at grocery stores and gas stations, in the customs and rites that mark sacred moments as the rituals we engage in weddings, funerals and commemorative holidays, such as Christmas, Diwali and Ramadan. The Church now finds that her authority is, indeed, no longer “unquestioned” and that her central tenets—those that pervaded the culture in the era known as Christendom—have been “rejected or overcome” by an alternative mythic narrative called Modernity. We’ll review some of the implications of Modernity below. For now, we hone in on the fact that the tide has turned, the shifting ground underfoot demands of us a more intentional placing of our foot forward. We find ourselves inside of a living opportunity to learn from Christ how to be the Church in an unwelcoming culture, how to once again be small while not turning away from our call to be a prophetic voice of Christ’s hope and wisdom to the world. It is into such an opportunity that the Explore project and its members enter.
Martin Luther King Jr. As Both Worldview Agent and Example:
Throughout the whole unfolding of human history, societies have relied on myths as the foundational pillars upon which modes of meaning and moments of essential decision could stand. Examples of this are contained in Martin Luther King Jr’s great, “I have a dream” speech, where he drew attention to the principles enshrined in The Constitution of the United States as the founding narratives upon which the democratic nation-state functioned. Many of the principles from which King drew in the Constitution are themselves taken from the mythic traditions issued to us from the Ancient Greeks as those were expressed in the great works of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. These had been worked by King into the fabric of his life as an arguably beautiful and integrated view of things as his very worldview, his manner of seeing and engaging the world. Of course, King also drew heavily in his speech from his worldview as a Baptist Christian pastor and theologian as a container for his thought. Narratives such as equality, justice, freedom, forgiveness and hope were both explicitly drawn upon and symbolically represented in the imaginal and visionary aspects of his speech (his thought of children of all kinds playing together in harmony, regardless of race or creed) and in the chosen location for the event (the Lincoln Memorial at the nation’s capital).
In contrast with these themes—which were presented on August 28, 1963 by King as eternal truths—the broader culture of which he was a part was embroiled in the very sort of tensions noted above. Riots, marches and ideological churn marked King’s era for all of history. The culture was in cataclysm. Mythic narratives were drawn upon by King as a call to a culture that had become lost in the chaos of the confused story that it had been living. A culture just like ours. King drew from a masterfully crafted worldview—a lifetime of careful thought—in prophetic witness to the essence of humanity as made in the image of the loving God. Mythic narratives tend to be drawn from for clarity during moments that require personal or societal reorientation. They become in such eras, a prophetic means to remembering the heart of our humanity.
The Historic Novelty of Our Contemporary Age:
A remarkable feature of our current culture in the globalized West is its decisive departure from explicit recognition of mythic narrative in the forms that we’ve noted above. Simply put, secularized Westerners draw less from ancient myths than in any period before.In fact, some thinkers have made the bold claim that we are the first society not to make mythic narrative our primary focus as a guide for communal and political life. These authors make the claim that such a shift is the primary effect of another kind of story, that of Modernity.
Modernity can be thought of as both an era (a period of time) and the grouping of social, cultural, attitudinal and practical forms that themselves present as a way of thinking about the nature of reality and what it means to be a person. Modernity contains two particular characteristics that relate to our focus in this document. The first is called naturalism, which is the view that all that really exists in the world is physical material. The second is a feature of naturalism, called, empiricism. Empiricism is a type of epistemology. The simplest way to think about what is meant by the term epistemology is that it is the range of theories about what counts as knowledge—both how we can know and what we can know. Simply put, the epistemology (a claim on what counts as knowledge) of empiricism is a general theory that says we can only know what we can demonstrate through testing and measurement of the material world. Many take issue with this claim because of everything that empiricism leaves out—that is, empiricism makes a claim that you cannot properly know things that can’t be physically measured or tested. Things like the entire subject of philosophy, our questions about meaning and purpose and ethics—these, under the guidelines of empiricism, are regarded as mere values; as subjective principles that one can hold as important, but which cannot be ‘known’ in the empirical sense.
