Need a little change?
I’ve got a paradigm…s…I’ve got a paradigms…That’s a crap joke.
Written while listening to The Golden Hour by Firewater
The concept of the Paradigm Shift was popularized by the physicist, historian, and philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolution, published in 1962.
I don’t know if realizing that blew anyone else’s mind, but it shattered my worldview. I don’t know quite why I grew up with the concept of paradigm shift locked into how I understood humanity, but for some reason I did. History has paradigm shifts in it. That’s how I understand history: full of significant moments that mark a complete change in how thought works. That just made sense to me. I looked back over history and segmented it, in my head, into “before and after these events” sections.
The axiomatic examples are in physics. They’re the most famous and easiest to grasp.
(Ironic that they’re easiest to grasp since they essentially meant that “Truth” itself stopped working and then got rewritten, but I’ll leave that aside for now.)
One of the most famous paradigm shifts in physics is that whole Ptolemaic/Newtonian switch-over ordeal. That was a big controversy, and I theorize that it caused a whole population of magic-users to have nervous breakdowns.
Slightly less controversial, but just as important, was the shift from Newtonian to Relativistic physics. As a population, we seem to have felt the shift a little less, in terms of how it forced us to question decisions on a daily basis. That said, the thoughts we’re capable of thinking after the shift into an era of Relativistic physics are intrinsically different than the thoughts we were capable of thinking before that paradigm shift.
It’s a basic, but not a simple, truth: There are certain assumptions that you consider absolute, if you came into your imagination after 1905 when Max Planck started talking about relative theory, that you would be incapable of even imagining before 1904.
And that’s just nuts. It completed shattered and rearranged my world view to discover that the concept of the Paradigm Shift is newer than most of the significant Paradigm Shifts in history. These moments of violent, species-wide upheaval were clearly happening; I reasoned that the concept to explain them must be…well, older, at least, than the Theory of Relativity. I figured that the concept of the Paradigm Shift got popularized back in the 1800s, at least. A lot of interesting philosophy got did then. Paradigm ought to have been considered then too.
Apparently not.
Pause for effect.
Pause over.
The Paradigm Shifts in Physics have an annoying eclipsing effect…
On a bunch of Paradigm Shifts a little more personal to me
As a physicist and philosopher, as well as an historian, Thomas Kuhn’s idea of the paradigm shift has applied, phrased like that, more often to moments in physics and philosophy than elsewhere. But the concept, according to its denotative definition, applies accurately to moments in other areas of human output.
I love physics and I have a…touch-and-go relationship with philosophy. But they’re not nearest to my heart. Other areas are.
An example of a paradigm shift that has directly impacted my life:
The Battle of Hastings.
Fuckin’…Normans. Fuckin’…Gaulic aristocracy. Okay, so, I have William the Conqueror, in person — although, to be fair, not only him — , to blame for an apology I had to make to every student I ever tutored whose first language was not English.
The paradigm shift I’m talking about here might be a loose application of the concept, and it might be an entirely biased way of looking at it, and the shift in question might have happened slowly, but I shall contend with all the breath that’s keeping me off that medical gurney over there that the Battle of Hastings — that moment in history — marks the beginning of this complex pidgin, bastard tongue that we now refer to as English.
God, I love English.
Just as a tiny example of how the Battle of Hastings effected your life, if you’re a regular user of English:
(Phrasing it that way makes you sound like a drug addict, and English is your drug. That is intentional.)
That wasn’t the example. That was the ADD wandering in. Here’s the example:
The reason you say “beef/pork/venison/mutton” for the food but “cow/pig/deer/sheep” for the animal is because the aristocracy of the time were Norman invaders. They were fecking French! (Pardon my Gaulic.) So they never handled the animals. They handled the food.
The peasants handled the animals — the cows, pigs, deer, and goats. And the peasants were Saxon. Arguably, the Saxons were the remnants of what you might, historically, call “Real English people.” Although that gets fuzzy when you track early migration patterns of Celts and Germanic tribes and similar.
There are a lot of assumptions we make that we defend with compelling arguments like, “That’s just how it is!” that have derived from the Norman invasion of Saxon England. Most arguments about using a word in English “correctly” have their roots somewhere in the reasons that a tribe of uncivilized Saxons attempted to keep civilization off their island.
Now listening to Get Off the Cross by Firewater. Two album story.
Fast Forward Exactly a Million Years
The time-scape in this piece is, I admit, a bit sketchy. I’m not good at numbers. Maybe it wasn’t a million. Call it, I don’t know, fifty or sixty…. Somewhere in that range between a million and fifty or sixty years. Fast forward that far.
Fast Forward Somewhere Between Fifty or Sixty and a Million Years
When you’re a little kid, you encounter the excuse, “Because this is how it works,” fairly often. That’s a signal that you’re encountering some paradigmatic axiom, some incontrovertible truth, that’s considered basically necessary for the ongoing existence of the universe.
Or ignorance. That happens too. For the sake of argument we’ll pretend like it’s the paradigmatic axiom thing.
It’s the mark of a developing psyche to be capable of encountering and evaluating paradigmatic axioms. Sometimes we evaluate the axiomatic truths we’re told and we call them good, and we incorporate them into our developing consciousness. (Pain hurts — avoid it. Gravity works — fuck gravity. Organized society works by subtle cooperation — find how you work inside those boundaries or choose other routes.)
