Excerpts From:

The Chrysalis Age: A Handbook for Spiritual and Global Transformation in the New Millennium
 

Worldview, Ethics, and Vision

Before we can begin to explore the many different aspects of our world from an integral perspective, we first need a framework to hang our analysis on.  The core of this framework is the idea of worldviews, what they are, how we acquire them, and how we can change them.  We will explore worldviews in increasingly greater depth as we proceed through the book, but for now a brief introduction will suffice.

 

“In the old times, when it was still of some use to wish for the thing one wanted…”[i] there lived a lovely young Princess who loved nothing more than to play with her golden ball.  It happened one day that her precious ball rolled into a deep dark well and the Princess became very distraught.  A bloated and slimy frog appeared at her side promising to retrieve the ball, if she in turn would promise to always keep him with her.  The Princess readily agreed, but after the frog had brought forth her ball from the well, she began to feel quite differently about the bargain.  The frog was after all, a frog.  The frog however, insisted that the terms of the agreement be honored.  The Princess unwillingly complied, taking the frog back to the castle, dining with it from the same plate, and retiring with it to her bedchamber.  However, when the frog insisted on sharing the Princess’ bed, she grabbed it in a fit of rage and threw it against the wall, where it made a large splatting noise, and promptly turned into a handsome Prince.  On apprehending this change of events, the Princess quite sensibly changed her mind about sharing a bed with the frog, now Prince, and the two were soon happily married. 

This classic children’s story from the Brothers Grimm is a good but, simple example of shifts in worldview.  The Princess could only see a frog, but the frog was more than merely a talking amphibious reptile, it was a royal youth, trapped by a witch’s spell.  Had the Princess seen more clearly, had her worldview been a little deeper, she could have seen the frog for what it was. Just as the Princess could not see that her loquacious frog was more than simply a fly-eating friend until something drastic occurred, it may be that the circumstances of our world will have to become much more cataclysmic before we can muster the courage to transcend our individual and collective worldviews for ones that fully grasp the reality of the world we are creating.

Our worldview is, quite literally, the way we view the world.  It is the manner in which we interpret the events of our lives and the world around us.  In philosophy this is known as an epistemology, the way we know what we know.  All philosophies are an attempt to explain and define their author’s worldview.  Whether they utilize mythology, occult interpretation, philosophical rationalization, scientific empiricism, or direct interior observation, they are all attempts at explaining at least some small portion, if not the whole, of the universe.  Interestingly, not only do our philosophies describe the world, they change the world as well.  Our understanding of the world determines how we behave in it, and our behavior inevitably alters the world.  This eventually becomes a feedback loop, whereby the changes we make in the world evoke changes in our epistemology.  Much of the epistemological crisis experienced by people from the Renaissance onward is due to the internal conflict this feedback loop generates.  This is because while it seems to be clear that we all move through various stages with ever-deeper worldviews, or frames of consciousness, we do not all move through them at the same pace, or in the same manner.

There are a fascinating number of ways of looking at the world, and each of these worldviews engenders a different way of engaging our lives.  The manner in which we live our lives, the choices we make of what to do and what not to do, is our ethics.  Our worldview informs and in many ways constructs our ethics, the system of morals with which a person interacts in the world. 

While there are a number of different worldviews, contrary to what many postmodern relativists might suggest, not all are equal.  The widest worldview, the one with the greatest breadth and depth of perspective is always superior.  The scientific worldview apprehends truths that the pre-scientific perspective simply cannot acknowledge.  Likewise, a post-scientific worldview, an Integral-Spiritual perspective, is open to truths that science has no means of measuring, and science falls apart without measurement.  As economist and philosopher E. F. Schumacher pointed out in A Guide for the Perplexed “…the methodical restriction of scientific effort to the most external and material aspects of the Universe makes the world look so empty and meaningless that even those people who recognize the value and necessity of a ‘science of understanding’ cannot resist the hypnotic power of the allegedly scientific picture presented to them and lose the courage as well as the inclination to consult, and profit from, the ‘wisdom traditions of mankind.’”[ii]  A deeper worldview sees the validity of both the scientific tradition and the wisdom traditions. 

We are living in a world that is integrated at every level and to survive in it, we must acquire an Integral worldview and an Integral ethics.  With these tools we can then begin to create a vision of the future we might want to forge from the slag we are rapidly turning our world into.   To accomplish this our worldview must eventually become not simply Integral, but Spiritual.  A Spiritual worldview is one that sees the full depth of the universe, from matter to life, to mind, to Spirit.  This progression is the Great Chain of Being of the world’s wisdom traditions.  Philosopher Arthur Lovejoy describes it in his classic book of the same name as a universe composed “… of an infinite number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kinds of existents, which barely escape non-existence, through ‘every possible’ grade up to the ens perfectissimum,”[iii] or Absolute Being.     An Integral-Spiritual worldview is one that attempts to see the whole of the universe at every level of its depth, and every aspect of it being, not simply its physical dimensions.  Furthermore, it is a worldview that supports an ethics capable of coping with the Gordian knot of moral issues that an interrelated world creates.

