I don’t know who first referred to having a “burr under my saddle”, and the fact I studiously avoided looking it up while some won’t be able not to is proof of my pudding. (I forbore to look that up too, and the fact that I had to “forebear” as opposed to “chose not to” is further proof). Of what?
Thomas S. Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is regarded as a “must read”. I’d say it has the status of Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 The Medium is the Message. I think it’s proof why or why not Darwin will fall. Most of the notes I took when I read it 12 years ago are listed under my category of “Evolution”. But the burr under my saddle is: what if we had a paradigm shift and didn’t realize it? This is akin to the 60s antiwar movement saying, “What if there was a war and nobody came?”. And yes, perhaps my query is equally “pie in the sky.”
Kuhn says that scientific revolutions don’t happen till the current prevailing theory is shown to be wrong or not able to answer enough questions while a competing theory does. A new scientific theory about anything “is likely to occur only when the first tradition is felt to have gone badly astray” (86). “Einstein’s theory can be accepted only with the recognition that Newton’s was wrong” ( 98). I think now it is in vogue to accept both. Newton in macro things like planet orbits and Einstein is micro things like electron movement. Physical reality is both fixed and predictable which enables us to “shoot for the moon”, literally, but, apparently, random. (I say “apparently” random because to us who have to have a supercomputer to generate a truly random number it is, but there is no randomness in the Almighty.)
Let’s go a little further down these rabbit holes. Kuhn maintains, “In those other areas particularly persuasive arguments can be developed if the new paradigm permits the prediction of phenomena that had been entirely unsuspected while the old one prevailed” (154). “Probably the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they can solve the problems that have led the old one to a crisis” (153). Here I will give a breadcrumb as to the problem. I don’t think our old ways of communicating, assimilating information, or gaining knowledge led us to a crisis. Nevertheless, I think the paradigm shifted, and a whole generation of kids grew up on the new ways, and we didn’t realize it.
I think circa 1969 the paradigm shifted from the Biblical Order of Creation to feminist egalitarianism. The WW II generation who went to war to defend liberty couldn’t or wouldn’t hear any longer arguments for a God-given, created Order. So liberty, equality, fraternity (ironically, the motto of a nation we had to bail out in two world wars), became the New Order of the day. We reaped what was sown in the late 20th century and early Aughts. That fruit has ripened and rotted into transgenderism, gay marriage, and the only legitimate Order being Self, i.e. whatever I choose.
But that Order failing is not my burr. The burr is that the paradigm of how we gather information, accept information, use information in thinking, writing, and speaking has changed. We believe that because we’ve taken a picture of something, whether that be a scene, an event, a text, we “know” it. Allow me to give an example:
Edgar Allan Poe, early 19th century (Murders in the Rue Morgue), and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, late 19th (Sherlock Holmes), showed us the unique power of close observation to problem solving, think clearly, coming to conclusions. This paradigm held sway even to the 70s when I was in college getting my Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice (That degree right there is proof in the pudding of another paradigm shift inflicted upon us by the social sciences which are neither.). In a class, the door flies open, a figure fires 3 shots at the instructor and flees. The instructor gets up from the floor and says, “Quick. Write down everything you can to describe the assailant, his race, clothes, build, height, weight, weapon, shoes.” Most of us wrote little and got much wrong.
Here’s how the smartphone generation – those who are in a shifted paradigm of reality and have no idea and don’t appear to me to be educated to see it – would respond. “Well, we’ll just have closed circuit TV, or a digital recording going 27/7 and erasing once a week.” They are convinced not only does this solve all problems, but it doesn’t create any new ones. And if this is your view, guess what? Your paradigm has shifted, and perhaps seeing that will be a burr under your saddle and make you think about removing it or at least addressing it.
