“The War of the Worldviews” at TedX Pugwash

I recently spoke at a TedX conference on Peace in the beautiful village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia. Pugwash and peace have a historic connection: the Nobel Prize-winning Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs were founded in 1957 by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the nuclear physicist Joseph Rotblat.

On the stage at Peace Hall, I talked about why it seems impossible to find common ground these days: often, there is no common ground, because there isn’t even a common worldview. If it feels as if people live in different realities, it’s because they do. Hence my title, “The War of the Worldviews.”

In 18 minutes (the limit for a Ted talk), I told the story of how this came to be. It isn’t a new problem: the crisis we’re facing now has been developing for centuries, if not millennia.

Our conventional, left-right model of politics doesn’t begin to explain it. But if we think in terms of worldviews, the confusion begins to clear.

Script (as written)

Do you ever feel like the world is going crazy — or maybe you are? Have you had disagreements with people and said to yourself, “It’s like they live in a different reality!”

Well, I think you may have been right. It could be they do live in a different reality. And what looks like the world going crazy starts to make sense when you look at it that way: as a conflict among different realities.

If we hope to build peace, I believe we must get a lot better at understanding that kind of conflict.

People have always lived in different realities, also known as worldviews. We can’t really know the world in itself. Our senses and minds are far too limited for that. So, we construct a worldview: a much simpler modelof the world, something like a video game, where there are rules, and everything makes sense.

This map is part of one the oldest worldviews. It’s from Mesopotamia about 5,000 years ago and shows the city of Uruk at the center of the universe. Strangely enough, whenever people construct a worldview, they’re likely to put themselves at the center of it.

Most societies have had a dominant worldview, the one everybody believes in — or at least pretends to. The dominant worldview holds the society together, like everybody playing a game by the same rules. Some people challenge their society’s worldview, like Socrates did in classical Athens. But it can be risky. When Socrates wouldn’t stop asking questions about everything, he was ordered to commit suicide.

But now, we’re running an experiment even Socrates might have found frightening: Can we have a society in which there is no agreed-upon worldview? It can look a lot like a world that’s falling apart.

Today I’m going to focus on two of the most significant fragments of our fractious world: what Americans commonly call the MAGA right and the woke left, although I’m adding an asterisk to the word “woke” here, because it has more than one meaning — more about that later.

It seems to me there’s huge confusion about both of these groups, including in most of the media coverage about them.

I’m going to argue that that’s because they aren’t really on the right or the left, as those words are usually understood. They’re in different worldviews.

The trouble is, we keep thinking about politics as if everyone lives in the same worldview. And in that one worldview, politics is pictured something like this: as a single line from left to right, on which all opinions are located. On that line, we imagine the woke in about the same place as progressive liberals, on the far left. And MAGA are in about the same place as rock-ribbed conservatives, on the far right. But I’m going to argue that this one-line model is wrong, and only increases the confusion so many people feel these days.

These groups can’t all be found on the same line — as we’ll see, they don’t even believe in the same line.

It’s more accurate to picture them as living within three different worldviews.

One of these worldviews has come to define what’s known as the Modern world. But many of the people who are called woke reject that worldview. And so do many MAGA people. They inhabit different worldviews.

Here’s an example that demonstrates what I mean.

In the Modern worldview, individual freedom is a universal value. It’s assumed that everyone believes in it, whether they’re on the left or the right.

But in the woke worldview I’ll be talking about here, the Modern version of freedom can be seen as a form of oppression. And in the MAGA worldview, it can be immoral.

“It’s like they live in different  realities,” right? They do: in different worldviews.

Not too long ago, it looked like the world might actually be coming together within one worldview.

That’s the one that emerged during the Enlightenment era, from roughly the late 1600s to the early 1800s. The rise of scientific reason had produced such an explosion of new knowledge that many people came to believe that all of humanity would soon be united by the principles of reason. A major inspiration was Isaac Newton’s discovery of what appeared to be fundamental laws of the universe.

It’s hard for us now to imagine the impact. The poet Alexander Pope compared it to a second Creation. He wrote,

‘Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night/God said, ’Let Newton be,’ and all was light.”
You can see why that time came to be called the Enlightenment.

