The Traditional Worldview Understood

In this article, we’re going to cover the key aspects of the traditional worldview.

This worldview has been among us since the beginning of human civilisation and self-consciousness, and still dominates to this day across the world, particularly in Muslim, African, Asian and South American countries.

I invite you to notice how this worldview buttresses traditional values, political views, preferences and so forth. These are all natural and expectable under this paradigm.

I invite you to also notice how the different aspects of the worldview necessitate and reinforce each other. Like any other broad, evolutionarily-driven worldview, it is not just a flimsy, replaceable belief system that one chooses to hold, but a self-consistent psychological system that correlates with the prevailing survival conditions.

I invite you to consider that even if your worldview is more liberal than the one we’re about to present, you still hold many traditional ideas, and these form a core part of your identity. As developmental psychology tells us, we all necessarily evolve through the traditional worldview, and this lives on inside us no matter how progressive we become.

I also invite you to appreciate that there’s an ongoing and necessary tension between the traditional worldview and the modern worldview. Sure, on the political scene they seem to create unending chaos rather than stable order. A priori, it seems life would be easier if we all simply held the same worldview.

But consider, instead, that these two worldviews are like poles that evolve one another. Liberalism pulls the tide of evolution forward, while traditionalism puts the breaks on it. Liberalism, with its zeal for change and advance, slowly seeks to improve via trial and error, while traditionalism maintains normality by signalling the problems and dangers of advancement. The tension is evolutionarily juicy. Together, slowly, we inch our way forward, and have been doing so for thousands of years.

I imagine many of my readers skew modern, liberal and progressive, and those holding worldviews of this kind often misunderstand and frivolise the traditional worldview. In trying to understand it, we must soberly ask ourselves why it exists, why it’s necessary, and why our worldview legitimately threatens the traditional mind. Only then will we truly grasp its nature.

To that end, we must recognise that all worldviews appear within a certain context that legitimises and necessitates them. When we carefully consider these contexts, the corresponding worldview becomes lucid and comprehensible, even natural for the context it appears in. When we attempt to understand worldviews out of context, they seem strange, misguided, loopy, even evil.

The traditional worldview is a kind of survival solution that has persisted for millennia. Only in recent times have large numbers of people been able to see its limitations and internal contradictions.

Thus, to grasp the traditional worldview, we must grasp the context for it. To see its context from above, from the perspective of the modernist worldview, we turn to the work of political scientist Ronald Inglehart.

Context for Traditional Worldview

One concept that runs through Inglehart’s work is that of physical and economic security and its influence on our values. He claims much of human behaviour and values is dictated by our level of security. Lack of security means our basic survival is in jeopardy. This has been the status quo for most of human history – our survival has never been guaranteed.

The sense that life is secure or insecure, Inglehart claims, is a relatively stable aspect of our character. It develops in our pre-adult years and has an enormous influence on our values. And since it’s more or less a lifelong trait, a society’s basic values tend to change slowly, on a generational timescale. Long time lags separate underlying value change and visible changes.

He has observed that conditions of insecurity lead to xenophobia, strong in-group solidarity, authoritarian politics, and rigid adherence to traditional norms.

Under these conditions, xenophobia is inevitable. If resources are limited, life becomes a zero-sum battle of my group versus the other group. Seeking protection behind a strong leader and guarding against outsiders is an effective strategy.

This survival strategy is called The Authoritarian Reflex, and a massive body of evidence suggests we’re predisposed to intolerance when under threat. This has been our default mode for most of history.

And Ronald Inglehart has found that the strength of this reflex varies by generation and that the level of existential security that generations experience in their pre-adult years is crucial.

Reinterpreting his conclusion in my preferred language, we can say that existential insecurity undergirds the traditional worldview.

Notice that I’ve not mentioned one particular form of traditionalist religion or politics. That is because this worldview has dominated since the first major empires and theistic religions came online.

This makes perfect sense when we consider the defining features of the traditional worldview, which we’ll do now.

Context for Traditionalism from Below

We must remember that Traditionalism, however allergic to it we may feel, was and is an evolutionary emergent. It evolves out of pre-traditionalism and into modernism, both in our individual lives and in human history. Its context from below is, therefore, pre-traditionalism. Understanding the pre-traditional world is crucial for grasping the role and importance of the traditional worldview.