Given the victory of Modernity as a cultural mode and its chosen valuation of empiricism as the only way to know, many note the way that this skews our shared experience of life by precluding serious inquiry and dialogue in the forms that our humanity seems to require. Such commentators call for a view of things that address the big questions of life in forms that go beyond whatever gifts empirical inquiry and the scientific method that it birthed allow. These thinkers note that we are the first culture in the known history of the world that does not locate mythic narrative (the stories that hold eternal meaning for humanity) at the heart of societal ambition. We’ve therefore become a culture heavy with how’s and light on why’s. If we follow the demands of Modernity as an obligated way of seeing and acting, we are thereby forbidden from proposing knowledge about moral life with any appeal to the great stories that guided human progress prior to Modernity’s emergence. Such a shift, these commentators argue, costs us too much, leading to effects that may result in ultimate disaster and the potential extinction of our species.
As the question of what counts for knowledge becomes more central and present in the common lives of average citizens in a globalizing society, we require modes of engagement, conversation and dialogue that reclaim human solidarity at the heart of things. The contemporary burden that we all carry these days is identifiable in the void of meaning that Modernity leaves. In short, the modern self experiences the matter of human being amid a contested economy of ideas about the ultimate meaning of life. Modernity and its epistemological arm of empiricism cannot guide us in these territories. As it turns out, both leave us wanting as a human race in the required domains of meaning, purpose and morality.
The Response of the Church to Modernity:
Unsurprisingly, throughout the history of Modernity, the Church has been decentered from her prior role in Western thought and society. Again, invoking Bolle and Buxton, her “authority is no longer unquestioned but has been rejected or overcome in some manner” by Modernity and its
ideals, however insufficient, inadequate, or inhumane Modernity’s alternative frames happen to be. During the period known as Christendom the Church was a primary guide and interpretive lens in the West at the level of individual, cultural, institutional and political life. This influence was mainly supplied to the world through the Christianized worldview of the Church’s leading thinkers and representatives. The Church now finds herself as but a placeholder at the roundtable of ideas. As her grasp on culture has loosened, the Church has struggled not to combat the creep of Modernity through use of particularly Modernist methods of engagement. She has struggled not to take the shape of her alleged enemy in defence of her deepest convictions. That is, in her effort to hold on to her authority and status, the Church has often attempted to apply empirical methods to the very aspects of life that she has claimed cannot be summarized through empirical means. Examples of this reflex are visible during cultural moments where the Church or her representatives attempt to formalize all of life into modes of thought and practice in a manner that is totalizing or exacting. This is an understandable impulse, given the great value that the Church places on all of life itself.
Reflex vs Response: On the Impulse to Prescribe Thought and Behaviour During Periods of Uncertainty:
It might be argued that the life, work and mission of Calvinist journalist, theologian, historian and statesman, Abraham Kuyper, represents such ambition.Kuyper, as a university founder and professor, became Prime Minister of the Dutch cabinet at the turn to the 20th Century and sought to formalize Christian identity in a manner that accounted for the whole of the human experience, from family life to education and politics. While Kuyper argued for the separation of church and state, he presented Calvinism, not merely as a theology, but as a comprehensive view of the world, one that ought to be formed in active contrast with the Modernist worldview of the times:
If the battle is to be fought with honor and with hope of victory, then principle must be arrayed against principle: then it must be felt that in Modernism the vast energy of an all embracing life-system assails us, then also it must be understood that we have to take our stand in a life-system of equally comprehensive and far-reaching power. And this powerful life-system is not to be invented nor formulated by ourselves, but is to be taken and applied as it presents itself in history.
