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The "paradigm" within which we live... In light of Cliff's very political column yesterday I came across this daily reflection from Thomas Merton in my email this morning... "It is true, political problems are not solved by love and mercy. But the world of politics is not the only world, and unless political decisions rest on a foundation of something better and higher than politics, they can never do any real good for men. When a country has to be rebuilt after war, the passions and energies of war are no longer enough. There must be a new force, the power of love, the power of understanding and human compassion, the strength of selflessness and cooperation, and the creative dynamism of the will to live and to build, and the will to forgive. The will for reconciliation." It seems to me a relatively recent phenomenon – like a century or two or three compared to humankind's existence of a hundred and twenty million years – where we have begun to do most of our thinking in a "political" paradigm. We tend to evaluate everything according to "political" measures. Before the birth of political parties do you think people went around thinking about whether they would support something or oppose it on the sort of evaluation that is used today where we figuratively "look over our shoulder" to see that "big brother" is thinking in the political parties we might subscribe to?
What's the average "peasant" think about today? It's probably no God but whether the government is going to deposit their social security cheque in the right bank account. I often wonder what thinking paradigm might eventually replace the one we presently live in. Eventually civilisation will discover that politics is not THE answer to everything. It's difficult to imagine though what might replace it. I suppose if we could imagine that we'd probably already be living in the new paradigm within which we do all of our living. Cheers, Tom
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I
can remember arguing a few years ago that the peasants out in the fields
a few centuries ago must not have had this "political" paradigm
in which so much of life is lived today. I suspect it was more of a "theological"
paradigm. They looked up and saw the sun, or the stars in the sky and
were filled with awe and wonder at what held all these things together.
What made like "tick"? What caused their fields to grow, or
not grow? What made the rain come, or the wind, the sunshine or any of
the other elements of weather? It is understandable that they were much
more inclined to believe that some "unseen" God was responsible
for all these things that could not be explained.