What is a worldview, and where do you get it?

One of the participants in a podcast on media that I follow for my professional life made a comment about people getting their worldview from the New York Times or Fox News. I replied with this video.

That got me wondering about the function and components of a worldview.

The function seems to be the easy part. A worldview is a cognitive orientation towards the facts of life that attempts to make sense of it all, or at least to put it in perspective.

Our brains do something worldview-like automatically. When we see a thing, we interpret it in the context of what we know and what we ought to do in relation to that thing. Some (like James Gibson) would argue that we don’t actually see things. We see “affordances” — actionable possibilities. But that’s getting slightly far afield. The point is that something like worldview thinking is fundamental to everything we do. It’s not a luxury for egg heads. The way we perceive the world is influenced by a broader perceptual, moral context.

Every component of a worldview would influence all the other components, so no matter where we start we find ourselves asking more questions. We could say that it makes sense to start with metaphysics, but I think it makes sense to start with man.

What is man? It’s a broad question that would encompass our origin, purpose, and destiny, but also questions of nature vs. nurture, identity, and so on. It would also address inter-personal relationships, like the family.

Any attempt to answer those questions begs answers to several other things, like …

• what is the natural of reality,
• what are the sources of knowledge, and how we know the things we know,
• what is the nature of good and evil,
• how do we interpret aesthetics,
• what is the role of God and religion,
• how does all this affect our social structures,
• how do we reconcile the individual and the collective,
• what are the primary “grand narratives,” like freedom or justice,
• what does all this imply for politics and economics.

There are also questions of idealism, like to what extent a worldview should be constrained by real-world experience.

The New York Times and Fox News have a squishy sort of perspective on all these things, but they’re not well thought out or explained — which is the absolute worst way to pick up a worldview. You just absorb it without thinking it through.