
In this article, we’re going to cover the key aspects of the modern worldview.
This worldview has been among us for the last 300 years or so, and dominates to this day across the developed world, particularly in America, Europe and English-speaking countries.
I invite you to notice how this worldview buttresses modern 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 different than the one we’re about to present, you still hold many modern ideas, and these form a core part of your identity. As developmental psychology tells us, we all necessarily evolve through the modern 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 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. Modernism pulls the tide of evolution forward, while traditionalism puts the breaks on it. Modernism, 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.
In trying to understand this worldview, we must soberly ask ourselves why it exists and why it’s necessary. 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 modern worldview is a kind of survival solution that has persisted for decades. Only in recent times have large numbers of people been able to see its limitations and internal contradictions.
Thus, to grasp the modern worldview, we must grasp the context for it.
Context for the Modern Worldview
Ingelhart’s Explanation
Just as we did in the article on the Traditional worldview, let’s cover Ronald Inglehart’s perspective on the context for this worldview.
A key concept that runs through his work is that of physical and economic security and its influence on our values. He claims much of human values and behaviour is dictated by our level of security.
Lack of security means our basic survival is in jeopardy. Under these conditions, we seek a strong leader to protect us and defend us from outsiders. This has been the status quo for most of human history – our survival has never been guaranteed. This undergirds the traditional worldview.
On the other hand, when we do have physical and economic security, we begin to take our survival for granted. In advanced countries after World War II, a whole generation grew up under secure conditions. This was a result of post-war economic growth, the rise of the welfare state and The Long Peace. With the added influence of population replacement and continued growth, enormous societal and cultural change has taken place in these countries.
If we hold Survival values, we give top priority to economic and physical safety and conformity to norms. On the other hand, secure conditions lead to greater autonomy and tolerance of outgroups, openness to new ideas and more egalitarian social norms.

With sufficient security, we can move towards Self-expression values and place emphasis on gender equality, tolerance of outgroups, freedom of expression, and political participation. Countries holding Self-expression values are likelier to adopt legislation favourable to gays and lesbians. They tend to rank well on the UN Gender Empowerment Measure.
Inglehart also claims that value changes precedes institutional change. He has observed that, while Self-expression values can exist without democracy (like in authoritarian societies around 1990), democracy can’t exist without Self-expression values.
After World War II, industrialisation, urbanisation and mass literacy allowed the working class in Western countries to have greater political say. This lead to governments that put welfare systems in place. Starvation became almost non-existent and life expectancy reached new highs.
Therefore, Inglehart traces how modern advancements brought radical social change and an expansion of the modernist worldview. Though we can trace the modern worldview back to the American Constitution and the French Revolution, Inglehart’s work reminds us that existential security is a key factor in our psychology and outlook.
The Historical Context for the Modern Worldview
A fundamental truth of this worldview is that it fights against the traditional worldview and all of its manifestations, like top-down rule, the union of church and state, theism, war and conquest, ethnocentrism, and so on.
We can trace modernism all the way back to The Age of Reason, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when scientific reasoning began to transform our world. It’s visible in the proliferation of scientific discovery, the rise of democracy, the Industrial Revolution, the granting of equal rights to all citizens and liberal political movements.
Just why this happened is a delicate and nuanced topic that would require much investigation. In a general way, we can say that growth is built into human beings, and inevitably new mutations of consciousness (a Gebserian term) come online as a result of the limitations of previous mutations.
The modern worldview came online historically as a means to transcend the traditional view that dominated for two to three thousand years. It is what enabled our development beyond the religious myths and feudal governments that dominated in the Middle Ages.
This worldview impacts all of 21st-century life, from law to education to technology to business to advertising to social norms to philosophy to sexuality, and more. For that reason, it can be somewhat tricky to identify it: it’s too close to us.
In our personal lives, it tends to come online in our high-school years, where we’re taught to develop rationality, logic, objectivity and reason. We begin to break the shackles of being a good boy or girl and form our own identity.

