1 Boring Old Man

In my professional life as a psychotherapist – psychoanalyst – psychiatrist, I was exposed to a number of differing ideologies. But before that, I was a "hard" scientist – Mathematics, Internal Medicine, Immunology, Rheumatology. I kind of like ideologies – ways to think about things. But, they’re just ideas – formalized and dolled up with a lot of bells and whistles. They aren’t heaven-sent. They’re just something somebody thought, usually somebody smart.

Thomas Kuhn was a physicist who became interested in the history and philosophy of science in general. He spent his career teaching about and writing about what he called scientific paradigms. A short version of his thought goes like this. Science doesn’t proceed in a linear fashion. Someone comes along who introduces a scientific paradigm, for example Newton’s way of thinking about Gravity. There is great excitement about a new paradigm, and scientists begin to expand the new idea to broader areas. After a time, exceptions begin to appear. Some people begin to question certain of the assumptions made in the paradigm. In the case of Gravity. People began to question Newton’s calling it a "force." It "looked like a force," but that was hard to actually prove. The others noted that in atomic and astronomic cases, the "force" idea didn’t explain things as well as it did in our everyday life. And what about light? Large bodies change the path of light which has no mass. What’s the "force" acting on in that case?

Kuhn called this later phase of skepticism "paradigm exhaustion." The great new idea of Newton was running out of juice, losing its explanatory power. Comes now a guy named Albert Einstein. He tells us that Gravity is what happens when large bodies distort the space-time continuum. It’s not a force after all. This, Kuhn called a "paradigm shift." Suddenly, text-books are rewritten, and scientists are off and running with a new way to think about things. Einstein’s predictions are "proved" correct. There’s a point here. If you’re living here on earth, Newton’s still your guy. When you fall off of a ladder, I doubt that even the headiest physicist is thinking about the dirstortion of time by planetary bodys. Gravity is pulling me down! Yikes!

Which leads to another term, "paradigm competition." It’s a situation where two [or more] ways of thinking exist, side by side. And you pick the one that offers the most helpful explanation for the phenomenon at hand. And so back to my starting place, psychoanalysis etc. There are a wide variety of models for understanding the human mind. Brilliant models formulated by thoughtful people. And the models are often at odds with each other. How is one to negotiate among them in one’s dealing with real people?

First, they’re only models. They relate to real people sort of like model airplanes relate to transatlantic jumbo-jets, a good place to start but hardly the final answer. I am reminded of the Zen saying, "When you point at the moon, don’t confuse your finger for the moon." A model of the mind is a pointer, not the mind itself. Another helpful way to look at models is to know what circumstances the person coming up with the model was  dealing with. Freud was treating young adults growing up in one of the most sexually restricted societies ever devised this side of a convent. Little wonder that he discovered that the sexual instinct was a pretty big deal.

Ideologies, ways to think about things, can be very helpful. The can also get in the way and be destructive. If you’re dealing with a person who is fresh home from the Iraq War and a psychological wreck, ideas about the sexual instinct aren’t going to help very much. Look for another paradigm. If you’re a politician faced with a country that is spending irresponsibly, forget Reaganomics or F.D.R.’s New Deal. Start looking at the ideas developed by conservative leaders who successfully curbed runaway spending. On the other hand, in a country dipping into a Depression with frozen credit markets, maybe F.D.R.’s thinking might be a good place to start. If it doesn’t work, look elsewhere.

We’ve spent eight years being dominated by a rigidly ideological government with a number of beliefs that have been applied to all situations, whether they fit or not. To be honest, they haven’t even done that well, often shooting from the hip, rarely looking critically at the results, never changing course They’ve treated their idiosyncratic ideologies as if they were some version of absolute truth, and, in the process, made a fine mess of things. What we’ve got coming looks to me like it’s exactly what we need – pragmatism. That means doing what works, being open to all models, looking at outcome rather that rules, making up creative new models when the old ones don’t work. The divisive liberal/conservative dichotomy of our recent political history has been a nightmare. Lets hope that a "down to earth," creative, pragmatism will replace it and send all the idealogues to the paradigm-rigidity-hell where they belong.