The Story of An Incredibly Slow, Hesitating, and Ongoing Paradigm Shift
The topmost line, undivided, shows its subject solitary amidst the (prevailing) disunion. (In the subject of the third line, he seems to) see a pig bearing on its back a load of mud, (or fancies) there is a carriage full of ghosts. He first bends his bow against him, and afterwards unbends it, (for he discovers) that he is not an assailant to injure, but a near relative. Going forward, he shall meet with (genial) rain, and there will be good fortune.
From the 1899 William Legge translation of an Axial Age Chinese text, “The Book of Changes”
Context
Sampling the social media and mainstream media during this long period of hangover following the peak of the COVID19 excitement, there seems to be something of a cultural Jarisch–Herxheimer reaction going on. Many of those who turned out, after all was said and done, to be somewhat on the side of the angels can’t quite seem to stop, or even reduce, their hen-like clucking about the behaviors of the formerly overly excited and consequently hasty. And, many of those on the other side of the fence can’t quite admit, or stop committing, their earlier errors of snap judgment and seriously damaging behavior towards others.
Evidently, on both sides of the matter, the following static, ancestral and traditional view (Diamond 2012) of ingroup and outgroup others is really a very hard ‘demon’ to cast out of the human mind:
“People who agree with me and who are like me are perpetually correct and good, people who disagree with me and who are not like me are perpetually wrong and bad.”
[Paradigm 1]
This viewpoint has yet to be wholly supplanted by the more recent, more tolerant — and ultimately more cooperative — human viewpoints like these:
“The older I get, the smarter my father seems to get.” (Tim Russert)
“And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.” (The Lord’s Prayer).
[derived from Paradigm 2]
Paradigms: They’re 100% Correct Until They Are Not
Academic scientists often forget (or not even realize at all) that what they do professionally in their specialties is something that all other humans also do just as frequently in their generalities; i.e., collect and use accumulated perceptions to make sense of what is happening in their surroundings. When all is said and done, however, what matters most in all of this great flurry of professional and non-professional attempted sense-making is not the loftiness of the subject matter, but how well each individual’s personally- and group-accreted model of reality fits with what is actually going on.
Because the human sense-making processes of both scientists and non-scientists are basically alike, Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 scientific examination of the historical development of science itself, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, lends itself to an examination of the general human melee of model-making and model-utilization.
A “paradigm”, according to definition 3 of the word in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, is “a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated”. This particular meaning of the word rapidly spread into the English lexicon as a result of Kuhn’s critical use of the term in his popular 1962 book. See below.
Kuhn observed that scientific history is marked by sporadic revolutions where old, well-accepted paradigms are subsumed into a new, more encompassing and more generative ones. Kuhn termed these occasional revolutions in understanding and viewpoint, “paradigm shifts”.
The Paradigm Shift Process in More Detail
Borrowing from Kuhn further, see the picture below and note that while one paradigm about the drawing loudly shouts “duck!”, another equally loudly yells “rabbit!”. Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that the dominant paradigm is that the animal depicted is a rabbit. Next suppose -- despite the social dominance of this rabbit view of things -- that the original artist-scientist concerned admits that they think they just might have heard one very faint “quack” while they were busy drawing the little beast. What then?
For a paradigm shift from the old dominant rabbit paradigm to the new, potentially more accurate and reliable duck paradigm to conclusively occur, obviously more data would first need to be obtained about the physical attributes of the creature below the top of its neck – or more artist-scientists would need to visit the animal in its habitat to determine more definitively if it does indeed quack. If the animal turns out to have feathered wings, and/or is repeatedly determined to quack from time to time, a revolutionary paradigm shift with regard to this instance of small animal identification and classification could and would occur.
According to Kuhn’s examination and analysis of scientific history, there is a consistent sequence of events leading up to paradigm shifts:1
1. In the ‘normal science’, business-as-usual stage of things (see rabbit paradigm above), a dominant paradigm is active. This dominant paradigm is characterized by a set of theories and ideas that, among other things, define what is possible and rational to do, giving scientists working in a given field a clear set of tools and apparently safe assumptions to use to solve certain problems. However, under this normal science stage, from time to time scientists encounter anomalies or exceptions (e.g., a “quack” emitted from an apparent rabbit) that cannot be explained by reliance on the dominant paradigm.
