What is Worldology

Worldology is a term I coined back in 1984 during my first year as a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. Back then there was really no pressing need to speak of globalization regardless of the fact that the process was well under way. Worldology was to be the name of a newly emerging social science discipline; it would follow the hierarchical tradition of naming disciplines based on the unit of measurement that they collected data upon for empirical investigation.

Psychology deals with and collects data at the level of the individual, Social Psychology deals with the behavior of individuals as they interact as groups and Sociology deals with the investigation of human institutions, the largest of which are presently nations and religions. Worldology would deal with the newly emerging unit of the whole “world” as its unit of measurement.  

Global consciousness would be the ultimate unit of organization possible for the human race. A journey that began some 100,000 years ago with the possibilities born from the evolution of the language organ giving us the ability to form progressively complex and increasingly encompassing social dimensions. After over a 100 millennium of ebb and flow, we stand at the verge of the possibility of a world unite. Social systems of reciprocally predictable behavior, which began with tiny groups of isolated humans towards its ultimate capacity of the complete world, have evolved to a point where today we stand at the threshold of our final human frontier of global consciousness.    

Generation from here on in will be faced with the daunting task of human organization at a scale that was neither possible nor that can be exceeded. Worldology is conceived of as a social scientific discipline that acts as a platform for the evaluation, investigation and facilitation of this newly emerging opportunity. An opportunity to preserve the biodiversity of our planet in all its forms and to work together toward global awareness and a world at peace, cognizant that we all live in one ecologically whole unit. There is only one world; the boundaries that we have drawn are mere blots of ink, meaningful only to the minds of one creature, humans. Boundaries have come and gone and they will for ever transform as we realign our allegiances and paradigms of co-existence.    

The idea of Worldology came to me after writing a final paper for my MA degree in Social Psychology at Bogazici University (Istanbul, Turkey). In the paper which was titled "Critical Review of Social Psychological Theories" one of the dimensions that I compared various theories upon was -how universally appropriate the theories were. In other words, were theoretical findings universally applicable cross culturally. I had concluded that most theorists agreed that when social psychological theories were reduced beyond social attribution of meaning that they lost their usefulness, and that meaning was anchored in language.  

Having grown up nearly symmetrically bicultural between Swissvale, a small suburb of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, and Istanbul a megalopolis of the East, I was well aware of the impact and importance of language and culture on perception. It dawned on me that for social psychological theories to be universally applicable that all people would need to be speaking the same language and thus be referring to the same source of extracting meaning.  

The next question was, would, at some point in time, everyone in the world speak the same language and truly understand each other, and if so how quickly would such a global reciprocity of awareness develop. Back in 1984 the globalization craze was just beginning to unfold as new technologies emancipated the individual with increasingly more power. Individuals were being bombarded with new opportunities to participate in novel situations and expand their perceptions beyond the boundaries of their own nations. The flattening of the world, to use Thomas Friedman's term, was just beginning to compress cultures into one big playing field.  

Globalization was well on its way but to speak of a global consciousness was still the stuff of musical imagination. The real world seemed to be launched into a spiral of polarization rather than moving toward world peace. The concept of Worldology was more of a deduction from the relationship between language and behavior rather than an observation induced by reality.  For years it was hard to discuss the concept with anyone other than a close group of academic friends.  But those days are past and after some 25 years, it's time to discuss how this process will unfold and nurture the emergence of a discipline that will work on behalf of the needs of the world as one ecologically diverse whole.