Creating an Arena for Flourishing
Our Worldview is our Home in the World
Our worldview is not simply a set of ideas that we overlay atop the world. It is not a passive act of application. It is a co-creation of our existence. Our environment, how we interact with it, how we build it, becomes our cognitive and spiritual reality.
In what John Vervaeke would call the Agent-Arena Relationship, we desire to act as agents in an environment (arena) where our actions fit to that environment. When our actions within an arena no longer cohere, or make sense, the world as we experience it becomes absurd.
Right now my environment is more digital than it has ever been. Living in a fairly remote area of the world, my connections are largely mediated via the internet. Work is online, philosophical practice is online, socialization is typically weekend coffee meetups on Zoom with friends around the world.
While it is not a substitute for in-person communing, it is a gift to have these connections.
During this temporary period of pseudo-hibernation, I am attempting to build out the Agent-Arena Relationship of my cognition. Desiring for the actions and ideas within me to cohere with the presentation of self to the world. Right now the largest element of this is writing. A morning conversation with myself to discover what has been lost in the booming silence of my distracted life.
In a nomadic, digital existence, where less people have permanent residence, and less people own physical homes, it feels important to develop our worldview.
Our worldview is our Home in the world.
The normative function of worldviews is to make the world real to us, to make that world intelligible to us, and to create a psychological home in which we can flourish.
When we think of worldview, perhaps ideology comes to mind for some. Ideology is a form of worldview, but it is a bastardization and ossification of it.
Ideology represents a rigid worldview, adopted and implemented top-down. It is a paralysis of worldview. For a functional worldview is something we continually put into practice and participation. It is evolvable.
In what we’ll call the covid years, as well as the post-covid era, there was a global shift towards top-down, ossified ideology.
A difference between ideology and an evolvable worldview is the questioning of ideology out-groups the questioner, essentially pulling the rug of worldview from beneath them. I felt this palpably during the covid years. Not that I believe I was entirely ideological. But I had a trust in institutions to some extent. I always believed in questioning power, but I thought that generally, our medical and scientific institutions worked. I was completely naive in that assumption and that rug was swiftly pulled out from beneath me in 2020.
And so began a bit of worldview bouncing. Knocking to the right. Knocking to the left. Landing now somewhere at a place of holding the sovereignty of the individual (and their relationships) sacred.
This is where I am building from. Putting myself in conversation with myself in order to move the needle on the evolution of worldview. Equally important is putting yourself into dialogue (dialogos) with others that uncovers what you cannot do alone.
A dogmatic instantiation of worldview (ideology) will be rigid and linear, whereas an adaptive worldview will need to be non-linear, flexible, and capable of forming a dialectical relationship to culture. In my view, for what that is worth, culture is the enactment of a distributed worldview. It is susceptible to the same ossification that an individual is. It is the conversation between our personal and communal worldviews that shapes culture.
And then we come back to the layers of cognition with this idea. We put ourselves in conversation with ourselves, using the inputs of culture in an iterative process to shape individual frames. These frames are put into dialogue with local community, shaped and reshaped through the process of co-creation. Community is an instantiation of locally distributed cognition. And the layer above that is the dialogue between local and global distributed cognition, or society at large.
This is the model for cultural transformation that seems useful to me, at least. Our worldview, our frames, they meaningfully influence how we interact with and co-create the world. I aspire to enact this frame.