In this vein, Kuyper’s legacy represents a worldview that applied a Modernist framework to life in contention with Modernity’s hold on the West. By allowing the heart of Christian life to become consumed with the reflex to combat Modernist tenets, it might be argued that Kuyper’s statement above reflects a version of Christianity that was shaped as much by Modernity as it was by the plain invitation of Jesus to apprentice ourselves to him in the art of loving God and one’s neighbor as oneself. Kuyper’s Christianity thus took on a Modernist personality.
Given what is at stake and the deep convictions with which such moments tend to be approached, Christian engagement with the broader culture has often carried a tone that seems opposed to the spirit with which Jesus engaged his partners in dialogue. Inside of the quest to know the meaning of life and to locate the cultural and institutional forms that can support it, the Church has often had the reflex to silence or vanquish its supposed opponents through means of argumentation or apologetics. The quest for a mode of engagement and dialogue in a globalizing culture remains a primary human need, therefore, as what abound as the alternatives to human solidarity all seem in one way or another to lead to continued conflict and death.
Worldview as an Alternative to Apologetics and a Means to Dialogue:
So long as the Church allows reactionary or reflexive modes of engagement from among her members it is guaranteed that the culture will remain closed to her input. The Church will remain inclined to identify those who disagree with ‘us’ (whichever in-group one can identify) as a threat so long as she demands of the culture that it continue to view her as the authority on meaning. While the members of Christ’s body know they can find no greater authority, no greater meaning or purpose, no more brilliant a perspective than that revealed in the supreme life and ministry of Jesus, we are reminded that the source of his genius is his love. That very love—his love—invites from us a posture of repentance and deep humility amid a culture that no longer holds the same view, either of Christ or his bride, the Church. Given the interests of Explore, the subject of worldview provides a generative frame for loving dialogue; a frame for mutual engagement between those of opposing ideals, philosophical perspectives and general life experience at the level of local culture and lived experience. Once and for all, it acknowledges that all people mete out the demands of their lives inside of a living system, within which they arrange thought and attribute value in manners in which they are deeply invested.
Worldview Decision as Historically Novel: The Modern Dilemma As a Contemporary Opportunity:
Prior cultures and forms of selfhood were not saddled with such a demand in an open market of ideas and technologies. Worldview was ‘given’ in our pre-Enlightenment societies—just as it remains in much of the East and among indigenous cultures not yet subsumed under the blanket of technology and reach of globalization. But for a few outliers, worldview remained thusly hidden and out of view as a conscious experience. That is, one didn’t engage the matter of worldview as something to contend with or to ‘discover’ in the pre-enlightenment world, one simply lived life in an effort to survive the dynamics presented to oneself in the local community with as much adaptive capacity as one could muster. Further to this, in prior contexts rights and identity were deposited into roles. Questions about ‘who one truly is’, or the demand to find one’s ‘true purpose in life’ did not reverberate at the centre of culture as a dominant aspect of personal development or as a weight placed at the heart of individual ambition.The average citizen of the West in a pre-enlightenment world thus lived inside of a dominant cultural narrative as the recipient of a worldview in largely homogenous native societies. It is arguable, therefore, that what has shifted is not the inherited aspect of worldview reception, but the native homogeneity of worldviews themselves; what has changed is not that we receive a worldview, but that the culture in which we emerge as selves is likely to present worldview to us in a manner that is disordered and potentially more confusing than it is clarifying.
In the global West, therefore, for the first time in human history, now armed with the notion of having overcome the God-haunted views of our ancestors, we are left with a disordered vacuum of meaning and purpose. As the Church’s size and influence shrinks, the discovery of new ways of inviting a return to reliable mythic narratives as the eternal stories that tell the greatest truths about who and what we are remains a humanitarian need. In pursuit of such clarity it will be helpful to draw from the thought of those who have devoted their lives to examination of these issues. Unsurprisingly, under the auspices of the Holy Spirit, the Church is replete with great thinkers who live with such devotion. In the territory of mythic narrative, worldview, and the pursuit of faithful sources of integration for human life, we can do no better than to consult the great corpus of work advanced by celebrated Catholic theologian and philosopher, Alisdair MacIntyre.
