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Welcome back to our ongoing series about the history of the ongoing conflict in America—and how we fix it.
In our last three blogs, we discussed the basics of the Wisdom Paradigm—the dominant way of understanding life for thousands of years—for almost all cultures, religions and philosophies.
The Wisdom Paradigm teaches us that human nature has been the same through history, and that we all have the same destination in life, the same purpose, which is Happiness, fulfillment.
Happiness comes from having good relationships—with ourselves and with others.
If Happiness is our destination and purpose, then we use our reason to figure out how to get there.
Reason tells us that it’s a fact that if we practice virtues like honesty, justice, wisdom and love, we will become good people prepared for good relationships and Happiness.
Finally, the Wisdom Paradigm sees human relationships as fundamentally covenant relationships where the good of the team and the good of the individual are the same. The more you put into the team, the better you get. The more the team invests in you, the better the team gets.
Covenant relationships are the highest-trust, highest-performance and most stable relationships possible. In the deepest covenant relationships, people are willing to die for each other out of love.
The Wisdom Paradigm was the right track for the ongoing development of humanity—until we took a wrong turn and got off track several hundred years ago.
What happened? What got us off-track?
Religious Wars in Europe
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe was overcome by a series of religious wars that raged for hundreds of years.
These religious wars devastated large parts of France and Germany, and led to the deaths of millions of people. The wars took a terrible toll on Europe, impoverishing millions more and driving governments to bankruptcy.
In many areas, there was anarchy as rival armies marched back and forth, plundering everything. Civil wars broke out as people took advantage of religious differences and bankrupt rulers to take power themselves.
The suffering throughout Europe was enormous and long-lasting in a way that is hard for us to understand today. Think of the devastation of the civil war in Syria, but across Europe and for a hundred years.
People and nations became exhausted and impatient by the suffering that seemed to be unending and systemic.
Thinkers began to search for a new way to understand life—a new paradigm—that could get them out of the terrible religious and political conflicts.
They needed to find a way for people of different religions to live together without killing each other. This led to the is the rise of political philosophers like Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau that you may remember from your political sci class in college.
The Modern Paradigm–Reason Alone
The Wisdom Paradigm is based on a foundation of purpose and reason. As we said in earlier blogs, our purpose, Happiness, is our destination in life and reason tells us how to get there.
Ever since Europe had become Christian, faith had taken the role of purpose. So, for European Christian civilizations, the equation was essentially faith/purpose and reason. Faith provided the purpose, the destination (salvation), and reason helped people understand what was needed to achieve salvation.
The horrific wars in Europe were over religion, over faith, over what people understood to be their purpose or destination in life.
So, for many European philosophers, the answer to ending the vast suffering was obvious. Let’s drop that thing, faith, over which we’re killing each other, and reconstruct our entire understanding of life in terms of reason by itself.
They do that by splitting life into public and private.
Instead of the Wisdom Paradigm’s understanding of life as a unified whole focused on Happiness, the Modern Paradigm splits life into your public life and your private, or personal life.
Public life is what reason can more easily discuss. Public life is the quantifiable side of life.
Private life contains the things that reason has difficulty discussing, like faith, love, purpose and meaning, because they are either hard to quantify or they are personal.
The modern philosophers believed that to get to objective Truth, it was very important to eliminate the superstitious influence of faith and religion. So, modern thinkers put faith, religion, purpose and feelings all into the private side of life. These subjects are not matters of reason. They are subjective. Matters of personal opinion.
The public side of life is where reason can be applied to pursue the Truth. Objective Truth. The public side of life includes business, politics, science and other subjects that can be analyzed using reason.
At first, morality was on the public side of life. But over time, as morality became more difficult to justify with reason alone, it appeared to become more subjective. Morality became more a matter of opinion than fact and moved from the public side of life to the private side.
Today, most young people consider morality to be a subjective, personal issue.
When this division of life into public and private happened in Europe, pretty much everyone at the time in Europe was Christian. So, while faith and purpose are put in our personal-private side of life, everyone pretty much shared a common understanding of our purpose in life—Happiness and salvation.
We just don’t talk about it publicly as a community.
Keep that in mind—that we stopped talking publicly about purpose, Happiness and salvation in life—because that will come back to haunt us after a few hundred years.
So, for public life, no more purpose plus knowledge. The Modern Paradigm bases everything on reason alone.
Basing this new, Modern Paradigm, on reason alone seemed to make sense. Reason is a powerful tool that seems to point us reliably at the Truth. Reason is something all rational people share, that we can use together outside of religion to get to the Truth.