The truths of each worldview are the basis of its ethics.  Consequently, the worldview with the greatest depth of understanding will be the one with an ethics that has the greatest depth of meaning.  The significance of this is extremely important.  The greater the depth of a worldview and ethics, the more appropriate it will be for understanding and engaging the world.  To be clear, I am not suggesting a Rousseau-like return to some historically earlier worldview, nor am I recommending the abandonment of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment scientific empiricism.  I am not promulgating an Eastern over Western perspective, nor am I advocating an adherence to religious, philosophic, or scientific dogma.  Plainly put, I am saying that the world we have created, and more importantly the world we will be creating in the coming century, requires a whole new worldview that transcends, yet still encompasses the valid truths of the previous, more limited worldviews.   Our brave new century, our Chrysalis Age, requires a worldview that is capable of understanding the unlimited connections being created between nearly all the spheres of life.  This is the Integral worldview.  Our world is also in desperate need of an ethics that is not based in religious dogma, philosophical rationalizations, scientific absolutism, or free-market abstractions, but is instead grounded in a direct apprehension of the interconnectedness of all things.  This is an Integral ethics.   Unfortunately, when the subject of ethics is mentioned at all in reference to globalization it tends to be stuck in either a Modern, highly utilitarian sort of ethics, or a dysfunctional postmodern ethics caught up in cultural relativism. 

In the spring of 2001, I attended a conference in New York City sponsored by the International Forum on Globalization.  One of the things that struck me while sitting through an otherwise informative symposium was that two words were suspiciously absent from the discussion: “ethics” and “spirituality.”  While I can understand the absence of the spirituality from the discussion, as it isn’t the first thing most people consider when talking about globalization, I couldn’t understand the absence of discussion about ethics.  The debate on globalization is by its very nature a discussion about ethics, but few people, whether pro-globalization or anti-globalization, are willing to admit this openly.  It seems we are assumed to be trapped in an ethical vacuum when making decisions about how to organize the world.  This is an extreme misplacement of our concern.  We should be concerned about globalization because of our ethics, not for intellectual or emotional reasons.  I give many of the speakers at the conference a great deal of credit for attempting an Integral critique of globalization, but no criticism can be fully integrated without considering at least ethics, not to mention spirituality.  The pro- and anti-globalization sides each have their own view, for their own reasons, and both assume they are “right.”  Without a discussion of ethics, it is impossible to tease out the truths of either side.

What is worse, in my opinion, is that many in the anti-globalization camp, while attempting to defend the cultural integrity of developing nations from the modernizing, and mostly Americanizing, forces of globalization, often fall into a great cloud of ethical relativism.  In one of the breakout seminars on how developing nations were being affected by globalization an audience member asked the panel how we, as culturally modern people, were to respond to the fact that many developing nations engaged in activities we found morally abhorrent.  The panel was unfortunately in relative agreement on its relativism.  They agreed that the cultures of many developing counties engaged in activities we find difficult to stomach, particularly where the rights of women were concerned.  However, they felt these problems were the individual culture’s to work out in their own way, regardless of how much these actions might repel us.  This is the dysfunctional postmodern worldview at it’s worst.  While the Modern worldview sees its cultural modes as superior, the dysfunctional postmodern worldview, in trying to see that all cultural modes have some value, mistakenly give them all equal value.  The truth is that the Modern cultural mode is in many ways superior, but not in all ways.  An Integral worldview, one not trapped in relativism, clearly sees that the Traditional and Modern cultural modes both have a great deal to offer, and a great deal that should be discarded.  The Integral worldview sees that while much of the culture of developing nations should be conserved as a precious heritage, where the cultures create suffering and deny equality to their citizens, they should change.  The Integral worldview acknowledges that some worldviews are better functional fits than others, and accepts that Traditional individuals and cultures should abandon some their ways for Modern ones, which in turn should be abandoned for Postmodern and Integral ones, which eventually should be abandoned for Spiritual ways.  One of the largest differences between the Modern and Integral worldviews is that the former sees itself as the height of development, while the latter realizes it is merely a stepping stage to greater heights of development individually, culturally, and socially. 

As the forces of globalization sweep over the planet, seemingly unchecked, no aspect of our burgeoning global civilization is left untouched.  Arenas of life that hitherto had only marginal effects on all of us are now tied together in a complex dance of near chaos.   The global stew of economics, politics, social structures, diverse cultures, and the natural environment is being heated to a roiling boil by a vast array of technologies that threaten to outpace our ability to understand their current meaning, much less their long term implications.  

To emerge from this maelstrom not merely in one piece but more whole than ever, we must not only acknowledge the storm, but our part in creating, maintaining, and exacerbating it.  To do this will require not simply that we transform some of the social structures we use to create our world, but that we transform the very way we perceive it.  This personal transformation, this transcendence of shallow ways of seeing for deeper ways of knowing, will by necessity demand that we challenge ourselves and others to examine in full our ways of being in the world as well as our ways of perceiving it.  This challenge is not to be taken lightly.  Change rarely occurs without some manner of challenge and as we are in desperate need of extraordinary amounts of change, we will have to begin to supply equal doses of challenge in order to fully accomplish the tasks that we will be called upon to achieve.  To create a Tsunami of change we will need wave upon wave of challenges.  These waves of challenge should come at both the individual and collective levels.  Moreover, they should be guided by the deeper ethics that the more encompassing worldviews engender.  To simply provide challenge without guidance is to promote chaos on a level that can as easily lead to collapse as the emergence of new and novel ways of being.  As our ethics guides our decisions it will also guide our manner of challenging the world around us.  Consequently it will guide our vision of the world we wish to create and finally the actions that we take to accomplish the goals set out by this vision.  Without a deeper worldview, we cannot obtain a deeper ethics, and without both of these we cannot hope to create a vision of the future that contains any real depth, nor can we hope to bring such a vision to fruition.