[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] A Struggle of Paradigms

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (April 22 2009)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


Perhaps the most fascinating factor shaping today's debates about the
future of industrial society, and certainly among the most frustrating,
is the rapidity with which any such debate plunges into territory
outside the reach of rational argument. Watch a conversation about the
subject, and nearly always one of two things will happen: either the
participants will find they share basic assumptions in common, and will
proceed to build a conversation on that firm ground, or their
assumptions will differ and they'll spend the rest of the conversation
talking past one another.

Any number of examples could be cited, but the one that comes to mind
just now is the way that communications break down over the subject of
environmental limits. It's no exaggeration to say that either you
believe in limits or you don't. If you do, it seems glaringly obvious
that modern industrial civilization, which depends on ever-increasing
exploitation of finite and nonrenewable resources, is in deep trouble,
and the only viable options are those that jettison the fantasy of
perpetual economic growth and aim at a controlled descent to a level of
energy and resource use per capita that can be sustained over the long run.

If you don't believe in limits, by contrast, such notions are the height
of folly. Since, according to this way of thinking, progress can by
definition overcome any limit nature might impose on human beings, it
seems glaringly obvious that modern industrial civilization needs to
push progress into overdrive so that it can find and deploy the
innovations that will get us past today's problems and launch our
species onward toward its glorious future, whatever that happens to be.

Readers of this blog will have little trouble guessing the side of this
division on which I can be found. As a student of ecology, I've learned
that environmental limits play a dominant role in shaping the destiny of
every species, ours included; as a student of history, I've reviewed the
fate of any number of civilizations that believed themselves to be
destiny's darlings, and proceeded to pave the road to collapse with
their own ecological mistakes. From my perspective, the insistence that
limits don't apply to us is as good a case study as one might wish of
that useful Greek word hubris, otherwise defined as the overweening
pride of the doomed. Still, the fact that these things seem so
self-evident to me makes it all the more intriguing that they are
anything but self-evident to most people in the industrial world today.

This same territory was mapped out the year I was born, from a different
perspective, by Thomas Kuhn, whose famous book The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (1996) is as influential as it is rarely read.
Kuhn was among the first historians of science to put the popular image
of scientific progress to the test of history, and find it wanting. In
place of the notion that science advances toward objective truth by the
steady accumulation of proven facts - a notion that continues to shape
histories of science written for popular consumption - he showed that
scientific beliefs are profoundly shaped by social and cultural forces,
and that the relation between scientific theory and the facts on the
ground is a great deal more complex than conventional ideas allow.

Kuhn's take on things has been misstated often enough that it probably
needs a summary here. During a period of what he calls "normal science",
scientists model their work on a paradigm. This isn't some sort of vague
worldview, in the sense too often given to the word recently; rather,
it's a specific example of science at work, an investigation by an
exemplary scientist and the successful and popular theory resulting from
that research. In bacteriology, for example, Louis Pasteur's research
program in the 1870s and 1880s, which led to the first successful
artificial vaccines, became the paradigm that later researchers
followed; good bacteriological research - in Kuhn's terms, normal
science - was research that followed Pasteur's lead, worked at
fine-tuning his theories, and asked the same kinds of questions about
the same kinds of phenomena that he asked and answered.

Sooner or later, though, a mismatch opens up between the paradigm and
the facts on the ground; the research methods drawn from the paradigm
stop yielding good answers, and the paradigmatic theory no longer allows
for successful prediction of phenomena. Scientists respond by making the
theory more elaborate, the way that Ptolemy's earth-centered cosmology
had to be padded out with epicycle after epicycle to make it fit the
vagaries of planetary motion. Crisis comes when the theory becomes so
cumbersome that even its stoutest believers come to realize that
something is irreducibly wrong, or when data emerges that no reworking
of the paradigmatic theory can explain. Sooner or later the crisis
resolves when a researcher propounds a new theory that makes sense of
the confusion. That theory, and the research program that created it,
then becomes the new paradigm in the field.

