Amit Goswami, Ph.D.

It’s the Worldview, Mr. President

An Open Letter to President Obama

Dear President Obama,

            During president Clinton’s election campaign, the very effective slogan, ”It’s the Economy, Stupid” was coined.   Your slogan, “Change that you can believe in”, although perhaps not as provocative as Clinton’s, was not so entirely bad either.  It worked, didn’t it?  Even so, I think the phrase “It’s the worldview, stupid! ” would have been more relevant.  Please hear me out.

 Now that you are at the helm of the country and have started to institute changes, your changes more and more seem to be a mixed bag of ideas.  Almost everybody that voted for you and still supports you, feels a little unsure if he or she can believe in all of the changes you have begun.  In some of them,yes; but in others, we are not so sure. 

Speaking specifically, the required changes needed are about meaning and values. When you were campaigning, you got that one right Mr. president! When you put programs forward in favor of the middle class, universal health care, education, or green economy, you are unambiguously siding with meaning and values. No confusion there.  But when you side with programs for bailing out the financial investment banks like AIG, are you supporting meaning and values?  Hardly.  Mr. President, these financial organization typified by AIG have been some of the most unethical organizations in our country.  Money represents meaning; and as of itself, it has no inherent meaning.  So people who make money by gambling on money can hardly be said to be involved in a meaningful economic enterprise to help society (any more than ordinary gambling is meaningful).

            Your confusion on these questions is not unique Mr. President.  Almost everyone in our society, democrat or republican, is confused on this issue.  This is where the question of worldview enters in. On one hand, we have the religious worldview in which meaning and values are clearly and unambiguously important.  Science, in contrast, by and large is value neutral.  And physicists tend primarily to look at the universe as meaningless.

            By and large, the democrats have adopted the seemingly more scientific “secular” view, keeping religion away from the affairs of state and politics (even if that means becoming ambiguous about meaning and values). Republicans on the other hand find the compromise on values (morality to them) so repulsive, that they would rather side with fundamentalist Christians and embrace their rigid view of meaning and values than associate at all with secularism.

            So is it the old science versus religion debate, or just the science versus Christianity debate?  We know who will win that one.  In the last few years, quite a few books have appeared suggesting (with an echo of the nineteenth century philosopher Frederick Nietzsche’s slogan) that the Christian God that doles out reward and punishments for our deeds sitting on a throne in heaven is dead.  Recently, I saw an ad on a London bus, “God probably does not exist, so relax and enjoy life.”  The hidden message is, if there is no God to punish you why not equivocate on values and become a hedonist.

            Mr. President, some of the people in our financial investment institutions took this hedonist message too seriously developing the schemes that have produced the toxic assets that now clog our banking system.  What kind of message are you sending when you bail them out?

            I know you are not a hedonist, Mr. President.  I also know that you re not a believer of the simplistic God of fundamentalist Christianity either.  Your God is more sophisticated.  When asked during the campaign by an evangelical Christian preacher about confronting evil, you said, “Evil makes me humble.”  In other words, you don’t separate evil from good.  You can see that evil, like good exists within us all.

            Still, Mr. President, your answer confused the pundits who could not understand your depth.  They instead preferred your opponent’s forceful, simple answer, “I will defeat evil.” This is the problem.  We seem to be caught between the good/evil split view of the God of the fundamentalist Christian or the meaningless, valueless view of reality held by the average scientist.

            And now, Mr.President, your going to church furthers the confusion.  How can you believe in science (you must, or else why do you support evolution and stem cell research?) and still go to church to pray to God?  And if you are a true believer in the dualistic God, how can you support evolution?

            Mr. President, it is a worldview question that deeply divides this country.  When you were campaigning you were constantly expressing your ardent desire to integrate; “We are not republicans or Democrats, we are Americans”!

            Yes, we are Americans Mr. President; but so long as we identify with the wrong science (hedonistic science has to be wrong as a model of reality if reality upholds meaning and values) or the wrong religion (a dualist God), how can our differences be resolved?  So it is of utmost importance that we resolve the worldview issues.

            Now you may throw up your hands and say, “But those issues are so hard; the greatest of philosophers cannot resolve them.”  I hope not.  One thing we all agree upon, you are a fearless person and not afraid to tackle the difficult questions.  And you have help, Mr. President. For the past few decades, some scientists are trying to develop a new integrative paradigm of science that resolves the divisive issues mentioned above.  And I am one scientist who thinks we have succeeded.

            It’s the worldview, stupid!  If we are foolish enough not to resolve the worldview issues, then integrating us behind you to solve America’s problems will forever escape you.  But if you are willing to listen to the possibilities that emerge with the new worldview, what happens then?

            The new integrative science is based not on the primacy of matter like the divisive science that has helped create our current conditions, but on the primacy of consciousness.  Can one conduct science based on the metaphysical idea that consciousness is primary, that it is consciousness that is the ground of all being; including matter?  The unequivocal answer is: Yes, we can, Mr. president.  But we do need to heed the lessons of quantum physics.

            Ideas do get around.  To my surprise, David Brooks, a respected columnist of the New York Times, was chastising you in one of his columns because you are trying to tackle too many problems. “Why he (Obama) has not also decided to spend his evenings mastering quantum mechanics and discovering the origin of consciousness is beyond me.”

            There you are Mr. president.  Mr. Brooks must be clairvoyant.  In order to integrate the nation, in order to see our way through the complexity of  the meaning and value related issues that are destroying our economy and environment (as well as breeding terrorism in some parts of the world), you do have to discover a new integrative worldview, one that gives you both God and science.

In order to discover and reconcile that vital worldview within yourself, indeed you do need to spend a few evenings becoming familiar with quantum physics.