Ways of Seeing

from Richard Ostrofsky of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed) www.secthoughts.com quill@travel-net.com April, 2011 Whether or not we happen to need glasses, we see the world through lenses of a sort: the paradigms through which we organize experience under some over-arching metaphor or model. I call the paradigm a kind of lens, rather than a filter, because it not only colors our perceptions, but magnifies selected aspects of these with corresponding distortion. Note that this choice of words lens rather than filter itself represents a choice of paradigm, albeit a very minor one. Only a little extra clarity depends on whether we see the paradigm as lens or filter, or in some other way. There is enough at stake for a writer to consider his choice of words, but for little else. By contrast, blood gets spilled over the choice between the Jewish, Christian and Muslim worldviews, for example, or over the choice between a top-down designed and ordained world and a bottom-up self-organizing one. People are apt to fight over their paradigms as if truth itself were at stake, and not just different ways of seeing. The reasons our paradigms are so important to us seem to be not logical, but biological. Facts are found tripped over, so to speak but paradigms and interpretations are suggested and chosen. Logically, it is possible and reasonable to draw this distinction, and to allow liberty to ourselves and each other in our ways of seeing, while demanding respect for facts and some obedience to local law and custom. Logic alone leads to pluralism. If you choose to see the world through a different lens than I use, there is no way I can prove you wrong. I might suggest that my lens affords a sharper view, or a view more useful for a given purpose, but that is as far as I can go. I end up as a pluralist, but not a relativist: I am bound to respect your choice of paradigms while still believing and arguing that my way is better, at least for some specified purpose. If people got into the habit of thinking this way, the world would be a safer and friendlier place. Debates would be civil, and people could disagree without becoming disagreeable or dangerous. This pluralist epistemology is itself a paradigm: specifically, a paradigm of knowledge. It's a commitment to allow other people and other cultures to perceive and organize found reality according to their own preferences, while asking that they leave you in peace and accord you the

same privilege. To "live and let live," in other words. We all know how often this principle gets violated; but the point of this article is that its difficulty seems to lie in our genes, and not in any logical necessity. The African savannah two million years ago was a much simpler world than ours, where it was healthier to be fast than always right. Our ancestors were selected for speed, sureness and confidence much more than for epistemological soundness. Occasional error in ambiguous situations was a more acceptable risk than hesitation confronting a leopard. There was another reason as well. Man is a social animal, strongly selected to be such. Our fundamental paradigms are not just personal ways of seeing, but battle flags that we rally around and fight under. Failure to rally in this way, under the flag of one's own group against the flags of others, was itself unhealthy. Deviance was dangerous for individuals, and groups that could not hang together against outsiders were doomed. Down through history, therefore, very few people have had (or wished for) the courage to be right about something on which everyone around them was wrong. For most of us, questionning the conventional wisdom of our group is terrifying to the point of impossibility even when the worst that will result is some degree of social isolation. Never mind, when heresy will get you burned at the stake. Facts are facts; and everyone has to acknowledge them, more or less. But we affirm and show our tribal loyalty by believing what everyone else believes, especially in matters like religion where there is essentially no feedback from brute reality. For these reasons, the evolutionary premium for humankind has always been on intellectual conformity and confidence, at the expense of timely, welljustified doubt. But in the modern world, all this has changed to some extent. With a global economy held together by global systems for trade, travel and communications, it would have been less divisive, and therefore much safer, to take the time to build those systems gradually and wisely rather than, as actually happened, in a headlong competitive rush. Though many individuals are already aware and vociferous about the threat of military and/or ecological disaster, corporations and nations are still racing to implement new technologies and systems as swiftly as possible, where it would be safer to take the time to get them right. It is obvious too that tribal loyalties unmatched by tolerance and civility are lethal not just, as they have always been, in the traditional sense of killing lots of people, but in the novel sense of wrecking the ecological niche of this high-tech society, and perhaps of the species itself. Evolution isn't finished with us. Predictably, in another million years, if humanity survives that long, its cognitive instincts will have changed to accomodate the requirements of life on a small and crowded 'spaceship' nothing like the open savannah that shaped us in the past. Meanwhile, the best we can do is to understand and try to live by the logic of our present

estate, whose conclusion is that a small planet dominated by a single species of great technological ingenuity needs political and managerial systems of a matching wisdom and competence, and that people who see the world differently, with different paradigms and priorities than ours, are still human and will have to be accommodated somehow.