In other words, we’ll stop basing our understanding of life on something about which we violently disagree (religion) and base it on something on which we all agree (reason).
And so many of the philosophers of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries introduced us to the Age of Reason and the Age of the Enlightenment. Collectively, they helped reconstruct our understanding of life, moving us from a Wisdom Paradigm based on faith/purpose and reason to a Modern Paradigm largely focused on reason.
What’s really important to remember here is that purpose—becoming good and achieving Happiness—no longer serves as the central, unifying element that ties our understanding of life together. The Modern Paradigm has switched it to r
Human Nature
In the Wisdom Paradigm, we have to understand human nature to understand life, our purpose in life and fulfillment. Human nature is the starting point for everything that follows including morality, relationships, Happiness, work and the meaning of life.
In the Modern Paradigm, with purpose and Happiness moved from public life to private life, understanding human nature is not as important.
Imagine a person suffering deeply from a question about the meaning of life. In the Wisdom Paradigm, when you ask, “What is the meaning of life?” the answer is obvious: to achieve Happiness.
The Modern Paradigm has a problem here.
On the public side of life, the Modern Paradigm can study human nature from a scientific perspective. We call that psychology and psychiatry. A scientific understanding of how the mind works in individuals and how minds work in groups is valuable in a wide variety of areas including educational, industrial and social psychologies.
But when it comes to purpose or meaning, the Modern Paradigm hits a roadblock.
Remember that science, on the public side of life, can tell us the how and the what about things, but—because the Modern Paradigm rejects purpose—science cannot tell us about the why of things.
So, science cannot tell us about our purpose or meaning in life. In the Modern Paradigm, questions about purpose or meaning or why are relegated to the private side of life.
When a person who is really suffering from a question about the meaning of life, modern psychology is going to be unable to answer that question. With the modern separation of life into public and private, questions about human nature and purpose are usually tackled in terms of one’s religion or spirituality.
And so, with the Modern Paradigm’s separation of life into the public and private, deep questions about the meaning of life get two hard-to-reconcile answers.
You get one answer from the Modern psychologist in public life and—almost inevitably—a very different answer from a minister in your private life who is coming from the Wisdom Paradigm.
Over time, this inability for the Modern Paradigm to talk about the deep, most important questions about life is going to cause huge problems for our society.
When people think that there’s no meaning or purpose in life, bad things happen.
From Wisdom Covenant to Modern Contract Relationships
The breakdown of society in the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries made Modern philosophers take a new look at human relationships.
Modern thinkers started with the idea that humans are radically free individuals in a state of nature without basic, pre-existing relationships with others.
These individuals have lots of freedom to do whatever they want, but don’t have much security, because other people are free to do bad things to them.
So, the Modern Paradigm says that people come together in a social contract where they give up some of their freedom to the community and get more security in return.
The Modern Paradigm tends to treat all relationships—from family to business—as essentially contract relationships.
The modern understanding of contractual relationship is very different than the understanding of covenant relationship in the Wisdom Paradigm.
Remember that in the Wisdom Paradigm, people are understood to be fundamentally social beings in covenant relationships. The more that you put into the the team, the better you become.
The more that the team invests in your skills, character, teamwork and leadership, the better the team becomes.
Because the good of the team and the good of the individual are the same, covenant relationships are high-trust, high-performance and high-stability.
The Modern contract relationship is the opposite. What’s good for the individual and good for the team are opposite.
Take the example of employees and companies.
The way the Modern Paradigm sees things, employees want more money for less work and companies want more work for less money. What’s good for one is bad for the other.
Employees need jobs and companies need workers, so eventually they negotiate a contract. They establish a contractual relationship.
What’s good for the employee and good for the company are, by definition, opposite, so contract relationships are low-trust, low-performance relationship without much stability.
In the contractual relationship, you literally get the relationship you pay for.
The modern concept of contractual relationships doesn’t just apply to employment relationships, but to all relationships in the Modern Paradigm.
Your relationship with your business partners, your clients, your doctor, attorney and accountant, and even the relationship you have with your family are all, at their core, understood to be contractual relationships.
Modern Purpose of Communities
In the Wisdom Paradigm, the purpose of all teams is to become good by helping the people within the team become good. This applies to all teams including businesses, government, family, military, non-profits, sports, neighborhood and churches.
In contrast, the Modern Paradigm rejects the idea that there is some underlying, shared purpose for all teams and communities.
Instead, the Modern Paradigm teaches that the purpose of a team is based on the reason the team was formed.
