Worldview Narrative – An Essay

Author: JD Fernandez (Winters)

Original Assignment: English 207 – Persuasive Writing – Aaron Schab – University of Idaho Spring 2023

 

Introduction

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that everyone, over the course of their lives, forms some sort of worldview, which is usually a reflection of their era. As time pushes ever onward, experience and education become knowledge, and that knowledge lays a foundation for our understanding. As we age, we temper and shape this understanding with conceptions of humanity’s origins, information which often molds the values we build over the course of our lives. In the end, our understanding of the current state of affairs is nearly as essential as our grasp of the future; humanity’s dreamlike destinations stretch out over the horizon of potential existence and taunt us with their heavenly superiority or chaotic entropy. At the end of our lives, on our deathbeds, each aspect of our worldview plays a crucial role in determining just exactly who we are, who we were, and how we’ll be remembered by those we leave behind when we depart this mortal coil.

 

I. Knowledge

 

To understand anything is to have a knowledge of that thin, but to define knowledge is a trickier task. As the truth is, we are all well aware, that a human can believe what they have is knowledge, when in fact the knowledge is quite flawed, and is closer to misinformation. We often behave rather gracefully towards one another in these moments as, “To Err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine.” (Alexander Pope An Essay on Criticism 1711) This hits at the core of everything that you’ll ever know as a human: essentially, you know nothing, or as Socrates put it, “For I was conscious that I knew practically nothing…” (Plato, Apology 22d, translated by Harold North Fowler, 1966). We must start here, from these very real and practical roots, to understand anything about understanding, or moreover, what I myself understand about this strange world we call Terra.

 

But it wasn’t always called Terra. No, before it was Terra, coined by the Romans in Latin, it was Gaia, coined by the Greeks. And before it was Gaia, it was Bel from the Babylonian’s Enūma Eliš. Understanding can be entirely cultural, and entirely based on what the level of technological achievement that your unique homeland happened to have. This cycle of communal sharing of knowledge has great merit, and has been, for most of human history, the oral education that most would receive, and use to formulate their own worldviews. Does this make their perspective, if outdated, wrong? No. As flawed as their understanding, or lack thereof, may have been on any given subject, ignorance is not failure, it is a necessary first step. And a worldview is not a thing formed over the first few steps, but rather is constantly changing. To be more specific: a worldview is not a thing that is wrong, but rather, a thing that is always undeveloped.

 

Knowledge Must Evolve

 

From childhood we learn and grow based on a variety of factors: good parenting, experience, book knowledge; living life itself tends to mold us over time and predispose us to make certain decisions. We brush our teeth, even though we don’t like it, because our parents say it will keep our teeth from falling out. We don’t touch a hot stove because we’ve learned, one way or another, that heat can burn, and hurt us. When all else fails, we read about how we shouldn’t trust our instincts and eat a berry off that tree because it’s nice and shiny and yummy looking. We learned that berry was poisonous from a book that someone else composed, with careful attention to detail, to help protect and save lives. Are we flawed because we don’t have this knowledge to begin with? Of course not. But many will claim that your worldview is, in fact, somehow wrong. Very often it’s because your perspective doesn’t align with their perspective. This is the double-edged sword of knowledge: it can be used to enforce excellence or perpetrate misperceptions, especially when those misperceptions are feverishly held. In behavioral psychology, this is called confirmation bias.

 

Thus, we arrive at what I personally consider knowledge: that which is based on the scientific method. A hypothesis must be presented, e.g. “this berry is poisonous”. This must be tested, and tested in other places, by countless other humans. Some humans will disagree, and must be allowed to defend their position in an academic setting. And, after confirming time and again that a thing is poisonous, we may yet discover hundreds of years later that, in tiny doses, this berry may in fact be a miraculous cure for a rare cancer. Do we shame those of the past for their lack of knowledge? No, we encourage testing, time and again, and we learn with each new generation, with each finer iteration of technology, and with each humbler human approach, to appreciate everything around us, and that which we can learn from it. We never stop testing, and we never stop learning. Because the instant we stop learning is when we begin to think we really know a thing. In my experience, this is the first of many forms of conceit that lead to the degradation of values.

 

The Thin Line of Doubt

 

In the end, we still struggle to source our information, no matter how many peer-reviewed aspects it contains. So we question the authors, or their motives. We question agendas, and institutions that support their own unique designs. We question, ultimately, ourselves, and our own ability to interpret information. Most, unfortunately, stop well before this, fearing the infinite void of the unknown, fearing the endless dark paths of ambiguity, fearing the darkening of the soul by the many shades of gray that spread like wool over our eyes. Some come to the inevitable conclusion on knowledge that we stated at the start: we know nothing.

