Let's Shift That Paradigm a Bit More

I introduced one line of thought in my previous post, How Do You Splint a Broken Paradigm?, that needs a bit more filling out.

While I wrote almost exclusively about the fall of my anti-religious world view in that post, that event coincided with a number of other worldview issues.

My faith in the academic world was taken down several notches by a list of things: The discoveries that I talked about in my earlier post that historians had repeatedly affirmed falsehoods for more than a century, my increasing awareness of just how politically uniform Western historians and academics in general are, and my occasional run-ins with histories and other academic work written with what seemed to be ideologically-driven (instead of fact-driven) methods.

My faith in journalism, never particularly high, was lowered further by the abysmal coverage of the war during the Bush presidency and increasing evidence that the field of journalism was as politically monolithic as the academy.

Finally, once I realized that the realm of information, both the academy and journalism, were almost completely in the sway of a single ideology, I understood the course of events in America differently. America has flirted with technocracy from the mid-nineteenth century, at least, and we may have finally reached it. Whether we have or not, the university is the high ground; whoever holds it determines the direction of American culture.

The combination of blows to what I thought I knew and the sources that before had seemed more trustworthy really produced severe doubts about what could be known about anything going on in the world. The political domination of the academy and, through it, other institutions, made me doubt that there were very many who would even try to tell the truth if it conflicted with their socio-political goals. (It's quite possible they couldn't see it as the truth; paradigms guide us, but they also give us blind spots.)

Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, wrote that a group of people, such as the members of a scientific community, cannot discard a paradigm, no matter how flawed, until they have a new one to replace it with. Without a guiding paradigm there is no way to accomplish anything, and we can always say we're working out the flaws, even if what we're really doing is changing paradigms entirely.

I'm not sure what new paradigm is shaping up here, but it is one that is far more politically aware, and one that views things through the lens of progressive domination of the university and all of the institutions that rely on it. It is obviously far more skeptical.

Something it isn't is belief in a conspiracy, or a belief that all or most journalists or academics are bad. I believe most of them are just people doing their best in a flawed world. In some ways that makes things easier, but in others harder. But, that is a post for another day.