Peace as a Paradigm Shift
This essay appeared in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Volume 37, Number 10, a magazine of science and public affairs. Copyright® 1981 by the Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Illinois 60637
December 10, 1981
Science advances through a succession of “paradigms," or frames of reference, which are often mutually irreconcilable, according to Thomas S. Kuhn's familiar description. The term "paradigm," widely adopted in the social sciences, has become almost common parlance.
In the process, however, it has lost some of its meaning. People now speak of paradigms wherever two or more concepts show any semblance of systematic coherence. They also speak as if a babble of different paradigms — "Marxist, realist traditionalist, peace research, feminist, and behavioralist," to quote one recent catalogue — could exist side by side. Everyone has the right to use the term as he or she wishes, but this is not the sense in which Kuhn intended it.
Kuhn was concerned to show that even in science, where the raw data of the scientist's observation can be limited and con trolled, they would be unmanageably complex without some previously agreed upon frame of reference. He showed that such a frame of reference involves preset categories which soon become deeply rooted in the perceptual and thinking process, and that, until "paradigm breakdown" and "paradigm shift" occur, it is widely if not universally shared throughout the community of discourse. One can be a Marxist and a feminist; one cannot believe in a Ptolemaic and Copernican universe.
This is not to say that people do not use preset categories in life, as they do in sciences; on the contrary. As William James pointed out, without selective perception to screen out the majority of our sense data and our own thoughts, life, even more than science, would be past coping with. As Hazlitt put it, "Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to make my way across the room."
Yet in life, even more than in science, paradigms can be disastrous failures. Or to speak historically, paradigms that have provided a useful system of selective perception, evaluation and decision for a time can become worse than useless encumbrances and require wholesale replacement for society to advance.
That is precisely the position we have now reached with the prevailing attitudes about militarism and war. Many peace researchers today would agree that the achievement of stable peace conditions in the world will require a paradigm shift. They may not all realize, however, that the shift required will not be that spoken of loosely by the social scientists, but the much deeper and broadly accepted change of vision described by Kuhn.
What is needed is not just a change of opinion, like the oscillations in public legitimacy in the United States accorded to the Vietnam War, but a permanent shift in how we view the world: how we gauge hostility, what we think of to do about it-almost a shift in what we perceive as real. Aristotle actually "saw" constrained fall in a stone swinging back and forth on the end of a string, Galileo saw the glimmerings of momentum in exactly the same phenomenon. As long as people feel comfortable when they make threats to other nations of people whom they regard as enemies and fail to perceive that those "enemies" will respond by making counterthreats (just as they themselves do), it will not be possible to abolish war.
It is true that individual wars can be aborted by better diplomacy. It is also true that the tendency of nations to get into dangerous confrontations can be mitigated by the institution of more rational political and social systems within them. But if we want to eliminate the root cause of war -- and in this nuclear era we cannot dare to stop short of this, if we want to live in the security of knowing that the exploitive economies, which put nations at one another's throats have been abandoned for good and that nations no longer act with the dangerous irrationality of adolescents in the schoolyard (as Norman Cousins once said), then we need to go after the causes of war which lie "in the minds of men."
Emerson quite correctly said, "It was a thought that built this whole portentous war establishment, and a thought shall melt it away." But what he meant by "thought" is poetic shorthand for a whole way of thinking. If a true paradigm shift in science is a rare event which occurs only after a lapse of centuries, the shift we are speaking of is even rarer. It is a reorientation of the attitude of masses of human beings not only to a particular war, not only to war in general, but to our relationships with one another. It is a step forward not only in history but in biological evolution.
The questions that anyone concerned with peace today must ask, therefore, are two:
Are the times right for a perceptual revolution of this magnitude?
If so, what can I do to facilitate it?
We have an answer to the first question, as simple as it is remarkable, from Kenneth Boulding, past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In his latest book, Stable Peace (1978), Boulding has formulated what he sees as the extraordinary watershed in which mankind now finds itself with regard to the most important question for continued survival: "War is no longer legitimate." If this is correct, we have reached what Kuhn would call an incipient paradigm breakdown which has not yet been carried through, for want of a paradigm shift.
And of course, it is correct. Almost daily more disturbing anomalies confront those who still believe that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun or a nuclear silo: The militarily strongest nation in the world is unable to control events in a tiny Southeast Asian country; to react effectively when its diplomatic staff is taken hostage in the Middle East; to preserve its economy; to maintain a foreign policy consensus at home, or the ability of its citizens to walk down the street in safety. The number two military power is in a similar predicament. Both add to their own and one another's insecurity with each new generation of weapons they produce to gain security.
To the majority, who are good Ptolemaeans, these problems, all of which are directly or indirectly produced by our commitment to military power, are still what Kuhn calls "puzzles" in a system which remains generally sound. But to a growing number of more thoughtful "Copernicans," from every walk of life, these problems are not puzzles but genuine "counter instances" showing that the entire paradigm in which they are sustained is wrong. Can we get people to abandon the old paradigm? Only if and when we can get them to see a new one. As Kuhn observes, "once it has achieved the status of a paradigm, a scientist theory is declared invalid only if an alternative candidate is available to take its place The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another. "There can be no question of perception, evaluation and decision without a paradigm. That may be possible for the mystic, but it cannot be the ordinary process of human decision-making in science, and still less in politics.