 

Let’s be clear: to know a thing isn’t to declare it always known, absolutely perfect, or ineffably unerring. To know a thing is to accept it for what it is now. That thing may be an entirely different thing later. But for now, you “do the best you can with what you have.” Empirical evidence, the scientific method, and intuition will open many doors and take a human down many paths of towards knowing a thing. Will we ever arrive at a perfect destination? Of course not. Life is about the journey, about walking your steps in a greater march towards humanity’s collective knowledge. While my own steps may be few and far between, I count them as important steps towards understanding nonetheless. In my experience, it starts with doing what you can with what you have, and always humbly acknowledging how little that is, and how important it is for everyone to do their little part, because collectively, we accomplish far more together.

 

 

II. Human Origin and Purpose

 

About 13.7 billion years ago our current iteration of the universe, this reality, exploded from the tiniest fraction of what it was. Many will speculate on the time before this, the actions that enabled this “Big Bang”, and the current structures of our universe that help us understand this fundamental starting point. Each of these aspects of understanding would take an essay of their own to even cast a shadow upon the face of human knowledge on the subjects. So I will, out of necessity, distill what I can for you here, and highlight why this understanding of history, anthropology, and geology form my unique perspective, or affect how my worldview is today.

 

We must start with understanding the expanding universe. In 1929, Edwin Hubble used the largest telescope that had ever been made, at the time, to deduce that the further away a galaxy in our universe is from us, the faster it appears to be receding into space. With a rudimentary understanding of geometry and physics, we can then deduce that the universe is in fact expanding at the same rate in all directions. Before Hubble made this discover, he built on scientific principles tested time and time again, like Isaac Newton’s Laws of Thermodynamics, the second of which states, essentially, that “entropy always increases with time.” Not only does our particular universe have a finite lifetime, by which we can measure the beginning, but it will, eventually, also have an end. Entropy will bring all things to chaos, and at the end of infinity, likely at a point at which the bounds of the universe itself can no longer contain it, we will likely snap back, begin reversing, and all will once again condense to a singularity through which nothing that exists in this universe will possibly escape, and through which, very likely, our universe will once again become the seed through which an entirely new universe will be born. These thoughts are summarized in what is now colloquially called the “Big Crunch” or “Big Bounce” theory.

 

Science and Collaboration

 

A contemporary of Isaac Newton, Richard Bentley, proposed this proto-theory in response to Newton’s second law, and, over time, Einstein and other astrophysicists used mathematics to formulate new theories, casting aside “constants” like the cosmological constant and again, testing, peer-reviewing, and collaborating with humans across this planet, in their era, to get closer to knowing about this universe. These men bravely and beautifully embody the ideas I espoused in the previous section on knowledge, and highlight why it is so important to constantly test, constantly update, and evolve with the collaborative efforts that push us all closer to true understanding.

 

But this rather metaphysical view leaves much room for humanity’s expansion, growth, and reach through the fabric of all this is, was, or will be. And this cycle, like many others, repeats. At the end of the day, we must accept that, for what it’s worth, our understanding is limited, flawed, and paints only the faintest of outlines of our human history. So what do we know? Well, there are a few things. For starters, we can use geology to measure the age of the earth at roughly 4.5 billion years old. And, extrapolating this knowledge, and gathering real-world data, we discover the epochs and eras of this planet’s past. We underwent incredible evolution through these billions of years, from the ever-shifting tectonic plates that formed habitable land, to the many disastrous apocalypses which marked the end of one age and the beginning of another. We find fossils, metamorphic rocks, hexagonal diamonds, radiometric dating patterns, and all the tell-tale signs of each part of the many changes our planet has endured. The last ten thousand years or so have afforded humanity a rather stable climate compared to the hundreds of thousands of years in the past. And by taking ice core samples from locations less disturbed by these changes, like in the far reaches of Antarctica, we can deduce what kind of changes led to climates which would be hospitable to life, and those that would not. Let’s take a moment to dive a little deeper into the importance of our current era, the Holocene.

 

The Origins of the Holocene

 

Roughly twelve thousand years ago things changed dramatically for us, as we exited an ice age and entered, through multiple extreme flooding events, an age of a warmer earth, that we call the “Holocene”, and our planet now had much more water covering its surface. The floods that brought this surge of water to make our many oceans and seas, the largest of which is called “Meltwater Pulse 1B” is considered by paleoclimatologists as a significant factor that changed the course of human history. For hundreds of thousands of years before, as we analyze these same ice cores, we realize that the climate was unstable, and even hostile, to human life, with countless cycles that would have essentially “reset” humanity back to the stone age, stretching nearly as far back in time as we can currently measure. But this fraction of knowledge sheds light on how so many early human cultures developed.