So, the purpose of a business is to make a profit. The purpose of a non-profit is to provide a service to the community. The purpose of the military is to defend the nation. The purpose of an athletic team is to win games. The purpose of a church is to worship. The purpose of a family is to raise children.
Modern Motivation
In the Wisdom Paradigm, people are motivated by their desire for Happiness in life.
Since the Modern Paradigm can’t talk about purpose—about Happiness—publicly, it has to find another way to talk about motivation that can be measured in terms of reason. Something that’s quantifiable.
So, the Modern Paradigm understands human motivation primarily in terms of money, power or fame.
Other motivations, like a search for meaning or Happiness may exist. They’re just hard for reason to quantify. So, motivations like fulfillment are put on the private side of life and not talked much about on the public side of life.
Think about job advertising. It is almost always a job description plus the salary and benefits. Except for non-profits and the military, how often do you see work advertising talking about fulfillment?
Modern Morality
In the Wisdom Paradigm, morality is objectively true because it is a fact that virtues like honesty, justice, wisdom and love, help us become good, have good relationships and achieve Happiness.
There are moral facts because it’s a fact that the virtues get us to our purpose in life—Happiness. In the Wisdom Paradigm there is an objective morality with moral facts—like it’s a fact that slavery is wrong.
And that whole Wisdom idea that there is an objective morality with moral facts is based on purpose.
When the modern philosophers drop purpose out of public life, they have to find a whole new way to prove that morality is objectively true, that there are moral facts. They have to create a new justification for moral facts that is based in reason alone.
Let’s go back to our journey from New York City to San Diego.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, it is a fact that southwest is the right direction because it’s a fact that traveling southwest gets us to our destination, our purpose, San Diego.
The Modern Paradigm basically takes our purpose—San Diego—out of the public side of life and drops it in the private side of life. We’re not allowed to talk about San Diego as our destination on the public side anymore.
So, in the Modern Paradigm, we have to create some new reason for why it’s a fact that traveling southwest is right and true. A new reason based on reason alone—not on the destination.
Modern moral philosophers spend the next few hundred years trying to prove an objective morality based on reason alone.
Two of the best-known attempts are Immanuel Kant’s principal-based ethics in the late 1700’s and John Stuart Mill’s consequentialist ethics in the mid-1800’s.
While strong efforts, both these approaches to establishing an objective morality based on reason alone end up failing.
Drop me an email or make a comment if you want to know the specifics of why they fail. There’s some cool, good stuff in that discussion.
As the effort to establish an objective morality based on reason alone falls apart over time, it becomes more difficult to discuss morality as a community in public.
Morality begins to move from the public side of life to the private side of life. And when morality moves into the private side of life, morality is increasingly understood to be a matter of opinion and not fact.
The failure of the Modern Paradigm to establish an objective morality is a big problem on its own, but its also a symptom of a much deeper, inherent flaw in the Modern Paradigm itself.
We’ll talk more about that in the next two podcasts!
WRAP-UP
So, let’s wrap up our first podcast on the basics of the Modern Paradigm.
The Modern Paradigm comes out of centuries of terrible religious wars in Europe.
Modern thinkers attempt to construct a whole new way of understanding life—the Modern Paradigm—based on reason alone.
They do this by splitting life into public life and private life.
Things that are easily discussed in terms of reason—like business and science—go on the public side of life.
Things like religion, faith, and our purpose in life go on the private side of life.
This new Modern Paradigm applies to all areas of life: art, theology, science, education and social relationships.
That leads modern philosophers to replace the Wisdom Paradigm’s covenant relationships with modern contract relationships. Wisdom covenant relationships where the good of the individual and the good of the team are the same are replaced with contract relationships where the good of the individual and the good of the team are opposite.
Because what’s good for the team and the individual are opposite, modern contract relationships are low-trust, low-performance and unstable.
Modern philosophers use disciplines like psychology to attempt to understand human nature on the public side of life, but there are deeper questions about the meaning of life—on the private side of life—that modern psychology can never answer.
Modern Paradigm attempts to understand human motivation run into the same problem. The Modern Paradigm, based in reason, wants to talk about motivation in terms of quantifiable things—like money. Even though people are more deeply motivated by things like fulfillment on the private side of life.
Finally, modern philosophers try to develop a new justification for an objective morality based on pure reason alone.
As we’re going to find in the next podcast, they are going to fail. The modern failure to establish an objective morality with moral facts will foreshadow a much larger breakdown in understanding of life.
Stay tuned for the next session.
I’m Pete Bowen.