2. Eventually, when enough anomalies have been noticed by those using a currently dominant paradigm, the scientific discipline concerned is thrown into a state of crisis. To address the crisis, some of the scientists working in the field start to produce, consider, and test alternatives and/or tweaks to the dominant paradigm in efforts to explain the bothersome anomalies.
3. Eventually a new paradigm is formed, which gradually gains more and more followers provided it explains and/or predicts natural phenomena much better than the old paradigm did before.
4. In the long run, the new paradigm becomes accepted as the dominant one.
5. Rinse and repeat.
The Old ‘Normal Science’ Paradigm Governing the Human Social Landscape
Again, the globally-dominant paradigm governing the human social landscape can be summarized thusly, and, again, it is a very old, very primitive one:2
“People who agree with me and who are like me are perpetually correct and good, people who disagree with me and who are not like me are perpetually wrong and bad.”
[Paradigm 1, repeated]
The central anomaly unaccounted for by the continued human use of this old, but still-dominant paradigm is that very frequently those who are disagreed with, and are therefore summarily labelled as ‘bad’, turn out, after the passage of some time, to be objectively and usefully correct in their past expressed judgments and points-of-view. The ramifications of this unhandled, problematic exception to the still dominant human social paradigm are legion, and run from slightly hurt feelings to disease, famine, riot, murder, and other human mayhem.
In physical science and mathematical economics, this sort of ‘me good, you bad’ paradigm is called a static model because it does not take into account any of the changes in a system and its components that occur or become evident over time. Not taking time and changes in the system over time into account, static paradigms of reality are, of course, poorly predictive because there are no systems in nature that are changeless.
The Up and (Still) Coming Dynamic Paradigm that Some Day May Govern the Human Social Landscape
The dynamic model making up the many human expressions, religious and otherwise, of tolerance-preaching paradigm two can probably be safely summarized thusly:
“All people live in the same reality,3 but different people eventually come to equally understand the various aspects of that reality at different times and at different speeds -- given enough time, and barring the negative effects of the different diseases that can sometimes afflict members of humanity, that is. In the meantime, there can and will be misunderstanding and disagreement among people – so, if there’s at all a choice in the matter, don’t harmfully make a big thing about such naturally inevitable conflicts.”
[Approximation of Paradigm two]
According to historical records, paradigm two, that partially expressed by Tim Russert and by the Lord’s Prayer of the Christian New Testament, started creeping and sometimes jumping into human consciousness in a number of different places in the Old World about 2500 years or so ago, at about the same time as trade contacts between geographically separated human groups became so common that coinage came into common use.
Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Confucianism, etc., all originated during this period of strongly increased culture-to-culture, person-to-person interaction that was defined by Karl Jaspers as the Axial Age. Note from above that this Axial Age period of time in the Old World, with all of its frantic philosophizing, corresponds to stage 2 of Kuhn’s paradigm shift sequence (see above). As Jaspers put it:
“The threefold historical form of the great advance of the axial age is something like a summons to boundless communication. To see and to understand others helps us toward the greatest clarity concerning ourselves, helps us to overcome that narrowness which is the danger in every self-enclosed history, and to make a leap into the distance. This venture in boundless communication is once again the secret of achieving humanity, not in the prehistoric past but in ourselves.”
There it is once again, that pesky free speech matter that keeps stubbornly surfacing in this, our mutually shared reality.
Given the continued loud hooting of the reactionary ‘me good, you bad’ primitive calliope machine emanating out of the oldest parts of the human spirit, however, it is clear that the young (it is only about 2500 years old, remember), more tolerant, and more patient paradigm two is still striving to assert dominance, and has so far only half-swallowed and half-subsumed paradigm one. See stages 3 and 4 of Kuhn’s paradigm shift sequence above for the apparent developmental coordinates of the current moment and, hopefully, the ultimate social landscape destination of us all.
This summary of Kuhn’s scientific revolution sequence is based in part on the summary of same provided at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift#Original_usage
See again, for example and explanation, https://www.amazon.com/World-Until-Yesterday-Traditional-Societies/dp/0670024813/ref=sr_1_1
Hence the Axial Age concept of monotheism, and the guiding viewpoint of modern science. Note that Buddhists would extend this paradigm two model to ‘all living beings’, not just people. Many dog, cat, and other animal owners would do the same.