Worldviews and the World

Before proceeding with our exploration of the fifteen aspects of the world, particularly the human world, it is necessary to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of worldviews; how they inform our interior lives, and how they help to determine the manner in which we engage the exterior world.

We brought the caveman from the Stone Age

To the subways of the modern world

How they pack so many in

Quick call the Guinness Book of Records

Well you have to admit

We're the smartest monkeys

XTC, "The Smartest Monkeys", Nonsuch

In his book Quantum Jump, Canadian policy analyst W. R. Clement notes that the world, especially the Western world, is entering what he refers to as a second Renaissance. Clement explains that the first Renaissance was so strikingly different from the Middle Ages that preceded it because it manifested an entirely new epistemology. This new worldview then began to reinforce itself, spreading among a larger portion of the population until the feedback loop between internal and external change was unstoppable. Clement points to several things driving this shift in viewpoint, from the development of perspective painting and the rise of humanistic philosophy, to the spread of the use of clocks, which changed how we envisioned time. He also points out many of the developments he feels are driving the changes we see in the world around us today. These include Einstein's theory of relativity, Quantum mechanics, computer and Internet technology, and shifts in global political and economic structures. Clement believes that not only is our world changing due to global shifts in perspective, but that some places are lagging behind in these shifts, to the detriment of themselves and everyone else. Moreover, he feels that a new epistemology is necessary to cope with the changes being wrought by the current ones. However, as he points out, "New eras tend to be turbulent and messy. There is little that can be done to guide new eras because they have all the subtlety of a bull elephant surrounded by a herd of cow elephants in heat. But, it is argued, new eras can be understood in their own terms. Before we can understand a new era we have to acknowledge that one is happening… and that is usually difficult to do. The reason for the difficulty is that new eras require new ways of perceiving the world."(i)

It is true that the shift between worldviews can be a frightening transition, especially when the world around us is going through enormous changes as well. Shifts in worldview, however, are only likely to occur when change is present, whether it is internal or external. In New World New Mind psychologist Robert Ornstein and biologist Paul Ehrlich point out that our human brains have evolved over several hundred thousand years to cope with a particular environment, namely the natural world. The world that we have created in the last five thousand years, the world of civilization, is quite different from what our brains are designed to comprehend. Moreover, the world we are creating in this new century widens the gap between our brain's natural levels of perception and our manufactured environment to an extraordinary distance.