Look at my pretty paradigm!
John Michael Greer is at his best this week, writing about paradigm change. He writes about the difficulty of change, the way that our paradigms prevent us from eve being able to ask certain questions, much less answer them, and in describing the thinking of some dude called Thomas Kuhn he shares this bit of brilliance:
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.)
So basically, the paradigm you just threw away because it is old and useless still explains certain parts of life, the universe and everything better than your shiny new one does.
Go read the whole article, and while you are there dig into Mr Greer’s archives and subscribe to his feed. I know he writes about peak oil and ecology, but if you want to understand why the white western evangelical church is failing, why most of the church is stuck talking about the possibility of rearranging the deck chairs on our Titanic, and WHY the things that Alan Hirsch, Floyd McClung, Frank Viola and even Brant Hansen are saying are so important, then I can think of no better teacher than John Michael Greer.
24 April 2009 Jeff Gill
tags: change,
church,
humans,
john michael greer
...stuck in a linear rut, imposing patterns of one-way flow on a universe that consistently moves in circles
This has stirred up my thinking about a bunch of different things that I hope to write about soon, but for now this will serve as a good reminder for me.
28 February 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: humans,
john michael greer,
quotes
Grids
In which I neatly jump from graphic designers’ grid systems to the internet’s most famous archdruid to the historian Arnold Toynbee to a church in North Carolina to the bible to you.
Image borrowed from Mark Boulton’s grid systems design tutorial
Graphic designers use grids…
Keep reading
14 February 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: church,
design,
john michael greer,
leadership
Ah, Spring. The sun is shining. The trees are blossoming. The druids are writing blogs.
I don’t usually start the day wondering what The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America has to say, but you never know where the life (or the internet) will take you. A blog I read linked to this article about peak oil (basically, a so far accurate theory for predicting the rise, peak and decline of production in any oil field. This theory predicts that oil production for the whole earth will peak this decade.) The entire article was interesting, but this is what really caught my eye:
…human thought is mythic by its very nature. We think with myths, as inevitably as we see with eyes and eat with mouths. Thus any attempt to bring about significant social change must start from the mythic level, with an emotionally powerful and symbolically meaningful narrative, or it will go nowhere.
In other words, what really matters to people, what really creates change is
- the stories, not the facts
- the heart, not the head
- the love, not the being right
- the feelings, not the thoughts
You cannot bring someone into the family of God through a rational argument. They must come through Jesus, a person who told stories that touched people’s hearts. He showed love in ways that were meaningful to first century people — healing, feeding, casting out demons. He made people think, oh yes, but even more he aroused great feeling in people’s hearts.
The Grand Archdruid’s article, The Failure of Reason is longish, but excellent reading. Go check it out.
4 April 2007 Jeff Gill
tags: humans,
john michael greer