 

One of the most common threads in the oldest recorded human histories and religious texts, which are essentially a history of their own, describe flood events that dramatically impacted the planet. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Hebrew Bible and the Chronicles of the Great Flood of Gun-Yu in China. Countless ancient cultures were affected by floods that we have extraordinary and ample empirical evidence to support. And this is where humanity began to formulate its current written history, and the origin stories that are the basis of countless religions and belief systems today. Unlike most, I decide to focus on the evidence, and the larger story of the planet, instead of the limited perspectives of the people who wrote, with what little they had, about what they knew at the time.

 

My Place in All This

 

So where does this leave one, in trying to understand the origins of our species? I think the simplest distillation of this information leads one to believe that we, as a human species, have had many attempts, and many ages, to try and come together and progress towards a point that we can become resilient, with our generational knowledge intact, enough to survive the many versions of extinction which constantly threaten us. Oftentimes we face extraordinary disadvantages, either from the lack of collaboration amongst ourselves, or the constant threat of death brought upon by the very need to survive in these hostile environments. These truths are at the core of the human spirit, something that has persisted from our earliest iterations, and will continue on until we evolve into something greater, or perhaps there are simply no humans left. To be truly human is to dip a toe, even wade in a bit, to the great conversation that may appear at times to be mostly a chaotic din, but in fact has all telltale signs of hope that a unified human race could overcome any obstacle in the path of our ultimate evolution.

 

Every human will wake up every day of their lives and get to make, in various ways, different decisions that will contribute to the evolution of humanity, or detract from our progress altogether. Most will merely be swindled into following massive entities with broad-sweeping power over the planet as a means to ensure their own survival and subsistence. But some, a brave few, will constantly challenge this status quo. They will test the knowledge given them, and, when it is found wanting, they will declare it so to their fellow man. This will of course, erode the power of those large systems, be they governments or religions or philosophies. And if there is another truth I can communicate from my limited human experience, it is that no one wants to lose their power. John Steinbeck once said “Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts. Perhaps the fear of a loss of power.” The ultimatums that these institutions force down our throats in their fear leave very little room for positive growth and change. But that hasn’t stopped humanity from overcoming tyranny, misinformation, and destructive religion that brought about wars and crusades and massacres.

 

History, often written by the victors of the past, is far from plain to see at times. But from the murky outlines of what we can establish and test, we do our best to understand the past that has created this present. A core principle of mine is to avoid being duped as best I can by always making the effort to verify that which I am told. Unfortunately, considering the number of times I’ve already been duped, it seems this will be a struggle for the rest of my life. And that’s it. I have no evidence to support my theories on the power of the human soul, nor its complex interactions with the universe. I think that for now, with no tool to measure the soul or perceive it, I will settle for my own musings to be just that: thoughts. And I think this mortal life is the one we get. Though I imagine any soul, as powerful as I’ve felt my own to be, wouldn’t want to drift through the cosmos for long, but would probably find another body to inhabit, in this universe or another, despite what happens to this silly mortal frame in which it currently resides.

 

III. Value System

 

This is a crucial moment in understanding my own personal worldview. Sadly, most people would have already stopped trying to understand me, as the complexities are simply too much to bear. We’re already far too deep in uncharted waters for the average person’s comfort. Most have already composed a understandably limited collection of traditional thoughts and ideas that have been largely untested and unverified, but have a basis in concepts like faith, ancestral respect, and their fear of the great chasm, the great void of the unknown that creates its own unique nightmares and fear mechanisms to push humanity into various modes of thought. But I do not fear the void. I bathe in it.

 

The void is empty and devoid of reason. It is all the chaos of everything and precisely no singular thing at the same time. The beauty of the void must become a part of your experience as a human being to evolve beyond a certain point. Do not mistake my discussion of the rare glimpses of the void with a pontification on its merits. The void is meritless. The void is nothing. That is its very definition: it is devoid of order or negentropy. It is merely that which must exist to be converse to order, to knowledge, to understanding, and to existence itself. We measure this simply: matter, and anti-matter. The void is a part of every breath you take, every move you make. The void watches you, but exactly as much as the world of matter itself watches you. This leads to many crucial aspects of my understanding of human values.

