Etiology of Incremental vs Fundamental Shift in Paradigm

My post is not as nerdy as the title suggests. My undergraduate advisor asked me to do an independent study based on Thomas Kuhn's "The structure of scientific revolutions". At that age, I got bored with all the philosophical jargon, and ended up doing a study on defence spending instead. But every few year, I try to go back and attempt to read the book to see if my maturity has caught up yet. So far it hasn't. I still find it boring and dry, but I appreciate it nonetheless.

The jargon word I picked up from Kuhn was "paradigm", and every time someone utters this word in front of me, I burst out laughing. Anyway, my post is about change in belief system, or, if you will, belief in moral paradigm (I'm laughing as I'm writing it).

I was sitting at a deadly boring meeting the other day (I seem to attend a lot of them lately) with a lot of high flyers, and struck up a conversation with someone who was observing lent. Lent, or the catholic concept of giving up something for six weeks prior to Easter, is not very common in Bangladesh, so I was asking how long s/he has been observing this. I was expecting a response in the vicinity of 18-20 years, but the reply was 8-9 years. I didn't comment on it, but it struck me as another of those 9/11 effect.

Whatever your views of 9/11 are, you gotta agree that 9/11 had a profound effect in the global psyche. It made americans more pro-american, it made the muslims more muslim, it made the nutty nuttier, it made the compassionate more compassionate. In chemistry we read about a process called sedimentation, where a foreign body is introduced in a suspension (a solution mixed with another substance), and that helps the suspended substance to precipitate at the bottom of the solution. It's like you had this transparent solution with black substance mixed in, so the solution looked gray. But now suddenly the black substance is separated from the liquid, so its true color is revealed.

Going back to Kuhn for a moment. Kuhn argues that, and I might sound like Nicholas Sparks here, once in a while something exotic comes along and "shifts the paradigm", or our entire way of thinking/being/behaving/believing.

What type of things? Take the global recession. Or the recent controversy surrounding catholic church abuse cover-up. Locally you may cite the BDR killing of army personnel last year, or the two year military backed government. Catastrophic events, and with lingering effects. But that's not all.

There's another side to this. While these events do have effect and reaction, what it does more is bring out the extremist views of people into the open. So if you were xenophobic, you'd interpret things differently than someone who's not, and react differently too.

If you're a devout catholic, you might be outraged by the latest updates on the church. You might conclude that the church needs more leadership and a change in how it works, but you won't question the faith that drives the church. If you like the church for the sense of community and belonging, but struggle with the religious questions/restrictions it poses, you might behave differently. Then the paradigm shift for the first person would be completely different than the second one. But at least out in the open.

Let's talk me (it's my blog dammit!). Over the past ten years, I've gone through several paradigm shifts. I've gone through bitter breakups, lost my job twice, change my career drastically, went through months of depression, saw the birth of my nephews and nieces, overcame personal limits and obstacles about going back to school, suffered from two violent acts of crime. Some of the events led to incremental shift (made me more hardworking, more compassionate), some of them led to redefining myself, or questioning myself, and even reinventing myself. The interesting process is when I tried to piece together what happened, I found that I always evolved along my core belief system.

I am kind, but impatient. I work hard, but always think that I need to work less, and earn more. I crave company, but can't function unless I've had my private time. I value money, but it is useless to me unless I can get something valuable in exchange for it. The catastrophic events, okay, let's call them transformative events, only reinforced my belief system, and helped me clarify what it is I value.

Unless you are forced to choose between life and death, you choose nothing. And you live your life floating in a mudlike solution, obscure, gray areas without a concept of what shape you are supposed to take. The disruptive event happens.  then you precipitate into this crystalline formation with your own unique color, size and dimension.

Some people pay for that kind of stuff.You are lucky these things happened to you.