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Metaparadigms

By Scot Rhodes

My fascination with how people fail to live in harmony has lead to an interest in paradigms. In previous editorials I have talked about "metaparadigms." This is my word for sets of rules to allow the harmonizing (or at least coexistence) of otherwise incompatible paradigms — fundamental models for handling our fundamental models. My concern is that we still have too much difficulty dealing with pluralism. We are still too afraid of it. We still want too much to homogenize it; and there is too much of a tendency to homogenize even when we try to avoid it.

I have recently wondered if metaparadigms are such a novel idea. It could be said that any worldview necessarily contains, implicit or explicit, ways of dealing with other worldviews. Thus metaparadigms would be a teased out aspect inherent to any set of paradigms.

Reductionist mania makes it so tempting to pull out subcategories I must take care that the complexity metaparadigms add comes with sufficient benefit. My hope is that in "creating" metaparadigms we can extract conflictive aspects of world views, leaving as much as possible of the rest intact — opening the door to harmony with minimum homogenization, thus a minimum threat to people's world views/identities/egos. If it works, I think its worth while.

Metaparadigms should be explicit; otherwise it's more an unconscious behavior than a mental model. For instance, if you believe those with a different worldview are untrustworthy because they have a different worldview (described as religion, culture, politics, etc.), that is clearly a metaparadigm. If you don't trust those who believe differently because "they are a treacherous people," that should be distinguished (perhaps as an "implicit metaparadigm") because it is of a sufficiently unconscious nature to require very different strategies in addressing it. It is perhaps worth noting that those who believe different from us are indeed "less trustworthy," at least on a subjective statistical basis. In the historical/evolutionary sense this would be because such people would be much less likely to be members of our tribe, with its political and genetic implications. In the more immediate sense this would be so because the more another's beliefs diverge from our own, the more difficult they are to predict. (Which is translates into trustworthiness). Another's unpredictability plus our own unpredictability in the other's mind can easily create a positive feedback amplifying a misunderstanding into a disaster much faster than we can compensate. Hostile metaparadigms are not trivial fears. It seems likely that they are so strong and so old because they served so well. But the world in which they served so well is gone, never to return short of an apocalypse.] To oversimplify: believing "they" are treacherous because they think differently is a metaparadigm because it invokes a set of rules for dealing with people of different paradigms. Believing "they" think differently because they are treacherous is an implicit metaparadigm because it invokes an emotional response to different paradigms, but not rules, and possibly not even the awareness that "they" have different paradigms (however the concept of paradigms manifests in conscious awareness). As the story goes, "barbarian" comes from the Greek "barbaros," referring to non-Greeks, because the Greeks believed that outlanders had no language — they only made noises like "bar bar bar." To have rules for dealing with different languages, you have to believe that different languages exist. To have rules for different paradigms you have to believe that other people can think and that they can think differently on that fundamental a level.]

Metaparadigms can be competitive, tolerant, or cooperative. In any set of metaparadigms one would expect all three styles to some extent, varying with circumstances. For instance, a right-winger might believe that Communism must be destroyed, and Democrats tolerated, while middle of the road Republicans might actually have some useful new insights. And the fall of Communism might change a tolerant view toward repressive allies to a competitive stance. On a larger scale, American society has destroyed or engulfed so many societies that got close to it, and insists upon many of its own aspects as global standards of the only possible good. Yet, "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it" is an example of America's higher aspirations. And the idea that we are better for the many contributions of different cultures in our melting pot represents our most harmonious paradigm (though unfortunately it seems to apply mostly to the past and within our borders).

Competitive metaparadigms seem to be dominant. They certainly make the headlines in the papers and the history books: ethnic cleansing, the crusades, the Mideast, the Inquisition, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Proto Indo-European incursions, and on and on. It's easy to suspect a Darwinian selection of metaparadigms, which actively try to out compete others.

Perhaps on some level it was recognition of a change in the environment that gave birth to these old metaparadigms that inspired the turn toward tolerance embodied in the Bill of Rights, for instance. Once the human population was concentrated and organized enough to assure its survival, it not only had a reduced need for homogeneous paradigms, but also had such an increased level of exposure to other paradigms that hostility was becoming self-destructive. The overall diversity that ensured the species' survival used to be spread among many locally homogeneous pockets with limited contact. With the success and expansion of those selected, contact became less limited. Diversity needed to be contained within the few larger versions of the once small tribal pockets for us to avoid the hazards of monoculture. And diversity had to be tolerated to keep huge states from fragmenting back into more tribal sized units. Even a state as "small" as Yugoslavia could not hold itself together without tolerance.