The Modernist Worldview: Defining Features
The values of the modernist stage are different from and in many ways antithetical to the values of the traditional stage… the ongoing tension between the enduring traditional level and the spectacularly successful modernist level reveals the structure these dialectically related stages of historical development.
Steve mcintosh
Lying at the kernel of this worldview is the premise that the world is a relatively safe place, where risks can be taken and opportunities pursued. Thus, we’re open to new ideas, we’re adventurous, and we’re willing to reinvent the wheel. We’re focused on the potential gains rather than losses. Life is about exploration and enjoyment.
Its circle of concern is relatively wide. It appreciates the importance of different cultures, marginal groups, differing beliefs, and even other species, at least to a greater degree than the traditional worldview. It values citizen rights and guarantees equality by law.
Its view of economy, politics, law and industry is worldcentric or global: it forms global supply chains, currencies, trade agreements, political alliances and so forth. It prefers to trade and compete with other countries rather than war with them.
It views the world as measurable, objective, physical, three-dimensional, predictable and linear. By using the scientific method and performing empirical experiments, we can decipher its secrets. As such, it firmly rejects myth and superstition. This worldview underlies and buttresses all of modern science.
Under this worldview, phenomena are result of natural, logical processes rather than the gods. A storm comes not as a form of divine punishment, but because of weather patterns. It seeks objectivity and objective fact in all areas.
Thanks to the success of the scientific method in its creation of material prosperity, effective medicine and new technology, the material worldview is self-perpetuating, and has led to physicalism or materialism, where only solid, physical reality is considered to be real.
Its firm insistence on evidence and explanation also leads to scientism, which scorns non-scientific approaches. It tends to equate intelligence with one’s ability to manipulate concepts and figure out abstract problems, as measured by the IQ test.
Its baseline for truth is not the authority providing it, but the empirical facts that support that truth. If a truth proposition is based on the scientific method and empiricism, it’s worthy of consideration. If not, then not.
Its attitude is one of questioning rather than accepting received wisdom. Scientific methodology enables any individual with the requisite desire and tools to discover new truths for themselves, by their own means, and equips them with a solid method for critical evaluation. This stands in firm contrast to the traditional world, where we had to trust the Holy Book or the sage on stage.
Inevitably, this worldview is also secular and undergirds systems of thought such as atheism, secular humanism, existentialism and Marxism. We can’t measure God, we can’t see God, so how can there be one? Furthermore, our advance as a species depends on our own resources and ingenuity, not on divine intervention.
It fights fiercely against the traditional, God-centred worldview, distancing itself from it, critiquing it, and explaining it away with scientific discoveries. This is inevitable because its epistemological foundation essentially contradicts that of the traditional worldview.
As Ken Wilber noted, “we went from a world where God is everywhere to one where God is nowhere”. The modernist no longer feels seen and loved by God, but by mathematics, science, logical order, reason, deduction, advancement and intellect.

When the modern worldview dominates a person’s mind, the world can seem meaningless, directionless, random, boxy, purely physical. Modernists tend to deny that life possesses a greater meaning, or a divine meaning.
Loosening the shackles of devout obedience, the modern mind now values individual expression and prosperity. Its prime value is the acquisition of status and material possessions. It views the world as being full of opportunities to win and achieve. Other people are viewed as competition or accomplices to one’s own achievements.
The modernist worldview sees people as individual wholes with the right to determine their own destiny. This correlates with the rise of personal achievement and “self-authoring”. We question authority and conformity, and declare “I’ve got to be me”. This attitude, along with industrial change, opened up upward mobility for large swathes of the population and saw the rise of the middle class.
In modern countries, individuals enjoy greater liberty as granted by agreements such as the American Constitution. The world becomes a meritocracy, where the winners are those achieve and accumulate. Indeed, philosopher Steve McIntosh claims that free enterprise was as crucial as the scientific method for the rise of modernism.
The afterlife isn’t what matters: this life is. If we live longer, fuller lives and are able to express ourselves and accumulate wealth, we’ll be happy. It typically trusts in the perfectibility of humankind through scientific and technological advancement.
Healthily Integration of the Modernist 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 modern worldview into your life.
Since the traditional and modern worldviews form a dialectic, we cannot truly integrate one without integrating the other. As such, a healthy integration of the modern requires a healthy integration of the traditional, and vice versa. By striving to achieve this, we become fuller, more effective people.
Healthily integrating the modern worldview means skillfully balancing and moving between:
- laxness and strictness,
- old and new,
- innovation and tradition,
- freedom and constraint,
- later and now,
- the unknown and the known,
- individualism and collectivism,
- liberality and caution,
- openmindedness and closedmindedness,
- desire and duty,
- spontaneity and inhibition.
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. The modern worldview tends to favour the first quality in each pair.
In some situations, at specific points in your life, favouring the modern approach is required. In a slightly different context, a more traditional approach is required.
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.
Follow Deep Psychology and join tens of thousands
of like-minded people today.