Here’s an old and dusty blog post on paradigms. Recent events brought it to memory so I’m posting it here. Also see this post on worldviews.
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Johan Norberg wrote a brilliant and devastating critique for the Cato Institute on Noami Klein’s recent book, The Shock Doctrine.
Norberg’s article is well worth a read. It reminded me of the immense importance of the long-term battle of ideas. The practice of teaching political ideas on a simple continuum of left to right, with fascism on one end and communism on the other, has resulted in all manner of untruthful re-interpretations of history, philosophy and economics. This book is probably the strongest example of the major problems this simplistic and inaccurate paradigm creates.
Klein is unable to see the world through any lens besides the left/right paradigm. Because of this, she is forced to make everything fit into this vision. She crams big government Republicans, fascists, despots, corporate welfare leeches, bureaucrats, militarists, and libertarians all into one bizarre category. No matter how strongly reality disagrees with this view, and no matter how impossible it is to fit these different shapes together, she still tries and apparently believes she’s succeeded.
The paradigms we form early in our intellectual endeavors can prove incredibly hard to shake. Seeing the world as merely a left/right world is the root cause of almost all of Klein’s inaccurate, and frankly stupid, conclusions. It seems glaringly apparent that libertarians and neoconservatives are not even close to the same thing – scads of books, websites, essays and debates are widely available which make this overtly clear to even a casual observer. Yet Klein holds so firmly to her left/right paradigm that she fails to see these distinctions, and sometimes even offers critiques of government and calls them critiques of free-markets.
If we are to analyze policies and philosophies on their moral and practical merits, it is imperative that we learn to break out of overly-simplistic paradigms, and allow each argument to stand on its own rather than be mashed together in unnatural associations that are easier to label and fit on our continuum. (Though also simplistic, here’s another at least somewhat better way to view political ideas – one that allows for more deviations and does a better job of explaining the world that we actually see.)
Paradigms are important and necessary mental tools that help us understand abstractions and put them into a broader and more meaningful context. However, they are only mental tools – the paradigm should never be confused with the truth itself. When reality does not fit into our paradigms, we need to explore new ones rather than bend and twist reality and deceive ourselves into believing it fits. Paradigms should be checked against logic; a sometimes difficult task that would’ve saved Ms. Klein from a great deal of error.
Klein’s book should serve as a reminder that the current left/right political spectrum is one of the least useful or explanatory paradigms around, and adherence to it in the face of divergent realities can be dangerous – to freedom and to truth.