What Lenses Do You Use To See The World?

By WCS Headmaster Dr. Roger Erdvig

​Theodore Roosevelt didn’t always wear his famous round spectacles. In fact, we find in his autobiography that it wasn’t until late in his childhood that he even realized that he was terribly nearsighted. Though he loved to study nature as a boy, he recalled that he was “always at a hopeless disadvantage” and befuddled because he couldn’t see—and yet was “wholly ignorant that [he] was not seeing.” When he finally got his first pair of glasses, “an entirely new world was opened” to him.
 
This is a common story… an elementary student struggles with paying attention in class but then gets glasses and everything changes. An aspiring tennis player can’t improve beyond basic proficiency until he gets glasses and suddenly he can see the ball just as it hits his opponent’s racquet and his game instantly improves.
 
These are great analogies for another kind of seeing—how we see, understand, and navigate the world around us. Philosophers call this a worldview, and as its name implies, it functions as the lens through which a person views the world. But beyond merely seeing, our worldview dictates how we live in the world.

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