Excerpts From:

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

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 our world is not only 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 extremely different from what our brains have evolved 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.  Additionally it makes it difficult for us to properly determine threats within that environment.  Contrasting the difference in perceived levels of threat between auto accidents and terrorist attacks, Ornstein and Ehrlich write, “Every month, hundreds of Americans are severely injured or killed because of underinflated tires or other results of poor maintenance of their cars.  This is far more important for us to recognize than is a single terrorist murder.  It does not register much in the caricatured mind, since tire inflation is scarcely as exciting as the exploits of the Symbionese Liberation Army….”^[ii] This statement is still true even in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11^th, 2001.  While nearly three thousand people lost their lives in that horrible act of violence, we are not similarly horrified by the fact that some 50,000 people will die this year in automobile accidents.   Our brains are naturally inclined toward large threats and have difficulty recognizing those that appear slowly or in abstract ways.  This is exactly the problem not only with the world we are creating, but also with much of the technology we have invented and are in the process of producing.

Ornstein later collaborated with science historian James Burke on the book The Axemakers’s Gift exploring how technology has helped to define and alter our conscious perception of the world.  Discussing the difficulties in rectifying the schism between our frames of consciousness and technology, they make it clear that, “we are mentally so separated from the natural world around us by the axemaker gifts [technology] which have, over millennia, shaped every aspect of our lives, that both the gifts themselves as well as a change of consciousness need to be parts of the resolution.”^[iii]  It is only by shifting the way our minds perceive the world that we can resolve the conflicts that science and technology give birth to.   

 

The Three Primary Worldviews

     Some of the most interesting and informative research on worldviews has been done by psychologists Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson.  In their book Cultural Creatives, they define three primary worldviews dominating North American culture.  Questioning some 100,000 respondents over the course of a decade, Ray and Anderson discovered that roughly twenty-five percent of people would identify themselves as having a Traditional worldview, while fifty percent felt they had a Modern worldview, and the remaining twenty-five percent were trying to define a new worldview.  Ray and Anderson label this third group Cultural Creatives, because they believe this group will be driving the cultural changes that occur in the coming century, as we shift from a society dominated by a Modern perspective to one dominated by something else.

     Ray and Anderson describe the Traditional worldview as “… a culture of memory.  Traditionals remember a vanished America and long for its restoration.  They place their hopes in the recovery of small-town, religious America, a hazy nostalgic image corresponding to the years from 1890 to 1903.  This mythic world was cleaner, more principled, and less conflicted than the one that impinges on us every day today.”^[iv]  In contrast, those with a Modern worldview “… are the people who accept the commercialized urban-industrial world as the obvious right way to live.  They’re not looking for alternatives.  They’re adapting to the contemporary world by assuming, rather than reasoning about, what’s important, especially those values linked to economic and public life.”^[v]  Breaking with both of these worldviews, the “ Cultural Creatives like to get a synoptic view—they want to see all the parts spread out side-by-side and trace the interconnections.  Whenever they read a book, get information on-line, or watch TV, they want the big picture, and they are powerfully attuned to the importance of whole systems.”^[vi] 

 

Stages of Personal Development

The stages of personal, or psychological, development are the essential worldviews we have available to us.   Understanding them helps us understand our own development, our own worldview, and how deeper or wider worldviews are available to us.

 

A broad range of psychologists have clearly identified at least six primary developmental stages, or worldviews, that human beings can and do progress through.^[vii] Because there are so many researchers and so many different approaches to systemizing the stages of development I will rely on the work of psychologist Robert Kegan to briefly describe them.  Kegan’s In Over Our Heads is an excellent introduction to the different stages of development that we all pass through, as well as being a cogent discussion of the problems arising when our world demands too much of our worldview.  Writing about the disjunction between what the world expects of us and our ability meet those expectations, he concludes that it will “…demand something more than mere behavior, the acquisition of specific skills, or the mastery of particular knowledge…” to bridge that gap.  It will be a difficult process and it will make “… demands on our minds, on how we know, on the complexity of our consciousness.”^[viii]  Understanding this process can help us engage in it.

Synthesizing the work of numerous psychologists, including Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Jane Lovenger, and Carol Gilligan, Kegan presents six main stages of development that each human potentially passes through as they grow from child to adult.  I say potentially, because, as Kegan makes clear, it is possible for people to either become arrested at a particular stage, or for them to experience a trauma at an earlier stage that adversely affects their ability to fully function at later stages.  Kegan refers to these stages as orders of consciousness. 

What Kegan labels as the first order of consciousness is really the second stage of development.  The first stage covers the period of time from birth until a child has become aware of and interactive with its environment.  During this stage the child senses little separation between its interior world and the external environment. ^[ix]  At the second stage of development, or first order consciousness, the child has begun to become “conscious” in the way we typically understand the word.  The child can communicate clearly, and begins to develop a nascent sense of ego-self, or the sense of separate identity that evolves and matures as the mind develops from childhood to adulthood, but it does not fully perceive the meaning of “the other.”  By second order consciousness, the child has begun to understand the “other,” and is able to see things from another’s perspective, but not with priority.  With third order consciousness a person gains the ability to fully perceive another’s perspective, and defines the way they interact with others by very specific rules.  With fourth order consciousness a person’s perception and identification continue to expand, allowing them to identify with multiple perspectives. Their relationship to the world is guided by an understanding of the importance of the group, though the self is still considered primary.  The last stage, fifth order consciousness, is a multi-perspective worldview that tries to see all other viewpoints and order them into a coherent framework.  Persons at this stage do not simply consider how they relate to others, or groups of others, but how all groups and individuals interrelate. 

Kegan labels these last three stages of development as Traditionalism, Modernism and Postmodernism and they relate very closely to the three worldviews proposed by Ray and Anderson’s research of Traditional, Modern and Cultural Creative.  The Integral stage, the stage that work by other researchers such as Ken Wilber and Clare Graves suggests exists beyond Kegan’s Fifth Order Consciousness, incorporates the Postmodern tendency for multiple perspectives, but instead of granting each viewpoint equal weight, the Integral stage attempts to weave this multiplicity of vantage points into a coherent whole.  Thus the Integral stage transcends but includes the Traditional, Modern, and Postmodern. 

The point of all this is simple, and hopefully has not been missed in the avalanche of terms and jargon.  The point is that we have available to us at least six stages of personal development, each of which successively embraces a wider, deeper, and more connected view of the universe.  Each stage will inevitably create problems that can only be resolved by the subsequent stage.  The problems created by a Traditional worldview will be best resolved by a Modern worldview, and likewise, the problems our Modern and Postmodern minds have created will be most easily solved by Integral minds.  It is important to note that as each stage is transcended, many of the insights, viewpoints, and beliefs of that stage, which are perfectly healthy and valid, should be retained as an individual transcends one worldview for the next.