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Basket-Foot-Golf: How Paradigms Work
In our last session, I teased you with some imagery.
Imagine walking on an athletic field and seeing a group of people trying to dribble footballs through a sand trap. Take second to really visualize that.
To our left, there is a coach talking about the proper golf club selections for the free throw line and goal line.
To our right, we see a person wearing shoulder pads put a big orange ball on top of a small white tee, and try to hit it with a 5 iron.
Behind us a person practices kicking a small dimpled white ball from behind the three-point line painted on a strip of grass.
One coach is teaching a seminar on how to score the most strokes. Another is teaching a seminar on how to score the fewest baskets. Which one is right?
As the participants go through this, they seem confused. Disoriented. Their activity doesn’t seem to have any particular purpose. It is just what they are doing.
What the heck is going on?
When we came upon this scene, most of us quickly recognized the orange ball as a basketball, the white ball as a golf ball, and the brown oblong ball with stitching as a football. The clubs people are using are golf clubs. The tees are golf tees and football kicking tees.
Of course the participants are confused and disoriented. They’re trying to play three unrelated sports simultaneously. They are confusing football, basketball and golf. Watching this, we know quickly that whatever they are trying to do, it will never work.
These three sports are all ways to understand and play a game, but they are very different.
Each sport is a self-contained system independent of the other sports.
Each sport uses the same words like rules, ball, team, playing surface, scoring and win, but the way each sport understands these words is very different. Sometimes the way each sport understands these terms is opposite.
Essentially, each sport is a different paradigm for athletic competition.
What’s a paradigm? A paradigm is defined as “A set of assumptions, concepts, values and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them.”
That’s the technical definition of paradigm. A much easier way of thinking about paradigms is the example we’re talking about. Football, basketball and golf are all different paradigms—different ways of understanding—how to play a game.
In football, you use a large oval ball, run plays and hit people hard. There are 22 positions with 11 on offense and 11 on defense. You move the ball forward by running with it or passing it. You can make one downfield pass per play. You score by running or passing the ball beyond the goal line, or by kicking the ball through goal posts at the end of the field. You win by scoring more points than your opponent.
In basketball, you use a large round ball and get kicked out of the game for hitting people. You move the ball forward by dribbling it or passing it. You are not allowed to run with it. You pass the ball repeatedly during play. The same five people play on offense as defense. Like football, basketball games have time limits. Unlike football, play is continuous through offense and defense. You score by tossing a ball through a hoop at the end of the court. Like football, you win by scoring more points than the other team.
In golf, you use a small, dimpled ball and move that ball forward by hitting it with a club. You never touch other players and time is not generally kept. While passing the ball is fundamental to the game of football and basketball, throwing a golf ball down the fairway will get you disqualified. You can play as part of a team, but you usually play as an individual. While football and basketball go back and forth on the same playing area, golf is played on 18 different areas. You don’t win by scoring the most points, but by scoring the fewest strokes.
Three very different paradigms for playing a game.
Clearly, this basket-foot-golf activity that we’re watching is a mess that frustrates everyone because they are taught conflicting, even contradictory, things and don’t make any progress.
Everyone is using the same words such as win, ball, team, score, rules and equipment, but are using those words in different and confusing ways.
In this basket-foot-golf activity, players are being taught that you win by scoring the most points and other times the opposite: that you win by scoring the fewest points.
It is crazy. Absurd.
Why Paradigms are Irreconcilable
So, what happened? What’s going on?
In this imagined scenario, several generations ago, only one of the sports was being played. Over time, the other sports gradually started happening in the same space at the same time. The sports became entangled and eventually merged into this chaotic basket-foot-golf mess embodied in dribbling footballs through sand trap and using 5 irons at the free throw line.
The participants don’t know that history. All they have ever known is this one merged basket-foot-golf activity.
There are some important lessons in this.
First, while these sports often use the same words, they mean very different things by those words. This makes everything very confusing.
Each sport uses a ball, but the ball in each sport couldn’t be more different.
Basketball and football use the same term—field goal percentage—but mean and measure very different things by it.
Take the concept of moving the ball forward.
Each sport has a different way of moving the ball forward.
In football you pass the ball or run with it. You never put it on the ground.
In basketball you pass the ball or dribble it. You never run with it
In golf, if you move the ball with anything but a club, you’re disqualified.
Now imagine the basket-foot-golf people having a discussion about moving the ball forward. Because each sport has differing—even opposite ways—of moving the ball forward, there is no common ground for discussion.
Some are going to argue for dribbling. Others are going to argue that putting the ball on the ground is the worst thing ever. Others are going to insist that it’s all about stroke.
If you try to have that discussion, you won’t get anywhere productive. You’ll simply have an argument that turns into an irreconcilable shouting match.