In a historical sense, pre-traditional culture was warrior culture that ran on the “might is right” ethic. Power accumulated to those who had the means to accumulate and perpetuate it, and was transferred through bloody confrontation. Political rule was typically unstable and short-lived. There were no moral codes, no legal systems, no Ten Commandments, no civilisation. War, chivalry, conquest and domination were ever-present. It was anything goes, so long as you had the requisite power.

Pre-traditional development in modern individuals looks like uncivilised behaviour, disrespect for law and order, criminality, debauchery, pure impulse expression, aimlessness, guiltlessness, social dysfunction and lack of discipline.

From this bottom-up perspective, we can clearly see why the Traditional worldview is a crucial piece in the evolutionary story, both for individuals and groups of them. It brings discipline, respect, civility, self-sacrifice, decency, morality and purpose to the uncivilised, pre-traditional mind. It is the antidote to that chaos.

The Traditional Worldview: Defining Features

Doesn’t Perfectly Match Life Conditions

Before we look carefully at the Traditional Worldview, I’d like to comment that though I’ll emphasise some facets of this worldview as being primary and others as secondary, this worldview is not the result of logical deduction. As Inglehart suggests in his work, it’s a result of necessity.

Furthermore, when we’re born and raised in an existentially insecure environment, not only do we encounter the problem of our individual survival being precarious, but that the survival of those in our surround is also precarious. The result is that traditional values underpin the workings of our family, school, city and nation, not only our individual psyche.

Since elements of our early life sit at the kernel of our personality and are emotionally poignant, it means we’re likely to remain attached to these early traditional elements even as we find ourselves in other, perhaps improved contexts later in life. As Inglehart says, the sense of existential security is a relatively stable aspect of our personality.

That is, insecurity in our early years leads to traditionalism. However, we can remain absorbed in the traditional worldview even when our survival becomes relatively assured.

Now, let’s discuss these main features, assuming that existential security is their fundamental cause.

The Defining Features

In this worldview, we see life as being serious, a matter of life and death. Things are precarious: our survival, our financial stability, the safety of our country, and so on. Life is not primarily about exploration or enjoyment, but about practicality, making ends meet, hard-nosed decisions and the here and now.

In this worldview, fear, threat, risk and danger are acute. Indeed, for much of human history, we have been continually threatened by war, pestilence, political instability, natural disasters and economic turmoil. It’s little wonder that we feel insecure. Since these problems live on, so too does the traditional frame of mind.

The world is perceived as threatening and survival as precarious, so we must have clear ideas and build firm boundaries to make things more orderly, controlled and regimented. If we don’t, we risk becoming too frivolous and sloppy, and may suffer dire consequences, whether it be societal breakdown, social decay, familial disorder or personal disaster.

In the traditional worldview, the new is threatening because it hasn’t been tried and tested yet. We prefer the known, the established, the pre-existing, the status quo. It may not be perfect, but it has guaranteed our continuity. If we tinker, calamity could strike: it’s best to uphold the status quo, emphasise the positive and quietly tolerate the negative. This is why the traditional mind tends to be rather closed and suspicious of new technology, trends, ideas, discoveries and systems of thought.

It prefers tradition over progress and continuity over change. It is pro-establishment, because the establishments of church, law, state, school and media are stable, reliable institutions that protect national heritage and repress threats from the outside. Everything in the past lead us to today, and today is tolerable, so why change our ways?

As such, the traditional worldviews sees modernism and postmodernism to be extremely threatening. Modernism is about material progress, science, liberalism, technology and individual success, while postmodernism champions psycho-emotional progress, pluralism, environmentalism and egalitarianism. Both fundamentally value progress and openness. Thus, traditionalists view them as disruptive, risky, airy-fairy, wicked, even devilish.

New discoveries always threaten to undermine the established order and open Pandora’s Box, and many scientists were hushed or executed in the early days of the Scientific Revolution for this reason. In the Middle Ages, widespread questioning of religious orthodoxy could undermine the legitimacy of church and state, cause factions to surface, and set off a civil war or state of chaos, which is precisely what church and state aim to avoid. They repress and straightjacket people at least partially to maintain order, which is often precarious in traditional societies.

