The Mona Lisa's Eyes, Trump's Lies and the Nazi's Worldview Warfare

Just look at her face. Mona Lisa - painted about 500 years ago - looks so contemporary, like any other face you might see on social media.

We now look at the world with the same eyes but very different worldviews.

As Lisa sat for this portrait, Europeans were just beginning to realize that they’d discovered new continents. The people in the Americas were people with very different worldviews that nonetheless included kings, priests, calendars, and economies.

During Mona Lisa’s life, the view of the world changed more dramatically than it ever had before. The very notion that we lived on a globe was new. Martin Luther was a member of the first generation of Europeans to grow up aware of the Americas. It is easy to imagine that living through such a radical shift in worldview gave him the courage to lead a revolt against the Catholic Church that had a monopoly on the authorized worldview of his childhood. View of the world .... worldview … it all collapsed into one during Mona Lisa’s lifetime.

The Nazis realized the power of offering new myths in a world where the old world of aristocracy and church had proven obsolete and the new world of technology and markets had failed so spectacularly with a world war and Great Depression. What others called propaganda the Nazis called Weltanschaunungkrieg, or worldview warfare. They knew that the first battle they had to win was in German minds, a battle of worldviews.

The economists might have it wrong. They attribute political unrest to economic stagnation, to median wage growth not keeping pace with the accumulation of wealth by the new generation of entrepreneurs. Perhaps instead it is the fact of economic progress that has created so much stress and discontent, has created demand for worldviews that aren’t upended by continual change.

Trump's continual lies dismayed so many of us. The volume of blatant lies seems to so clearly disqualify him for leadership. How can any group that denies reality survive, one can’t help but wonder. But maybe that misses a larger point.

As reality changes it forces continual updating to our worldviews. And of course, this is never a clean process. Updating worldviews creates new divisions, a continual competition between new versions. The Europeans who discovered a world of Mayan gods didn’t become Mayan but the reaction to this was one cause of the fragmentation in Christendom. When worldviews update, wars break out, national borders shift, families split and accepted philosophies revered in one generation aren’t even considered in the next. Facts force constant updating of our worldviews which can lead to the anomie (or loss of norms) that Durkheim claimed in about 1900 was a cause for suicides. Social progress that destroys worldviews can feel like anything but progress to people who feel their sense of self bound up in it.

In the wake of World War One, Yeats wrote, 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

A world of rapid change drives demand for a worldview that doesn’t. Change, that is. If it takes lies to protect it from constant change and updates, that is a small price to pay.

And in this we may have one of our more frightening conflicts, the conflict between our psychological need for stability and the imperative of progress that demands constant change. "The centre cannot hold." There is no easy resolution to this conflict. Our eyes, unchanged for generations, close at the thought of yet another change to our worldview, another change too much to bear. Lies are a price we are willing to pay to keep the old worldview.