And that’s the first lesson. When paradigms are confused, the same words mean very different things, and that eventually leads to confusion, disorientation and anger.
Failure of the Paradigm Buffet
Second, in our society we tend to approach things with a “buffet mentality.” We like to look at different things, and then pick and choose what we like best to create something new.
So why not treat the sports paradigms like a buffet where we pick and choose what we like most from each sport and then combine them into something new and better?
Unfortunately, that buffet approach with these sports will inevitably end in failure. The sports are self-contained. You can’t mix and match.
You can’t try to maximize your score (basketball and football) while at the same time trying to minimize your score (golf). The concepts contradict each other. It won’t work.
Think of it another way. Imagine an electric motor, a gasoline engine and a jet engine.
The electric motor uses the interaction between the motor’s magnetic field and electric current in a wire winding to rotate a shaft providing power.
The gas engine sparks a fuel-air mixture in a piston that moves the piston up and down to crank a driveshaft providing power.
The jet engine ignites a fuel-air mixture creating tremendous pressure that is directed out a nozzle to provide power.
All of these are engines. All of them provide power. All of them are designed using fundamentally different approaches.
If you try a buffet approach to building engines, mixing and matching parts from the different engines, you don’t get a more powerful engine, you get something that doesn’t work at all.
The same is true about the sports paradigms and life. Any attempt to mix and match pieces between the paradigms—any attempt to play basket-foot-golf—will inevitably end in failure. People trying to do that will become disoriented, confused, frustrated and unhappy.
A buffet mentality won’t work with this.
So, what do we do?
Finding Anchor Points and Untangling the Paradigms
When you understand what’s really going on underneath this basket-foot-golf activity, you can untangle the sports. You can untangle the paradigms.
When the coaches and players see the anchor points of each sport—how that sport defines key things like ball, team, playing surface, scoring, winning, etc.—then they can use those anchor points to recognize and untangle the sports. They can use those anchor points to understand the sport and get really good at it.
When you realize what’s happening, and use the anchor points to untangle the mess and find yourself, the disorientation, confusion and anxiety gets transformed into clarity, excellence and fulfillment.
Why does life seem like an endless chase of pointless things? Why do we feel disoriented? Why are people getting anxious, burned out and depressed?
Because we are being taught conflicting messages from three fundamentally different paradigms of life.
We’re caught in a real-life version of the basket-foot-golf mess. We just don’t recognize it.
Our society has the same problem. We’re yelling at each other—we’re even getting violent with each other—because we have different life paradigms telling us opposite things at the same time.
One life paradigm says there is objective Truth versus another paradigm that says there is no objective Truth, only personal truth.
One life paradigm says there are moral facts, like it’s a fact that killing a person for fun is wrong, versus another paradigm that says there are no moral facts, just moral opinions. Morality and ethics are in the eye of the beholder. Who are you to judge?
One life paradigm defines racism as discrimination by race or ethnicity versus another paradigm that defines racism primarily in terms of Power.
We’re being bombarded with messages that tell us that life is about scoring the most points and simultaneously that life is about scoring the fewest points and its confusing and disorienting and where are the anchor points and my life is flying by while I’m just trying to figure life out and raise a family and do the right thing in the middle of this storm so no wonder that in the midst of more wealth and education and technology and prosperity than ever in world history people are getting more anxious and depressed and our kids are killing themselves.
Wisdom, Modern and Postmodern Paradigms
While flying a low-level training mission back in 1988, a bad compass took us off-course. It happened slowly. Things seemed right at first, but over time, my map and the terrain we flew over matched less and less. We knew that things weren’t right, but we weren’t conscious that we were lost. The divergence was slow and insidious. It almost got us killed flying through a tank gunnery range.
We didn’t realize that we were lost until we popped off the low-level route and climbed above it all. Air traffic control helped us find our anchor points. We got back on course and we landed safely.
That’s how we’re going to find ourselves—as individuals and as a nation—lost in the midst of the crazy, disorienting mess we call life.
We’re going to climb up above it all. We’re going to find our anchor points and untangle this mess. Then we’re going to get back on course to safety.
We’ll start by learning about the Wisdom Paradigm of life that is the foundation of most all the world’s great philosophies and religions.
That is, until the religious wars in Europe in the 1500s and 1600’s. The warfare and killing and suffering of that time were so great that people worked to create a whole new understanding of life: the Modern Paradigm.
The Modern Paradigm made some fundamental modifications to the understanding of life that changed the course of Western civilization.
At first, things didn’t seem too different. But over time, we got more and more off course, and the differences between where we were and where we thought we should be got too big to ignore.
In the decades around 1900, it became increasingly clear to some that the Modern Paradigm had broken down as a way to understand life. These philosophers, educators and others took what they thought were the lessons of the breakdown of the Modern Paradigm and, over time, developed a new, Postmodern Paradigm.