 

Values are Inevitable

 

No matter how far you go, or where you look, humanity will form values based on their experiences. These values will manifest in many ways, from the way they care for their family and loved ones, to the way they take part in civilization and the larger progress of humanity. Rarely do these values have a basis in anything concrete. Let’s take a basic example. The average Judeo-Christian devotee would likely say that lying is wrong. They would cherish and uphold honestly. Of course there are exceptions. You don’t tell your significant other when that outfit doesn’t look good, you simply deflect nicely and hope they understand your tone. You don’t go through the effort of keeping every single receipt for every purchase you’ve made over a year, and every paystub alongside it, to ensure the validity of your submitted taxes. You guestimate with what information you have, the important bits, and rarely does anyone think they are lying to the IRS if they fail to report a few hundred dollars in income they made on an odd job here or there. But there are always degrees. There are small, insignificant lies, and there are large, life-altering lies. Obviously most try to stay away from the latter. But what if the lie is to protect that person you love? What if you keep some horrible secret, to prevent heartache and damage that the truth may cause? Are we all liars then? The answer is yes. And that’s okay. Morality is not black and white. There are mostly just gray zones that we all muddle our way through.

 

I value truth on a very high pedestal. At the same time I value lies when they do less harm than the truth. I value life. I do not value a life that takes other lives, and ruins countless others. I believe in every human’s right to find and test their own understanding. But I don’t value humanity’s pursuit to understand everything. Some things do not need to be known, or explored, as we saw with the Nazis and the Spanish Inquisition. So how do I calibrate my moral compass? How could I possibly survive without some ancient text to define my morality? I test. I question. I explore. I use my intuition. I use the knowledge of countless humans who have tried again and again to verify that which is good, and that which is bad. There are a lot of easy ways to spot good and bad. Is that habit productive; does doing this bring good into the world? Is that information constructive, and who says it is? Do I trust them because they have authority, or do I trust them because I’ve verified what they’ve said before, and I’ll verify what they’re saying now? Certainly I don’t have the ability to verify everything, so there must be some trust, right? This is the realm of true science. To think a thing, test a thing, theorize further, and test endlessly, that is the journey we must all undergo every time we attempt to know a thing. To stop anywhere short of this is to subject ourselves to being duped. It’s okay to be a bit duped. But never stop, once in that place, and fret about being further duped. Just do everything you can not to be duped again.

 

So, just don’t get Scammed?

 

There is a lot of distillation going on here. But there are some objective truths that can be established to give us a firm foundation to stand on, and this can help us move away from the idea that most people want you to buy what they’re selling, so to speak. In the “American Values” table, there are indeed some values that strike at the core of my own value system. Let’s list them briefly:

Top Six Terminal Values:

  • Wisdom
  • Equality
  • Inner Harmony
  • True Friendship
  • A World at Peace
  • Self-Respect

 

 

Why did I choose these values? To put it simply: each of these values is based on a universal truth. Wisdom should be the chief goal of every man, not knowledge. Wisdom, experience, and understanding of how to use our knowledge – these are things every human should strive to gain over the course of their lives. Equality stems from this firm root, as it is the wisest way in which humanity can set aside each individual’s ego and focus on the objective benefits we each offer to the collective good. Inner harmony is a lifelong balance of these external interactions and the internal dialogues between the various facets of our psyches. True friendship can only be accomplished when the previous three are established as fundamental goals. As far away as it sometimes seems, a world at peace, with the self-respect that my own contributions would make towards it, are at the core of my aspirations.

 

At the core of all of this is love. Another universal truth that many claim throughout most known religions is the idea that the divine is love. That’s a lovely idea, and one I can encourage merely for the hope that through this idea, others will actually spread love, and not simply hate which allows them to discriminate against others. Most often, good people stay away from that hate, and that’s important to see. It’s easy for anyone to get swept up in hatred, as the operators of those big entities discussed previously will gain more power over those divided by hate. In the end, love is the only thing that will bring humanity together, as cheesy as it may sound. My greatest hope is to see a courageous humanity that pushes its imagination, sculpts it with a healthy dose of logic, and independently enables every mind to open up and find a love that can connect us all. This is of course, the stuff of dreams, of near fantasy even. But I’m alright living in a few fantasies, especially one as lovely as that.

 

Conclusion

 

In the end, destiny is what you make it. I take the tools given me and glean every piece of wisdom I can while exploring this world. I cast all the bits of knowledge I acquire into the great fire within my soul, and test them for purity. I verify what burns, and what is left behind. I cross-check this against my peers. I stand at the forge every day, drawing out small quantities of molten existence, and carefully pour little crucibles into their tiny molds. One may become a filet knife to help keep me well-fed. Another might become a pair of scissors to help me make a patchwork cloak of understanding to shield myself from the many storms of this world.

 

And rarely, ever so rarely, I will find a diamond in the slag, a precious gem in the casting. With everything I have, I will attempt to liberate this precious jewel and share its beauty with humanity, in the hopes that someday, everyone on planet earth will be decorated with the knowledge that billions of humans died to acquire. I live for the hope that all I am, all that I can extract with all the passion of my being, will someday pass on to those humans of tomorrow, who I hope, against all hope, might get a bit closer to knowing these universal truths.

 

— JD Winters

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