So far, so good. Kuhn pointed out, though, that while the new paradigm
solves questions the old one could not, the reverse is often true as
well: the old paradigm does things the new paradigm cannot. (Sailors who
navigate by the stars still use Ptolemaic astronomy, for example,
because one of the questions it answers elegantly - what does the
movement of the heavens look like from Earth? - is awkward to work out
using the Copernican system.) It's standard practice for the new
paradigm to include the value judgment that the questions the new
paradigm answers are the ones that matter, and the ones the old paradigm
does better don't count. Nor is this judgment pure propaganda; since the
questions the new paradigm answers are generally the ones that
researchers have been wrestling with for decades or centuries, they look
more important than details that have been comfortably settled since
time out of mind. They may also be more important, in every meaningful
sense, if they allow practical problems to be solved that the old
paradigm left insoluble.

Yet the result of that value judgment, Kuhn argued, is the false
impression that science progresses, replacing relatively false beliefs
with relatively more true ones, and thus gradually advances on the
truth. He argued that different paradigms are not attempts to answer the
same questions, differing in their level of accuracy, but attempts to
answer entirely different questions - or, to put it another way, they
are models that highlight different features of a complex reality, and
cannot be reduced to one another. Thus, for example, Ptolemaic astronomy
isn't wrong, just useful for different purposes than Copernican
astronomy. (From the standpoint of relativity theory, please note, this
is quite correct: since there are no fixed points in the cosmos, only
frames of reference, it's as meaningful to take an earth-centered frame
of reference and calculate the movements of the planets from there as it
is to take a sun-centered frame of reference and do the same thing.)

All these same considerations sprawl outside the limits of the sciences
to define the rise and fall of paradigms in the entire range of human
social phenomena. This brings us back around to the irreconcilable
differences that introduced this post, for the difference between the
believers and the disbelievers in limits is, at root, a difference in
paradigms. Those who believe that modern industrial society is destined
for, or even capable of, unlimited economic expansion have drawn their
paradigm from the industrial revolution and its three-century aftermath,
with James Watt and his steam engine playing roughly the same role that
Louis Pasteur played in the old paradigm of bacteriology, say, or Isaac
Newton still plays in some aspects of physics. Like any other paradigm,
the industrial revolution defines certain questions and issues as
important, and dismisses others from serious consideration.

This is where the problems arise, because a solid case can be made - and
this blog has tried in various ways to make it - that some of the
questions dismissed from consideration by the "normal culture" of
industrial expansion are among those our species most needs to face just
now, as the depletion of fossil fuel reserves and the soaring costs of
environmental damage become central facts of our contemporary
experience. The industrial paradigm can only interpret running out of
one resource as a call to begin exploiting some even richer one. If
there is no richer one, and even the poorer ones are rapidly being
depleted as well, what then? From within the industrial paradigm, that
question cannot even be formulated; the assumption that there is always
some new and better resource to be had is hardwired into the ways of
thinking that the industrial paradigm makes inevitable.

Thus a change of paradigms is necessary. The belief in limits discussed
earlier in this post derives from a different model of this kind - the
model of ecology, which is still sorting out its historical vision and
has not yet quite found its paradigmatic theory, researcher, and
discovery. (Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Charles Darwin are among
the current contenders.) From within this paradigm, the models that
provide the most insight into our contemporary situation are those found
in nonhuman nature - specifically, the cycles of increase, overshoot,
and dieoff which afflict so many other species that rely on outside
forces to control their numbers. Unless we take that model and its
implications into account, the ecological paradigm suggests, some of the
most important factors shaping our future are completely out of sight.

The change from one paradigm to another, however, is not an overnight
thing. Kuhn points out that in the sciences, it usually has to wait
until most of the older generation of scientists, who have been trained
in the old paradigm, have been removed from the debate by old age and
death. The same thing is too often true in other fields. Thus it's
uncomfortably likely that even as the industrial paradigm fails to
explain an increasingly challenging world, a great many people will
cling to the faith that progress will bail us out. Meanwhile, those of
us who have made the Copernican leap to a universe in which human beings
are no longer central will have to accomplish what we can on the smaller
scales available to us.

_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent: A User's
Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/04/struggle-of-paradigms.html


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