The Postmodern Paradigm began to gain influence in academia in the 1920’s—the years after World War I. People studied the breakdown of Modern thinking in the context of a truly terrible and modern First World War. It seemed like Modern thinking had led to the horrors of a that modern war.
People in their 20’s were studying postmodern thinking in the 1920’s.
Over time, these postmodern thinkers gained influence in academia until, in their 50’s and 60’s, they took over the department chairs and leadership of the colleges in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
No surprise, then, that we had a lot of turmoil in colleges and our nation in the 1960’s.
The rise of Postmodern thinking was not unopposed. Great teachers like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis wrote books like Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia and the Abolition of Man to counter the rise of that postmodern thinking.
Today, postmodern thinking dominates Western academia, and our society has several generations of students trained primarily in postmodern thinking.
It is not a coincidence that their anxiety, depression and suicide rates are climbing.
The Wisdom and Modern Paradigms didn’t disappear. Threads of Wisdom and Modern thinking are still quite influential in areas of our society. The deepest battles in our society today are really battles between the Wisdom Paradigm and the completely opposed Postmodern Paradigm.
Why are we yelling at each other instead of having rational discussions to solve our problems?
Because one paradigm says that the meaning of life is Happiness and the other says there is no meaning in life.
Because one paradigm says that logic is a great tool to pursue Truth while the other paradigm says that there is no objective Truth, and logic is a social construct—even a racist construct—used as Power to oppress the less-privileged.
That’s the disorienting basket-foot-golf stuff going on in our society. That’s what we must untangle to get back on course.
A few more things before we dive into the paradigms.
Political Categories Don’t Apply
First, that overwhelming tendency we have to categorize things in terms of Republican vs Democrat and liberal vs conservative?
We need to be clear that the conflicts between these political categories are not the same as the conflicts between the paradigms.
Remember the sports? Conservative versus liberal is more like the difference between the spread offense and the pro-style offense in football than it is like the difference between football and golf.
Second, it is common for us to play basket-foot-golf without realizing it. Writers and speakers often unknowingly mix their paradigms unaware that they are inconsistent or even contradicting themselves. They don’t realize they are talking about using golf clubs from the free throw line.
Don’t expect to find paradigm consistency within particular writers or speakers.
Third, this is a brief, not comprehensive, history of these paradigms.
We will be discussing the general directions of thought over hundreds of years. There are lots of cross currents and counter currents in thought through those times, but those don’t change the general direction of the overall thinking.
If something in these sessions doesn’t seem to fit in how you understand history or the dynamics of life, please drop me a question on my website and we’ll start a discussion to figure it out in good faith.
Let’s recap.
Summary
Just as football, basketball and golf are different, self-contained ways of playing a game, the Wisdom, Modern and Postmodern Paradigms are different, self-contained ways of understanding life.
While these paradigms may use the same words, the words mean very different things in each paradigm the same way that ball, offense, score and win mean very different things in football, basketball and golf.
The disorientation and conflict in our lives and society today are really a conflict between these three fundamentally different paradigms of life.
Here’s the plan.
We’re going to look at the history of these paradigms to find out how we got lost and how we get back on course.
We’re going to find that the Postmodern and Wisdom Paradigms are completely opposed to each other. In fact, as much as we’ve been taught—and rightfully so—about tolerance and co-existence, we’re going to find that the Wisdom and Postmodern Paradigms can’t co-exist.
In the end, we are forced to choose between Wisdom and Love on one side, and Postmodern Power on the other.
When we make the right choice—and the right choice is Wisdom and Love—we’re going to get a lot of clarity about life and our nation. This deeper understanding won’t just clear the air, it will make each of us much more successful in our work, our families and life itself.
This not going to be easy. Postmodern Power has built a huge amount of momentum against Wisdom and Love.
But adversity is also opportunity. The greatest adversities are the greatest opportunities to grow.
So, what is the history of the paradigms?
How can this help you do succeed in all aspects of your life?
Stay tuned for the next session.
I’m Pete Bowen.
Comments
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Peter Ganahl On August 7, 2019 at 6:03 pm
“But adversity is also opportunity. The greatest adversities are the greatest opportunities to grow.”
This statement is pivotal to making improvement and progress whether it’s individual, organizational or societal. The gritty high achievers in the three sports you mentioned use it every day to get better. Why don’t more people see this? There are many reasons but the one at the top of the list is that adversity presents a risk/reward tradeoff. Everyone wants the reward. Everyone wants the prize…but only a few are willing to get into the arena. We are entering (or have already entered) a time where the people of the wisdom paradigm must enter the arena against the post-modern folks because as you pointed out, the two can’t co-exist.