The Frame's Unseen Power
Envisioning an Education Centered on Worldviews
As humans, we all experience the world through the filter of a worldview, and that this filter has ENORMOUS consequences for what is possible — to see, to think, and to do. As a concrete example of how powerfully worldviews influence perception and belief, consider this triad:
- “Human property.” For centuries, many White Americans didn’t see African-Americans and this continent’s indigenous peoples as ensouled beings. As a result, they believed that these beings existed simply to be used.
- “Natural resources.” Today, many Americans don’t see chickens and trees as ensouled beings. As a result, they believe that these beings exist simply to be used.
- “Inanimate objects.” Currently, most Americans don’t see the metals that make up their phones, cars, and toasters as ensouled beings. As a result, they believe that these beings exist simply to be used.
This triad is illuminating to me because, while the denial of slaves’ souls appears obviously barbaric to us now, the proposition that a tree has a soul (and rights) is still considered radical. And people such as the indigenous elder Martín Prechtel — who suggest that metals may not WANT to be extracted from the earth and turned into our technological servants — are treated as completely unhinged. The idea that we should ASK our cars if they want to drive us to work (as we would a dear, old friend) is considered sheer lunacy.
The reason that we parse the world this way depends entirely on our worldview. This worldview offers particular answers to life’s fundamental questions, and, like all worldviews, it insists that those answers are the RIGHT ones. To validate these answers, our worldview focuses attention and intention on certain aspects of reality and obscures (and even outright DENIES) others. In general, these biases are hard to see because they’re shared by everyone, and because every aspect of the society reinforces them as obvious, self-evident facts.
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When I was 20, I made the exceedingly poor decision to walk from Cannes to Marseille — a 150-mile backpack trip along the southern coast of France — in the dead of winter. On my second night, I slept in a stone-gray hostel perched on a cliff overlooking the stone-grey Mediterranean sea. In the morning, I discovered that there was a North African man curled up on the floor next to me, and as we both prepared ourselves to face the bitter cold, we struck up a conversation. After exchanging a few pleasantries, he leaned forward and asked if he could broach a “personal” matter. Intrigued by his timidity, I assured him that he could ask whatever he wanted. “Is it true,” he asked — trying his best to mask his horror — “that after you Europeans go the bathroom, you just wipe your butt with DRY toilet paper?”
At that precise moment, the usually invisible lens of my worldview cracked. I was somehow able to see the world through this stranger’s eyes, and from that perspective, it became howlingly clear that this aspect of Western hygiene is preposterous. (A decade later, a friend would put it to me this way: “If you had poop on your face, Ari, would you wipe it off with a dry piece of paper?”)
Staring into that Algerian man’s eyes, I saw that what I had always taken to be ‘reality’ (the way things are and the way we do things) was actually the result of a very PARTICULAR worldview. And as I learned that morning, it’s often only by catching a glimpse of our worldview from the OUTSIDE that we can see it with any clarity. While we swim in a sea of people who all share the same worldview, its limits and biases are often impossible to notice.
There’s also another reason why the biases of our own worldview are so hard to see: worldviews are INTENTIONALLY designed to be invisible. In this sense, you can think about worldviews like operating systems on a computer. The power of this operating system comes precisely from the fact that it can run silently and invisibly in the background, so that we can focus on our attention on a different level of reality (in this analogy, the software level). Obviously, keeping operating system issues in conscious awareness while typing out a novel would be extremely maladaptive — imagine trying to write a paragraph while ALSO figuring out what protocol to use to write information to a hard drive. In terms of our worldviews, too much conscious awareness of the core code would be equally disastrous.
As we’ve discussed, all worldviews are filters which contains a specific picture of the world. Although this filter is enormously useful, its power comes PRECISELY from its ability to blind us to certain aspects of reality. Even more importantly, our worldview also blinds us to the blindness it creates; it convinces us that what we can’t see doesn’t even EXIST. As an analogy, we could think about how cats can see into the infra-red range of light in a way that humans can’t. Those infra-red rays are literally invisible to us, but so is the fact of our blindness. Almost by definition, we have no awareness of what’s missing from our visual perception.
Despite these blind spots, however, we can’t choose to live without a worldview, and so our question then becomes: Do we want to choose a worldview consciously (after carefully evaluating the benefits and blindspots of several different worldviews) or do we want to simply take on the worldview of our culture? In slightly different terms, we could ask: Do we want our children to create their own worldviews or live according to one that someone else created for them?
This, I would suggest, is one way to understand what Socrates meant when he counseled us to live “an examined life.” It’s also the insight which exploded into the awareness of Malcolm X in prison, as he realized that he’d been colonized by a worldview which devalued and demeaned him. My sense is that we ALL need to undertake a journey similar to Malcolm X’s — a journey of awakening to the potentially limiting assumptions we’ve unconsciously swallowed.
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“You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” — Albert Einstein
Beyond its amazing acknowledgment that it’s the MIND that creates problems, Einstein’s statement contains a searing subtext — if the world is diseased, it’s because our minds are diseased. If we accept this proposition, it seems that we’re ALL implicated. While it can be tempting to assume that the world’s problems are the result of other people’s ignorance (corporate pirates who ‘just don’t get it’ or ungrateful employees, who ‘don’t know how good they have it’), my sense is that we have all been infected by unconscious and dysfunctional thinking patterns. As my favorite bumper sticker of all time puts it, “You’re not IN traffic. You ARE the traffic.”
Happily, there’s another layer to Einstein’s statement, which reminds us that there are many DIFFERENT ways we can use our minds. This insight invites us to get curious about what mode our mind is currently operating in, and how that mode might be suboptimal.
As a concrete entry point into this type of inquiry, imagine how you’d respond to a child who asked you, “How did we humans get here?” Would you find yourself referencing the Big Bang, the formation of the Earth some 4.5 billion years ago, and the evolution of early humans from chimpanzees? As secular Westerners, our answer to this fundamental question is drawn largely from the scientific paradigm — even if we don’t identify as a scientist or even as someone who cares that much about science. Because so many of us were educated in schools where scientific orthodoxies reigned unchallenged, we have been thoroughly colonized by the scientific worldview.
In this next post, we’ll dig deeper into the challenges and blind spots of the West’s dominant worldview.