MacIntyre has spent his professional life in careful observation of the narrative structure that human life requires if it is to stand a chance of thriving in the direction of the Good. As we noted above, it is these mythic narratives that are challenged during eras like ours, eras of cultural cataclysm. Modernity and the ideas that it contained were the most recent attempt to supplant the stories that stood as the ground for Western civilization. Some of the new myths that emerged during the period we’ve referred to as Modernity sound like this: you can have rights without a claim on human origins, humans are merely sophisticated mammals, efficiency in all its forms is superior to its alternatives, and utility is a value to trump all other values. As was noted above, such platitudes are seldom spoken as directly or explicitly as they are simply lived. Their lived expressions tend to show up in other Modernist artifacts such as corporatism (state or democratic interests being subsumed by corporate shareholder interest), globalism (the transcending of national interests under the notion that the whole world can be appropriately guided and governed by centralized oversight or governance), elitism (the notion that individuals who form an elite—a select group with desirable qualities such as intellect, wealth, power, physical attractiveness, notability, special skills, experience, lineage— are more likely to be constructive to society and deserve greater influence or authority), technocracy (a form of government in which the decision-makers are selected based on their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge), and transhumanism (the belief that humanity prospered through the integration of technological implements into the physical body as purported improvements). As each of these continue to emerge in contemporary life as dynamics with which the average citizen must contend, MacIntyre invites a return to modes of thought and practice that address humanity at its core:
A central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practices, as well as in his fictions, essentially, a storytelling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’…
Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their worlds. Hence there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute is initial dramatic resources. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things. (p.216)
Given the prolonged erosion of mythic narrative as the bedrock for culture and society that we’ve noted here, a discernable vacuum exists not only at the centre of society, but in the likely experience of the average citizen of the West. Explore guides are thus presented with the opportunity of presenting the Christian worldview as a grand narrative that accounts for the essence of life. As they gently traverse such landscapes, they run squarely into the interests of one of the most impressive and holy of our forebearers, John Paul II. Those who have examined prior documents in the development of Explore will recall that John Paul II identified such interests as the heart of his personal life-calling:
I devote my very rare free moments to a work that is close to my heart and devoted to the metaphysical sense and mystery of the PERSON. It seems to me that the debate today is being played out on that level. The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person. This evil is even much more of the metaphysical order than of the moral order. To this disintegration planned at time by atheistic ideologies, we must oppose, rather than sterile polemics, a kind of ‘recapitulation’ of the inviolable mystery of the person.
John Paul II would likely be pleased to know that Modernity, which demystified our senses and stole the sacred from our understanding of the human person, is now being called into question at the heights of academic inquiry. A case in point is the recent scrutiny to which the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDG) have been submitted in response to their Modernist underpinnings. Such inquiry would have been staunchly rejected in academic circles until quite recently and is an indication that the entrenched hold of Modernity over our cultural institutions and individual lives at the level of the local community is loosening. A scholar who has devoted serious attention to these matters is Bert J.M. de Vries. To the policies advanced by the UN under the Modernist worldview that formed them, de Vries concludes,
The worldview behind the SDGs is characterized by Modernity. This no longer offers satisfactory principles and rules for the relationships of human beings with each other and with the natural world in the Anthropocene… I propose that the realization of truly sustainable development in the sense of (human) dignity and justice, ‘the good life’ and staying within ‘planetary boundaries’ is found in the middle for both individual and society. It is a rebalancing act in which the subjective and the immaterial are regaining legitimacy and the relation between individual and collective is reorientating itself. An explicit and systematic assessment of stakeholders and associated worldviews and narratives is a helpful tool in this venture, as are civic society experiments with novel concepts, rules and institutions and setting up dialogue, coalitions and alliances. (Italics added)
