Whose worldview is it anyway?

I've promoted Colin McNeill's comment to a post, partly because of its honest elegaic tone and partly because it continues the debate about whether or not we want our media to guide us or tell us how to think and whether we can trust them not to try. What do you think? John

Words fail me. I have an understanding of the way things are and who I am that is based on a lifetime of thoughtful evaluation of my experience of self and the world. But clear articulation of any particular aspect my worldview is difficult.

This is not only because my language skills are not up to it but also because 'things' are complex and subtle, naturally, no necessarily, based on processes with uncertain outcomes. Everyone is unique and behaves accordingly but almost everyone has a primordial sense of ethnic and national identity and a worldview and value system that tends to constrain and skew their behaviour and beliefs.

Our elites used to tell us how it was and is. And we were inclined to give substantial weight to what they had to say. Today we are required to make up our own minds whatever our capacity usefully to do so. That involves each of us deciding whose voice we want to hear, find convincing, whose informed opinion to follow, to whom we should offer 'elite' status. And we are inevitably drawn to those who think like us and conflict with those who do not, confirming and refining our own views.

I like Prospect for within its pages I find a real attempt to engage with the complexity and subtlety surrounding conflicting beliefs and values. I find a goodly proportion of what I read well based in reality and not afraid to challenge conventional views particularly of the politically correct and human rights ilk.

I find many of my own thoughts better articulated within the pages of Prospect than I could ever manage . The authors so to say speak for me. And I often have the benefit of an equally articulate counter argument probing my worldview seeking out uncertainty and doubt on my part. And the only whiff of pretension comes from those for whom fairly relaxed and non-neurotic intellectualising of debates on issues of the day in which any thoughtful person can participate does not fit their narrow disciplinary perspectives or the heavy intellectual baggage they carry with them.

Colin McNeill, Oldie

Comments

[John Powell]

Who’s world view is it anyway?

“Prospect” should describe the position from which “Prospect” is the prospect

The magazine should moderate an on-line, “open source activity” that has this as its aim.

(Open source - once a starting version has been provided Prospect readers do much of the work to update parts of it for free just because they want to see it done well.)

I think “The Prospect position” should be a document of about 100 pages that gains as much as it can from images, graphs and timelines and can be read in about 100 minutes.

It should be compatible with repeatable experience and describe what our universe is, what we are, where we are, where we came from, what sort of mechanisms have been in play throughout the 4.5 billion years of the earth’s existence, and the 50,000 or so years during which talking people have been around. It should say that, having persisted for so long, those mechanisms can be expect to be effective in the future as we try to nudge the emergence of yet more complex ways of living into a favourable direction.

In spite of the obvious difficulties, “The Prospect position” should project into the future. Catastrophic futures are easy to predict but, how might we avoid major disasters and achieve a global organisation that leaves us cultivating the bioskin, (our only home) and the noosphere; what sort of life can we realistically expect to be achieved by our grandchildren’s grandchildren?

It should be a statement; the details and justifications are in many excellent books and web-sites that can be linked to or referred to.

A revised edition should be published in magazine format yearly, rather as the Economist publishes “The world in 2007,8,9 etc.”.

A few years ago, my granddaughters and I wrote such a document giving “my personal view” as a book, our version is at www.essayforgc.co.uk . “Prospect”, its contributors and its readers could do a better job and produce a document that would be more effective.

John Powell

Note to the moderator. Related notes and copies of the book have been sent (23-01-2007)to David Goodhart and John Kelly.

[Daniel Taghioff]

>And we are inevitably drawn to those who think like us and conflict with those who do not, confirming and refining our own views.<

How inevitable is this? This is like Gidden's urgument on the inevitability of people seeking ontological security. Is it inevitable?

Diamond points out that "Collapse" tends to occurr in civilisations whose Elites become so cordoned off in their own world that they can exclude things that do not conform with their expectations. This allows them to undercut the conditions of their own survival, without acknowledging that they are doing so.

Treating it as inevitable that we are drawn to those who share our views only heightens such dangers. This is perhaps why there is also evidence that people, and neary all other species, also have a tendency to seek out novelty.