Tolerance might be enough to address all our problems. It has certainly allowed some remarkable achievements, such as modern mega-states, and a peaceful end to the Cold War might have been impossible without it. But we would need much more tolerance to give it a fair try at the many remaining problems. And yet we seem to be shrinking from tolerance lately. I hesitate to say this because it seems to be a ubiquitous conclusion over the millennia. It's possible that we tolerate more now, but it seems like less because the demands on us are so increased. It's easier to "tolerate" people when they never eat at the wrong lunch counter or sit at the wrong end of the bus. Also, improved communication leads to increased reporting. And the definition of intolerance could be becoming more sensitive. What used to be not killing someone becomes giving him or her a fair chance at a job and not making fun of them. But whether it's us backing away from the goalpost, or the goalpost racing ahead faster than we can follow, or simply the nature of our perception, we still seem to need more and more tolerance than we have.]

Tolerance is tough. When you hate someone, it's easy to want to get rid of them. It takes a constant conscious will to treat them with the respect that you do not feel they deserve. It is much easier to live with a cooperative metaparadigm, where respect is not grudging.

A cooperative metaparadigm assumes that paradigms other than our own offer something unique. This allows us to participate in diversity with more possibilities and a broader group consciousness than is possible in a monoculture. It does not require the maintenance that a tolerant metaparadigm demands because diversity is welcomed — it is not just the cost of being left alone. However, it takes a much greater initial investment to change to a cooperative metaparadigm.

In a competitive metaparadigm you get to believe you have the Whole Truth and do whatever you like to those who do not. In a tolerant metaparadigm you still can believe you have the Whole Truth, you just have to leave alone those who do not so that they will leave you alone. A cooperative metaparadigm requires you give up the idea of having the Whole Truth. You can believe you've got part of it, or your version of it, or none of it, or that there is no such thing, but you can't believe that others have no useful paradigms different from your own (even when they conflict). Somehow your paradigms are "incomplete."

Such a notion opens to conscious contemplation mental processes normally hidden, their influence as transparent to our consciousness as the retina's visual processing. This is a momentous step; for nearly all-human history (and all pre-human history) it was too dangerous (i.e., not fitness maximizing) to open these paradigms to consciousness under any circumstances short of catastrophic. Before sophisticated communication, especially before writing, the limitations of the conscious mind in time and space (a few generations living together in a group of less than 300, which could not range very far over the planet) left it ill equipped to safely amend the rules for survival embodied in paradigms manifesting as taboo, tradition, and other inflexible aspects of culture. Ancestors too adept at questioning the time-honored wisdom of the tribe were probably selected against, because that wisdom had been shaped by millennia to keep people alive. There is plenty of good, Darwinian reason to avoid changing paradigms under any but the most extreme conditions. Analysis of population, environment, communication and the other novel aspects of our modern world indicate clearly that we do face such a crisis if we fail to change, but we do not readily experience it as such since changes are incremental or limited in scope.

The challenge/curse/reward of metaparadigms is an expansion of the realm of consciousness. Metaparadigms are conscious of paradigms (though not necessarily self-conscious). This is not our usual state. Ask a scientist "why reductionism?" You'll hear it is the way of the world. It has been proven so (by reductionist means). Ask a Fundamentalist "why God?" and you'll hear about finding watches in the forest and a Bible that is True because it says so in the Bible. Paradigms are transparent so our consciousness cannot be tempted to noodle with them. So cooperative metaparadigms not only present the spectre of changing noncooperative aspects of our paradigms but also of becoming conscious of all of them. Certainly a momentous and desperate act, but perhaps our easiest path in the long term.

Paganism, as a minority and a reconstructed religion, offers us an advantage in this quest. Few of us grew up Pagan, or even in a Pagan-friendly world. Often we had to think consciously about what religion we wanted to be, even if the attraction was unconscious. Beyond that, we (or others we are aware of) often had to consciously (re) construct much of our religion, or our version of it. Thus for so many Pagans, religion, as a fundamental embodiment of many paradigms, was open to conscious consideration in a way that is historically quite rare, and still unusual even today.

I admit I often long for the feeling I imagine would come through living without a conscious sense of having created and pieced together my religion; but more often I am excited at the prospects of this kind of conscious self-awareness. But my hope is to learn how to have the feeling I want and the prospects I enjoy.

Blessed Be!