Significant numbers of people will never stop making the decisions that lead inevitably to war, even if the resulting wars destroy everything they live for, until and unless they come to trust, understand and learn the use of an entirely new system of decisions that leads to peace. Fortunately, such a system is already known. These words of Albert Szent-Gyeorgyi point to it very clearly:
"Between the two world wars, at the heyday of Colonialism, force reigned supreme. It had a suggestive power, and it was natural for the weaker to lie down before the stronger.
Then came Gandhi, chasing out of his country, almost singlehanded, the greatest military power on earth. he taught the world that there are higher things than force, higher even than life itself; he proved that force had lost its suggestive power."
Any successful use of nonviolence – the liberation of India from British rule is a conspicuous example – provides not only an arresting counterinstance to the old paradigm of injurious force but a clear indication of the new paradigm. It is based on an entirely different set of assumptions and a different system of human relationships. The term "nonviolence, “like that of "paradigm," has been weakened in the social sciences and in its rare appearances in common parlance. But when truly understood it provides an entirely new conceptual system, and when correctly applied it provides mankind, in Gandhi's words, with "the greatest force he has ever been endowed with."
Life theories, of course, are even harder to change than scientific theories. But the method history shows us is the same: First a few daring geniuses discern the new paradigm – a Copernicus, a Galileo, an Einstein, or in our case a Gandhi. Then certain opinion leaders take it up and demonstrate its power. In course of time it becomes the established frame of reference. That is why Einstein reckoned that if only S percent of the people would work actively on peace it would be achieved. Peace is not only inherently more desirable but practically more workable than war, and as with any such change, when opinion leaders begin to use the new paradigm what was at first the "lunatic fringe" can become insensibly, but rapidly enough, the carpet on which the majority takes its stand. Our second question – what can I do – has therefore almost answered itself. Whatever we can do to increase the visibility of this new paradigm would be far and away the most effective contribution we can make to the establishment of a lasting peace. There are many ways to approach this adventure, but it seems to me that for all of us who are members of the intellectual community these ways would entail our learning the history of nonviolence, understanding the theory behind it, and – most importantly – learning to practice it. What the Report from Iron Mountain (by Leonard C. Lewin, Dell) had to say in 1967, that “up to now, no one had taken more than a timid glance over the brink of peace, “is still far too true.
At present, as we know to our cost, certain "buzz words" like "strength," "preparedness” and above all "security," because they are thin disguises for military strength, and military security, play a major role in systematically misleading the policy decisions of people from the lowest to the highest political echelon. The most effective way to attack that kind of outmoded thinking is to point out, and where possible demonstrate, that there is a greater strength in cooperation and "mutual aid" than in belligerency; that any security worthy of the name can only come from not having enemies, not from threatening those we perceive as enemies. We have to know about the successful uses of nonthreatening protective mechanism like nonviolent civil defense, and about other aspects of the nonviolent armamentarium to carry this point.
It is not uncommon to see a newspaper headline like “What U.S. Could Do to Iran" (meaning of course, what harm we could do to Iran). These questions are in the genre, "when did you last beat your wife?" They preclude any consideration of the one question which is in fact most important: Should we harm them? “The most effective way to open people's eyes to that neglected question is not to point out how we provoked the Iranians by harming them in the first place. (It may be true but it does not seem to be effective.) Rather, it is to demonstrate how cooperative and conciliatory behavior would be a more efficient way to deal with them than combative aggression.
Without a definite shift in our educational perspective, we can hardly hope to effect a permanent shift in our worldview. The things that unite the various people of the globe would have to be made more interesting than the present intellectual fascination with differences. Such a shift would prepare the ground for this opening of eye. We would have to know not only how the principle of peace is being violated all over the world, but precisely what it would take to make peace more stable, which as far as lean see can only be thoroughgoing nonviolence.
At the basis of the old, increasingly vulnerable but still very dangerous paradigm of force and violence there is the central assumption that people are separate, pretty much as they appear to the senses. We will never securely abolish war without challenging this basic assumption; and the new paradigm does challenge it. Nonviolence is based on the hypothesis that all life is one. Just as Einstein opened the modern era in physics by challenging the accepted axiom that time and space are absolute coordinates, so he and others now challenge us with the even more portentous hypothesis that men and women are not separate from one another and the rest of the environment. The day may be dawning – we should see to it that it does dawn – when these words of Einstein are as much used as his famous formula expressing the interconvertibility of matter and energy:
“A human being is part of the whole, called by us the 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty."
When Gandhi called nonviolence a science, as he often did, and referred to his own life as a series of experiments with truth he was not being metaphorical. Nonviolence is certainly science. It can be learned, and taught. It has a central hypothesis, as we have seen, from which a system of theoretical and practical constructs about the nature of reality have begun to be developed and tested. Its laboratory is the whole of life, and the scientists competent to explore it are, literally, all of us.
During the recent debates on the connection of the University of California with the national nuclear weapons laboratories a distinguished physicist explained to us that he was voting to retain that connection because. "I guess I'm older than most of you, and lean remember what happened to France in 1939."If my colleague could remember what happened to France in 1939, why could he not remember what happened to India on August 15, 1947, when the last British detachments, cheered by vast crowds of friendly Indians, sailed willingly for home?
It is not lack of experience but lack of a sufficient paradigm in which to interpret that experience that caused his selective perception, and the decision he based on it. Our job is not one of dissuasion but of education. Let each person truly know what happens to a country that can perceive only military force and becomes dependent on military defense, and what happens when a country learns to wield "the greatest force that mankind has been endowed with." I have enough confidence in human nature to know what his or her choice would be.
