Kuhn does not work that way!
Any worldview outside the mainstream has a pressing need to justify its alternativeness. Creationists, alternative medicine proponents, adherents of plasma cosmology, radical catastrophists – they all have to come up with an answer to the question, “why isn’t our belief system accepted in the mainstream?” Generally, there are three paths you can take in this situation: you can say that your view is quite new and hasn’t had a chance to gain any adherents yet, you can posit a conspiracy by the Powers That Be to keep everyone in the dark, or you can explain it by invoking collective blindness.
It’s a familiar story – there’s a cure out there for cancer, but the medical establishment is blind to it because it goes against the Western scientific worldview. The evidence for creationism is overwhelming, but the biologists just can’t see it – they’ve been blinkered by an atheistic, materialistic upbringing and are simply incapable of being convinced otherwise. Einstein was wrong and relativity theory is bunk, but the physics community is locked into a pattern of thinking that keeps them from realizing the truth. It should be utterly obvious that whites are the master race, but everyone’s too brainwashed by multiculturalism to notice.
Collective blindness is a sort of unintentional conspiracy. Nobody’s really trying to keep these things from coming to light – or at least most people aren’t. It’s a kinder, gentler sort of conspiracy: no longer are your ideological opponents active participants in a sinister plot; they’re simply sheep, unwilling pawns, well-meaning people who haven’t really thought things through, who aren’t open-minded enough to see what’s right in front of them. This is the sort of situation where people use the word paradigm a lot – “The materialistic paradigm needs to shift!” – which is nails on a chalkboard to anyone who’s actually read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
(In a nutshell, the thesis of Kuhn’s book is that scientific investigation is best characterized as a series of discrete paradigms – frameworks in scientific disciplines that determine which topics can be fruitfully investigated and which questions can be meaningfully asked. When a paradigm becomes fraught with problems and contradictions, people will eventually move on to a new paradigm that makes different assumptions, and asks different questions, and a new age of science can begin.
Kuhn’s is not a bad philosophy of science, but the notion of a paradigm is one of the most misinterpreted philosophical concepts around. A paradigm shift occurs out of widespread dissatisfaction with contradictions and irreconcilable anomalies in a discipline – how can we reconcile the observable curvature of space-time with the idea of a luminiferous aether? The one thing that most people don’t get about Kuhn is that the anomalies must originate within the paradigm to be shifted away from; a sea-change in the framework of modern physics will not occur no matter how loudly someone might shout about channeled messages from the Zetas, and psychologists are unlikely to abandon cognitivism because the Bible says it’s wrong.)
Mangling of Kuhn aside, the idea of collective blindness serves a dual function – not only does it provide a plausible explanation for why a group’s ideas are outside the mainstream, it’s also a subtle form of self-flattery: those who are immune to the siren song of the dominant paradigm must be especially strong of will or open of mind in order to see the truth about, say, aliens having built the pyramids. But there’s a fine line between blindness and complicity; at some point one must wonder exactly how the most brilliant minds in a scientific discipline can delude themselves so thoroughly – perhaps there’s some malice there, maybe some defensiveness on their part. It’s only natural; who wouldn’t feel tempted to bury or fudge the occasional finding to ensure that they remain top dog and continue to receive funding?
From there it’s a short hop to the full-blown academic conspiracy – an honest-to-goodness cabal of ivory tower intelligentsia consciously working to perpetuate a lie. The deceived become deceivers, and the sheep are taken on as part-time workers at the abattoir. This is one of the many ways that conspiracism can take root in a community – when pride is placed before an earnest desire for truth, mainstream opponents are discounted as malicious opportunists, and conflicting evidence is considered false until proven otherwise. Unintentional blindness becomes willful, and the Manichean trap is sprung: the world is now divided neatly into those who crusade for The Truth, and those who seek to suppress it.
And the irony of it is that all this can arise from the very same kind of self-deception that people on the fringe ascribe to those in the mainstream. Just as it’s not pleasant to think about something that contradicts your worldview, it’s not pleasant to consider the possibility that your worldview is unusual because it’s wrong – or at the very least, that the preponderance of evidence is against you. Isn’t it more comforting to think that you’re just smarter than everyone else?
Tags: philosophy, science