Reason also inspired new thinking about how to run a good and just society. John Locke and other philosophers developed the principles of what became known as liberalism, including universal human rights, individual freedom, equality, self-government, and the rule of law. When Thomas Jefferson wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he was referring to these principles. They still seem self-evident to many people today, on the left and the right. I expect that includes many of us here.

Enlightenment reason and liberalism would become the basis of the Modern worldview. They produced so much progress, so fast, that some people concluded that humanity was reaching the “end of history,” meaning the goal history had been working towards. The philosopher Georg Hegel wrote about that in the early 1800s and the political scientist Francis Fukuyama did again in the 1990s.

But even as the Modern worldview was emerging, it began to split apart.

The French Revolution was largely inspired by Enlightenment reason and liberalism. And we can think of the new French assembly as a microcosm of the new, Modern worldview. Here, conflict would be resolved through reasoned debate, based on liberal principles, like liberté and égalité.

And the French assembly was also the birthplace of our left-right model of politics. When delegates first started meeting to debate the future of France, they sat to to the left or the right of King, depending on how they felt about change versus tradition.

But some of the delegates didn’t even belong in the same room. They wanted to be in different worlds. The Royalists wanted to restore the world of the past, ruled by God and the King. Robespierre and his radical Jacobins wanted to abolish the past and re-start history from the Year One.

It turns out that the division between the radical Jacobins, the liberals, and the Royalists was the start of a three-way conflict of worldviews that’s been going on ever since.

And I would say it continues now among the woke worldview, the MAGA worldview, and the Modern worldview.

The long history of this conflict has been very complicated, so I can only touch on it here. But as I do, I hope you’ll find it helps to de-confuse our otherwise very confusing present day.

I’ll start with a look at the history that produced the MAGA worldview. It began with people who didn’t want to live in a world defined by Enlightenment reason or liberalism. They believed that world lacked everything that mattered: morality, beauty, mystery, and meaning. Many people still feel that way about it.

Some people based their rejection of the Modern worldview on religion. For them, God was the ultimate authority for everything we know about the world, not human reason. And they believed society should be ruled by God’s anointed rulers. The philosopher Joseph De Maistre argued that otherwise, only chaos and evil could result. And when the French Revolution descended into the Reign of Terror, De Maistre thought that proved him right.

There are still religious nationalists who feel that way. That doesn’t describe all religious people, of course. Many of them have found ways to reconcile their faith with the Modern worldview.

For other people, it wasn’t only God who was far more important than reason and liberalism. So was the nation, at least as they conceived it. According to liberalism, a nation is formed by a social contract among people who agree to support its laws and principles. But some philosophers and artists saw that as soulless. They believed that a nation is far more than a mere contract among strangers; it’s an ethnic people who share a language, a culture, a homeland, and a deep, even spiritual connection. That’s known as an ethnic nation.

Two early and very influential ethnic nationalists were the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the opera composer Richard Wagner.

Now, just like there are religious people who are also rational liberals, there are ethnic nationalists like that too. Many countries have been founded as ethnic nations to escape domination and many have become liberal democracies. Like Germany and Italy, for example.

But as religious or ethnic nationalists become more extreme, their belief in the paramount importance of God or the nation becomes ever more authoritarian.

Extreme ethnic nationalism led to the rise of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy and their allies across the globe, including more allies within the democracies than we might like to think about.

We’re seeing a worldwide resurgence of both ethnic and religious nationalism.

It’s very hard to make sense of the MAGA movement if you’re looking at it from within the Modern worldview. But MAGA does start to make sense within a worldview defined by religious and ethnic nationalism, which in MAGAworld can range from moderate to extreme. 

Donald Trump’s most committed followers see him as chosen by God or as the embodiment of the spirit of the nation, or both. Their bond with him can be more mystical than rational. And when you listen to what Trump says, try thinking of his language as not rational but symbolic. He often uses words not to describe reality, but to create it, as if he’s a king, or even a Messiah, as he’s suggesting more and more often.

To understand the loyalty he commands, it helps to think of loyalty to a figure like that, not to an elected official in a reason-based Modern democracy.