Thus, Explore guides are invited into such territories with their human neighbours to relocate our human story at the heart of things. Explore guides come to such encounters equipped with a beautiful tale (a mythic narrative) that accounts in arguably unrivalled depth, for the whole of things. Only with grace and humility will such depth become palatable to their human neighbour in dialogue. Worldview as a devoted frame of reference and personal posture will help to situate Explore guides in solidarity with their partners in dialogue as they adopt the mission to reclaim mythic narrative through the sharing of worldviews. People like MacIntyre, John Paul II and de Vries, demonstrate for us that wherever worldview is lost as a glimpse of the whole of things, wherever mythic narrative is forbidden, human life is degraded, not enhanced. Modernism, against such a backdrop, is simply a story that claims that it is not a story, but a discovery of a way of thinking and acting that points more reliably to truth. That it did not utilize empirical methods in order to draw such conclusions is rarely acknowledged. On these grounds, Modernity and empiricism are self-refuting. Modernism simply represents another worldview in the economy of worldviews, and accordingly, it is accepted as ‘given’ by those who ascribe to it. And so, we are invited by wise thinkers like MacIntyre and others to reclaim mythic narrative as the heart of the matter, the heart of our worldview(s). Returning to the heart of Jesus and his interest in helping us to love our neighbour as ourselves will require that we find new means for rich dialogue between those who hold conflicting views. Plainly stated, if the Church is to be faithful to the business of loving her neighbour in concert with Christ’s interests and call, she must develop the capacity to have and to host a great conversation.
As the subject of worldview is no longer restricted to the spaces and forms inside of which it was initially birthed and as the term shows up as a conceptual framework and a valued way to assess political and ethical decision making at the heights of modern governance and social reform, the Church has the opportunity to invite rich articulations regarding the true heart and nature of humankind. The recent subjection of the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDG) to scrutiny against this backdrop is but one example of the quickened pace of change to the Modernist frameworks that have marked institutional vision and philosophy at the global level. As Jesus issues his prayer,
O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them that we all would be one in God,
we are invited by him to locate a dialect that is accessible to all. Worldview here presents as that very opportunity, as a lens through which we can find ways of engaging our human neighbours in a spirit of solidarity and mutual understanding.
One of the familiar reflexes from within the Church in response to Modernity’s demands is to think and speak in forms that aren’t oriented to good dialogue, but rather narrow subjects to a fine point. The reflex shows up as an aim at defining things exactly. To most of our human experience, such a quest steals from rather than adds to life. We don’t live life with such certainty, after all. A humbler approach here, rather than seeking modes of exact definition (except where such definition is intuitively apparent to all) is to take a dimensional approach to the matter of worldview so that the Christian faith can be considered alongside other ways of being and seeing in the territories of universal human experience. Worldview is not an academic construct for the vast majority of us and it cannot serve the communities of which we are a part if it is only spoken of in academic forms. Worldview must be translated against the backdrop of everyday life where it is experienced simply as a way of being.
Ten worldview domains show up in common lives as daily experiences. They are listed here along with their common Christian expression in cursory forms:
- Theology: Theism, Trinitarian Theology
- Philosophy: Supernaturalism, Faith and Reason
- Ethics: Moral Absolutes (contra relativism)
- Science: Creationism
- Psychology: Mind/Body Dualism (Fallen Nature of Man)
- Sociology: Traditional Family, Church and State (Both individual and societal order are important to God)
- Law: Divine and Natural Law
- Politics: Justice, Freedom and Order
- Economics: Stewardship of Property
- History: Creation, Fall, Redemption
As we seek to engage our neighbour within the particular interests of Explore, holding in mind these ten as territories of life will allow worldview to be engaged as a continuous thread of inquiry and dialogue as members of an increasingly caring society. Within these domains, we are invited together to first reflect upon and then discern the principles to which we wish to submit our lives. The life of Jesus—his manner of teaching, his own worldview and his central mythic narratives, are thus posited with humility into the open field of ideas alongside any others who lay claim to a way (or, ways) of life.