Some axioms sit less easily in the conscience. Axioms like “women are inferior,” or “that representational art you’re doing — that’s wrong,” or “these religious leaders speak directly for God.” At certain points in history, ideas like those were considered absolute truths, considered necessary for the correct operation of social interaction.
Certain axioms — “you have neither the right to nor capacity for education,” “oh, you think you can do this? I’m sorry that you don’t know the right people” — that held up civilized reality did not sit well with some individuals in history.
Those people, when they were told “this is how it is,” found it unacceptable, and they kept itching at whatever it was.
And they had revolutions that produced sex, drugs, and music.
My favorite example of one of these rock and roll revolutions…
The Italian Renaissance.
I don’t have a lot to say about the Italian Renaissance, except that, in a meandering way, it’s the main reason we talk to Your Friends @ Medium.
See if you can follow this:
- 1477–1480: Michelangelo paints humanistic representations of God and Jesus and various saints. So realistically, in fact, as to be clearly celebrating the humanity of the characters. His purpose was to uplift the Profane and bring it closer to the Divine. Many nay-sayers saw it the other way, viewing him as degrading the Divine. Much argument happened, resulting in a lot of people deciding to view Being Human as not only a fairly good BBC show but as a state worthy of admiration, not something to be embarrassed about. Eventually, the biggest effect that had was suggesting that you could rebel against God. Which led to…
- 1693–1700: The concept that Man: The Mortal can also be cool has spread throughout the western world sufficiently enough that a few imaginative sailors, discontent with their lot in the various navies of the superpowers of the world — England, Denmark, Portugal, etc. — see a window of opportunity. They commit various acts of mutiny against the captains of their ships, which was in general considered the same as an act of treason against heaven. (Ship captains were, necessarily, considered First Under God on their ships.) Then the discontented sailors start an economy based on equal profits and democratic voting. They do run around pillaging and so on, but they’d do so only after having appropriate committee meetings first, and everyone got a fair percentage of plunder. I am, in fact, talking about pirates here. Not long after this, example of semi-successful revolution against the status quo, various other groups of malcontents heard about these revolutionaries and read some of their writing. They then had revolutions of their own. Some noted dates in their stories are July 2, 1776, and January of 1793.
- July 4, 1976: In the controversial fallout of those revolutions, various ideas got touted loudly and repeatedly. One significant one was, “You can have fair treatment.” But fair treatment seemed to happen rarely, which got on a lot of nerves. One group of people whose nerves it got on played a concert in England, at a joint called the Roundhouse, on this day in 1976. They were called The Ramones. Partly because of this gig — which was attended by members of the Sex Pistols and The Clash, among others — partly because of this gig, we had a punk movement.
Now listening to Orange! by Firewater. This is a long story from my perspective…
- August 2012: One result of certain ideas included in the “It doesn’t have to be that way — we can improve it” ideal of the punk movement helped to produce the tech industry and what we call the internet. In August of 2012, an experienced techy called Ev Williams looked at the quo that we all accepted as status and he decided not to accept it, and he and his team launched Medium.
- Early 2016: In direct inheritance to the ideology that asked why foreshortening was blasphemous, Oliver Shiny asks some questions about an outmoded publishing industry. He experiences a lot of blow-back and begins to wonder whether he’s merely ignorant.
He knows he’s not ignorant. He knows that the publishing industry is broken and needs some overhaul. He can feel it in his marrow.
Have you ever thought to yourself…
“Well that’s a little jacked. Why is that like that?”
About any aspect of any branch of the publishing industry? Movies — comics — books — magazines — any of that. Have you thought any part of publishing was weird and thought to yourself, we could improve that…couldn’t we?
The answer is, yeah, we can improve that.
And I bring up all this, everything I’ve said so far, because in order for it to happen something’s going to need to change in how we think. I don’t know what needs to change, but I know that there’s a status quo in this industry that’s unfair and peculiar. To change it, some new thoughts about it need to be thought.
There won’t be one solution. There won’t be one fix. It won’t happen all at once. But it can happen.
It already is, slowly. There’s betterness happening in the necessarily slow and painful way that it’ll need to happen.
But it is happening. Stuff is improving. In direct inheritance of every other paradigmatic revolution that’s ever overthrown unjust dictators or supplanted an arena rock band or gotten a scientist hanged to death, we’re saying we’re not content with explaining our worries away with the words, “this is how it is.”
We’re thinking new things, because new things need to be thought up.
This won’t be the only good thing to happen to the publishing industry, but I am part of an organization assuming their role as mutinous sailors in the seas of multi-media publishing. We’ve begun building a piratical counter-culture. It’s time for it to happen. Long past, I think.
Come help push-start a new paradigm. Damn thing keeps dying the moment it goes off the lot. I think it’s a battery issue but, Ned insists it’s the fuel injectors and… Maybe I’m pressing this particular metaphor too far.
Forget about it.
But, really, do come say hello. We’re helping spark the next renaissance.
I know what you’re thinking…
No, I have no idea how to keep things simple. Yes, I believe the shite I spew. No, you can’t have my autograph. Yes, I do accept payment in oatmeal, but only on particular days.
What about you? Ever felt like you were standing on a lay-line of history? Ever wanted to fix something but you weren’t sure how to start? Ever wondered if the only reason you’re not considered a genius is because Leonardo DaVinci already invented whatever it is you thought of? (Mint hot chocolate! But with a twist: I make it without any milk. Ha, can’t have thought of that one, can he… Oh, he did? Okay…damn…)