Now let’s take a look at the history that led to the Woke worldview.

I need to start by clarifying that adjective “woke.” As I mentioned, it has more than one meaning.

The original one was coined by Black Americans, and means, basically, “awake to racial injustice.” By that definition, anyone who lives within the Modern, liberal worldview can and should be woke. But by another meaning, the one I’m using here, people within the Modern worldview can’t be woke, because injustice is seen as built into that worldview. To be woke in this way is to wake up from the Modern worldview.

You become that kind of woke by learning a body of thought that might be described as postmodern critical theory, although it’s often called just “Theory.” According to Theory, everything about the Modern worldview is determined by relationships of power, and everything people think is objectively true or good just serves the interests of power.

That way of thinking is often traced to Karl Marx.

Marx argued that one of the ways capitalism kept workers down was by generating a worldview that made their suffering seem normal. Religion, for example, taught them that it was God’s will and that if they behaved wellthey’d be rewarded in the afterlife. Marxists describe the effect of believing in the capitalist worldview as “false consciousness.”But Marx thought that the awful suffering in the factories and slums of his time was about to wake the workers up. He predicted an imminent global revolution.

But the global revolution didn’t come. Some later Marxists tried to figure out what Marx had got wrong. That included these two, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. They were leaders in a school of thought known as Critical Theory. When you hear about a critical theory of race, or gender, or other things, it often has roots in their work.

The Critical Theorists concluded that Marx had underestimated the power of a worldview to create false consciousness. The workers of the world hadn’t risen up because entertainment, advertising, and everything else around them had created a worldview that made capitalism look desirable.And Horkheimer and Adorno thought Enlightenment reason was an essential part of that worldview, because values like rationality, order, and productivity just trained people to be cogs in the giant capitalist machine. The point of Critical Theory was to expose how that happens.

There have been many, many other influences on Theory. Among the most influential are these two, the postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault and the theorist of colonialism Frantz Fanon.

What’s been assembled from all the sources of Theory is a view of the Enlightenment not as a dawn of knowledge and freedom but of false consciousness and oppression.

According to Theory, fundamental Modern values should be challenged or outright rejected. For example, the pursuit of objective truths and universal rights is seen as erasing the subjective truths of different people in different cultures — what’s know as their “lived experience.” The pursuit of equality can be seen as doing the same thing: erasing differences. That’s why people influenced by Theory talk about “diversity” and “equity” instead of equality.Language is seen as potentially dangerous, because it could oppress people by defining them and their world. And so free speech might need to be limited through speech codes or cancellations.

Now, as with the worldview that produced the MAGA right, the worldview that produced the woke left can become authoritarian — even though its purpose is to challenge all forms of authority.

One way of understanding how that can happen is to look again at the concept of false consciousness. If I believe a theory has equipped me to judge who has false consciousness and who doesn’t, I may conclude that anyone who disagrees with me doesn’t just have a different opinion, they have an incorrect opinion, because they have false consciousness.

This is the logic behind the concept of “political correctness,” which in the Modern worldview sounds tyrannical.

And following that logic to the extreme can appear to justify the violent repression of dissent in the name of liberation, as happened under communist dictatorships and during the French Reign of Terror. Today, though, it’s far more likely to end up as the dogmatically intolerant but nonviolent version of wokeness often called cancel culture.

The Modern worldview can go very wrong too, like when spreading enlightenment was used as an excuse for colonial conquest, or bogus science was used to justify racism. It seems to me people are all too happy to use any worldview to justify what they already want to do.In any case, my goal here isn’t to argue for or against these worldviews. It’s to point out how fundamentally different they are — and the huge challenge that poses to peace.

In the Enlightenment tradition, peace is pursued by trying to negotiate some kind of compromise between opposing parties, by finding “common ground.”

But what if there is no common ground, because there isn’t even a common worldview?That’s the challenge we face now.

I don’t know if we’re going to meet that challenge. But at the same time, I think there’s at least some hope in uncertainty — if only because certainty so often leads to tyranny. However long it takes to build a world of peace, I think it’s probably going to involve asking, and welcoming, lots of questions.