In the previous post, I discussed the relevance of epistemology in understanding others. One perspective should not dominate the other, nor should it be isolated from the other. Rather, the only way to honestly hold to a critical realism is to bring differing perspectives into dialogue.
In this post, I want address how worldviews guide our thinking and inevitably result in interpersonal and political tension. I will begin by addressing our inability to understand how others can hold opinions different from our own. In on-line essay, sociologist Allan G. Johnson refers to this as a failure of the imagination.5 Johnson writes:
What I can imagine depends on what I already know or think I know, a huge collection of beliefs, values, and assumptions that make up a worldview. Like everyone else, my worldview shapes how I see everything, from the cosmos and what happens when we die to why people do what they do. It is the stuff out of which I construct a taken-for-granted reality that I don’t have to question. It shapes not only what I perceive as real, but how I make sense of it, how I explain what happens and what is and is not, and how I justify what I do in any given situation.
...Worldviews shape not only how we experience what’s right in front of us, but also what we cannot see and what hasn’t happened yet.
….Because worldviews enable us to feel like we know what’s real from one moment to the next, it’s not hard to see why we’d feel we cannot live without them, which is why opposing worldviews can provoke extreme reactions like calling people idiots or morons or evil. To nullify the threat, we draw upon those same worldviews to understand our opponents in ways that leave our worldviews intact while discrediting theirs.
When people think differently than we do, it challenges our sense of reality. Worldviews not only enable us to have a sense of what's real and what's not, but we also derive meaning from them as well as a sense of identity. So worldviews are necessary, but but they also inevitably lead to judgments about others. Johnson continues:
Which brings me to what is, I’ve long believed, a general pattern among human beings that applies to both sides of any argument. It goes like this—when we lack information that is important to us, we tend to make it up. Our worldview is our primary source of such material. We can’t really know what’s going to happen next, for example, and we can’t really know why people believe and do what they do. We cannot see into their hearts and minds. But that doesn’t keep us from acting as though we can. I don’t actually know what the driver of that other car is going to do in the next ten seconds, for example, but watch me act as if I do.We make up reality as a way to avoid the anxiety and fear that come from uncertainty and from the need to feel solid ground beneath our feet.Where this can go wrong is when we pretend that what we’ve made up is the actual person or group or thing we’re dealing with. Look at the daily waves of anger, fear, outrage, and disbelief around one issue or another and we can see the result—I’m right, you’re wrong; I’m good, you’re bad; I’m sane, you’re crazy; I’m smart and you’re an idiot or a moron.
This is an important point. A worldview mediates to us a sense of reality (what is out there) and a sense of identity (how we relate to that). We experience our worldviews as “based in something larger than and beyond ourselves” which “only increases our tendency not only to experience them as true, but to be unaware that we even have a worldview in the first place.” We take them for granted. It is therefore inevitable to have judgments of others – it is the only way we can have a coherent worldview. And when we get into a disagreement, we “defend our worldview not simply because we like a particular set of what we consider to be facts, but because our sense of reality itself—of who we are and the difference between what is real and what is not—depends on it. This makes it impossible to completely separate ourselves from whatever worldview we’ve come to have.” Our worldviews make it inevitable that we hold certain ideologies about what it means to be human and what other people are like, but they also have “safe” explanations for why others disagree with us. And so a worldview necessarily entail having prejudice about and interpersonal tensions with other people. Therefore, the only way to maintain civil relationships with others is to be able to reflect and examine one's own worldview.
Examining our own worldview is not an easy thing to do. It is hard work that can be confusing and uncomfortable and threatening and, at times,frightening. But it is also the only alternative we have to angry refusals to compromise or even listen to one another. Yesterday a caller to an NPR radio show expressed support for gun control and then blurted out in exasperation, “Why should we have to compromise?” while at a recent gun rights rally in Hartford, a man was heard to say that the two sides are on opposite sides of the moon, with people like him on the light side and their opponents in the dark. It would be easier if this were true, because we’d have no reason to reconcile our differences. But we inhabit the same society. We live down the street from one another. Our children and grandchildren attend the same schools, go to the same movie theaters.
Finding a way out of this doesn’t mean making our worldviews all the same, which is impossible. It does mean opening our own worldviews to the reality that they are just that, that they are not the only ones, and that those who see things differently are not crazy or stupid or malevolent. Then we can talk about evidence and consequences and how to construct a society in which worldviews can coexist without our being at one another’s throats.
Examining our own worldview does not come natural to us, especially as we are already geared towards scrutinizing the worldviews of others. But that is the way forward. Dialogue and introspection go together.
Try to be aware, when you witness or participate in a debate, how easily it slides into defensive and accusatory attitudes, and issues become more about “us vs them” than the actual topic being discussed. Try to pay attention to the assumptions made about others, the ad hominem and straw men arguments.
In the last section I characterized attitudes of judging and attitudes of learning. It may be more accurate to characterize our attitudes of judging as attitudes of protecting. We all behave in ways to protect our worldview as a way of self-protection. Therefore there must be a building of trust in order to facilitate an attitude of learning
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