It sees the abstract as wooly, alien and impractical, and the concrete as certain, trustworthy and reassuring.

This worldview is patriotic and insular, even xenophobic. Home and hearth sit at the kernel of one’s personality. Emphasis is on family, heritage, tradition, scripture and culture, and foreign peoples and traditions seem alien and suspicious.

This worldview favours authority and hierarchy since they provide a sense of continuity, security and order, whether the sphere is religion, education, politics, family or work. Clear directives and retributive punishment keep the hierarchy in check and ensure smooth functioning. Thus, we’re conscientious, dutiful, conformist and loyal. Individual autonomy and proactivity do not fit within this worldview.

Another pillar of the traditional frame is that life is absolutistic, or black and white. There are two piles: the right way, the way my people and my country do things, and the wrong way, the way we don’t do things. Everything is found in neat, clearly delineated categories. Stealing is always bad. Abortion is always bad. Homosexuality is always bad. My country and people are good. Those who don’t follow these rules are sinners.

Finally, a crucial pillar of this worldview is monotheism. Traditionalists tend to frame ultimate reality as being a single. powerful, just creator, who is usually anthropomorphic and who distributes punishment and reward according to our adherence to rules and directives, which claim divine status. Religion means obedience to and worship of this prescriptive higher power.

Though we might flinch at this sort of religion, it’s part of a radical shift in worldview from pretraditional to traditional. As historian David Fromkin wrote, “one of the greatest revolutions ever in human affairs took place about the middle of the 1st millennium BC… it was the development of a conscience in religion and philosophy,” and, “the shift in view… to one in which the universe and its deities were seen to be informed by morality and salvation, was a kind of revolution.”

This is visible in the approximately simultaneous rise of Confucianism, monotheistic Greek religion, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, the Upanishads, Buddha’s Eightfold Path, Christianity and so forth.

Furthermore, in keeping with the other elements of this worldview, only one religion is understood to be correct or worthwhile. Other claims to truth fundamentally contradict the “correct” set of claims, so are unreligious, devilish and heathenous.

Healthily Integrating the Traditional Worldview

A key part of my work is to help you build an integrated and flexible personality. As such, I want to give some pointers on how to integrate the traditional worldview into your life.

Of course, since the traditional and the liberal worldviews form a dialectic, we cannot truly integrate one without integrating the other. As such, a healthy integration of the traditional requires a healthy integration of the liberal, and vice versa. This is true even if our tendency is to lean modern, liberal or progressive.

So, in my mind, healthily integrating the traditional worldview means skillfully balancing and moving between:

• strictness and laxness,
• new and old,
• tradition and innovation,
• constraint and freedom,
• now and later,
• the known and the unknown,
• collectivism and individualism,
• caution and liberality,
• closedmindedness and openmindedness,
• duty and desire,
• inhibition and spontaneity.

If you look carefully at your life, you may notice these pairs of traits share an internal tension. They contradict one another, both offer solutions, and both offer problems. In some situations, at specific points in your life, favouring the traditional approach is required. In a slightly different context, a more liberal approach is required.

For example, in parenting, the received wisdom is that we should be strict with children. If we’re not strict, they’ll do whatever they want, they’ll take drugs, drink alcohol, have sex, get in with the wrong crowd, and may ruin their entire life.

When we’re strict, children have structure, learn respect, contain their impulses, develop long-term thinking, and so forth. If we’re too permissive and lax, we find that children simply express all their impulses with no thought for those around them. I’ve personally heard of some harrowing examples of this.

However, we also find that being too strict can have the opposite effect. If we’re too strict, children eventually crack under the pressure, become rebellious and do all the things we dreaded. Or, we stifle their emerging independence so much that they become needy and never truly grow up. They fail to develop their own identity because they deeply internalise the desires and interests of the parents. Having been wrapped in cotton wool, they remain immature.

As you see, neither approach is really adequate. What’s required is balance, back and forth, interplay. Sometimes it’s right to err on the side of caution, other times it’s right to let loose.

Learn Spiral Dynamics, a developmental model that charts the stages of cultural and psychological evolution.