Hold it! I feel the need for a lengthy preface, so let me first chat about a more general topic first: worldview.
Worldview is something of an obsession of mine. I’m regularly distracted from my immediate surroundings by mental excursions into idea-land. Therein, I’m fascinated by ponderings about "How would I look at the world differently if I thought ___ idea was true?" In fact, these mental excursions are hazardous: many thanks to those who refuse to talk to me about these things while I’m driving, as I’ve had more than a few near misses on the road.
Ideas are consummingly important, and I think rightly so. Worldview is something we all have and need as human beings. Recently I finished reading a book on the natural history of human beings, and I found this one quote from the author (Ian Tattersall) extremely informative and enlightening:
"As far as we can tell from the archaeological record, the difference in cognitive capacity between Homo Sapiens and even its closest extinct relative is a huge one. And it is not just a difference of degree. It is a difference in kind. It is probably fair to say that even such evidently complex beings as chimpanzees do not in essence do much more than react fairly directly to stimuli that they receive from the outside world...Human beings, on the other hand, are symbolic creatures. Inside their heads they break down the outside world into a mass of mental symbols, then recombine those symbols to re-create that world. What they subsequently react to is often the mental construct, rather than the primary experiences themselves."
That mass of symbols is one’s worldview. A worldview is something we as humans can’t not have, it’s how our brains function, we need one in order to interact meaningfully with the world around us. I wanted to draw attention to this, because it greatly helps me understand why changing one’s opinion about something is such a frustrating and painful process. It also explains why it’s so difficult to convince another person to change their mind. It’s actually a really tall order to ask someone to change their worldview, because, depending what you’re arguing for, you’re expecting another person to re-arrange their head full of symbols that they’re using to live by.
Moreover, the act of changing one’s symbolic system in any major way is an excruciatingly painful and confusing experience. As I
experience it, my mental world is a self-consciously Christian one: these concepts are crucial in my day-to-day working world, because the world as I know it is governed by God, and every decision and thought is accountable to the Lord Jesus Christ. There are things going on around me that I can’t see, for God created both a physical realm, and a spiritual one. I interact with both those worlds, and make decisions based on the assumption that these symbols are accurate. If you were to take my symbols away, I actually could not interact with the world in a way that was meaningful to me. I am used to seeing the world through a certain lens, and if that were taken away, I really couldn’t do anything. If I were to be persuaded that a major part of my worldview was false, I would be very confused about what I ought to do, what my moral obligations are, for these all depend on the world around me being ordered and coherent. If you change one concept that is obviously inconsistent with other symbols, I could be seriously thrown into confusion.Another example I like to use to describe this re-symbolizing of the world that we humans practice is by comparing our mental worlds to a living room full of furnitur
e. We are like a person who owns a room, and acquires furniture and appliances that enable him to live comfortably in that room. Changing your basic beliefs is like re-arranging your room. We move around our mental furniture. Now most of the time, we’re always in the process of re-arranging things. I think most ideas come to us like handy appliances: when we come across an idea that helps us understand things, it’s like we just acquired a new blender, and happily add this new appliance (knowledge) to our mental living space.Now, sometimes new ideas are imposed upon us. We thought we were all comfy, but suddenly someone comes in and kicks over the centerpiece of your room, or smashes a table or a major appliance like your fridge. This causes great discomfort and anxiety: the room that you were used to is no longer liveable or comfortable, and it takes a lot of work to re-arrange your room in the light of the loss of your refrigerator.
Now I write all this as a preface to a bunch of posts about the environment because the experience of "converting" away from environmentalism was very much like being violently thrown out of a favorite lazyboy chair. Not only was my room disrupted, but I could not simply set my living room upright and resume sitting in it: the chair was trashed and no good; I couldn’t sit in it even if I wanted to, but the rubble still cluttered my mental living space. I suddenly had no place to sit, and the room was almost too messy to move around in. The busted chair didn’t just disappear, it le
ft a mess.The importance of this worldview preface is actually to apologize. I’ve had a few years to fix up my room, and now that it’s a little cleaner, I can see in retrospect what I was going through at the time. When you can’t sit down, you get tired, frustrated, and grumpy. Changing my long-held views on the environment was positively exasperating, and I wish I had dealt with the process better than getting angry. My sincere apologies to those who had the unpleasant experience of talking (or writing) to me about the topic of the environment while I was in the business of cleaning up my headspace due to the unexpected destruction of the environmentalist chair I had sat in since childhood.
Are those rabit ears?
ReplyDeleterabit ears?
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