Why You Think the Way You Do, by Glenn Sunshine
Why You Think the Way You Do, by Glenn Sunshine
Chapter 1: What is a World View and Why Should I Care:
A worldview is the framework you use to interpret the world and your place in it. It is like a set of glasses that you look through to bring what is happening in the world into mental focus.
What you think of other people and your relationship to them is evident in how you treat them.
You may think we have a particular worldview when in fact we do not. For example, if we say we care about the environment, if that is part of what defines our self image, yet we litter or dump our motor oil down the storm drains, we reveal through our actions what we really think and what our values really are –and thus our worldview. This is how worldviews operate – below the radar; behind the scenes, guiding our thoughts, words, and actions and only rarely being examined or analyzed.
For society to function effectively or to have any semblance of stability, there must be broad agreement on at least a cores set of values drawn from a common conception of what it means to be human and how we are to relate to each other, which in turn presupposes a set of beliefs about the world, truth, and morality.
A society’s worldview can change over time, resulting in changes in the culture. If your want to understand why and how a civilization changes over time, you need to track the evolution of its dominant worldview.
This book will explain the development of Western civilization from the perspective of the changes in worldview from the Roman Empire to the early years of the 21st century.
Religion is essential to understanding worldviews. In Western history, this means particularly Christianity. In fact, in many ways the history of Western worldviews is the history of the rise of Christianity and with it the emergence of a biblical worldview.
The key dynamic that begins the development of a distinctly Western worldview is the interaction of Greco-Roman civilization with Christianity. To understand this dynamic I must start with a survey of worldviews within the Roman Empire.
Selected quotes from chapter 2, The Worldview of Ancient Rome:
The Roman Empire is a paradox. For the last 2000 years, the Empire has dominated Western ideas about what makes a great civilization. And there is no doubt that Rome was great. At its height the Empire ruled territory from northern Britain to North Africa, from the borders of Persia to the Atlantic Ocean – territory conquered through the unrivaled power of the Roman military machine.
Within the Roman world, peace and prosperity reigned, with vigorous trade; literature and the arts; efficient government; and the rule of law as the hallmarks of Roman civilization.
But there was a dark side to Rome as well. The Roman economy and all its engineering feats were products of slave labor. The slaves themselves came from people who had become so impoverished that the only thing they could do was to sell themselves or their children to pay their dates or from prisoners of war or rebels against Roman rule.
People were killed regularly as public entertainment in gladiatorial matches and other spectacles. At the highest levels of society, treachery, poisoning, and assassination were common. Roman decadence, gluttony and sexual perversion are legendary.
Both sides of the Roman world flow naturally from the worldview of the Empire, and when viewed from this perspective, both make sense.
Religion in the Roman World:
The Roman Empire had a bewildering array of religious options. With the exception of Judaism, all of these fall into the broad category of paganism. Paganism is most often connected to nature worship. Before the days of artificial lighting and climate control, people were much more in tune with the natural order and were abundantly aware that they were at the mercy of the elements.
The primary function of religion was to keep the gods happy so they did not destroy the people. Gods were feared, not loved.
Emperors were considered gods and had incense burned to their statues. Except for Jews, who as monotheists were given a special dispensation not to participate in pagan religious activities, anyone who refused to burn incense to the emperor’s statue was refusing to acknowledge his political authority. This was treason pure and simple, and so any non-Jew who refused to worship the emperor was tortured and killed.
Platonism:
Platonism towered over all philosophical schools in the Greco-Roman world. Plato argued that because the physical world was constantly changing it cannot be the fundamental ground of reality. According to him, the ultimate reality must be based in the nonphysical world of ideas since they do not change (according to him). For him clear thinking and logic are the best approaches to understanding the world.
Aristotle taught that logic and philosophy, not experiment, were the proper means for understanding physics and all other branches of learning.
What did this mean for Roman society?
They thought that since we know what is superior and what is inferior, we have the basis for determining what is right and wrong. The higher up on the hierarchy you are, the more authority you have over the things that are below you and the more rights and privileges you can claim for yourself. (Status was everything)
Slavery:
Among men, some were considered more capable intellectually than others, and in a proper world, these superior people would control society. Wealth, bloodline, and power were the criteria for determining who was superior to whom.
Slaves were considered intrinsically inferior to free people – Aristotle ranked them as “living tools”, little better than animals – and thus undeserving of anything better than their lot in life. This was true of people who fell into debt, since they demonstrated that they were not capable of taking care of themselves or their families. It was true of criminals and of prisoners of war, who by virtue of being on the losing side demonstrated that they were inferior to winners.
Work and Wealth:
Roman nobles began developing large, slave-run plantations. They increasingly gave themselves over to lives of luxury, with beautiful artwork, gardens and homes. What better way to live a life contemplating the spirit than to live in the midst of beauty? The luxury they sought pulled them inexorably toward activities that catered to the flesh. As often happens luxury led to excess in terms of both gluttony and sexual orgies. The higher up the social scale, the more perverse and extreme the sexual activities became.
While elites were giving themselves over to refined living and debauchery, someone needed to be doing the work to support them. Since productive labor dealt with the material world, it was seen as demeaning, fit only for inferiors such as the lower classes and slaves. In the heyday of the Empire, virtually the entire economy depended on slave labor.
Most of the urban residents in the Empire lived in appalling squalor in disease-ridden tenements, living hand to mouth existence with a life expectancy of around 30. The great engineering and building achievements primarily and intentionally benefited the elites. They may have provided employment for the masses, but they did little else for them.
Abortion and Infanticide:
Romans frequently used a variety of herbal and other contraceptive measures to prevent pregnancy. When those failed, they used surgical abortion as a means of birth control.
Infanticide was always an option. The earliest codification of Roman law, made it mandatory for the father to kill any visibly deformed child born into the family. This practice was considered essential to the health of the society and was supported by prominent thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, among others.
The wealthy as well as the poor practiced abortion and infanticide at least as often as the poor. The only explanation is that it was a cultural trend; not one that was dictated by economics.
As Rome stopped expanding, the supply of slaves from prisoners of war dried up and no new workers came in. With birthrates dropping, the Romans were forced to make up the gap by permitting into the Empire more and more Germanic immigrants from beyond the borders. This resulted in a cultural change within the Empire and eventually to its demise.
Next week: Christianity and the transformation of the pagan world
Notes:
Aristotle: (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings constitute a first at creating a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality and aesthetics, logic and science, politics and metaphysics.
Plato (428 BC – 348 BC), was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of natural philosophy, science, and Western philosophy. Plato was originally a student of Socrates, and was as much influenced by his thinking as by what he saw as his teacher's unjust death.
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