Paradigm Shifts (Burgess-Van Aken)

As I prepare my syllabus for my summer class, I’m wondering how the pandemic experience will help my students understand Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts, the theoretical basis I rely upon to explain how entrenched big ideas and systems inevitably change. 

For nineteen- and twenty-year-olds, the idea of paradigms is not easy to grasp. Yet, the idea is an important one for the development of critical thinking because it highlights how hidden assumptions at the core of our basic beliefs are what make people resist change in systems and big ideas.

• Renaissance scientists didn’t instantaneously accept that the sun—not the earth—is the center    of the universe.
• Rationalists didn’t suddenly morph into Romantics.
• Einstein’s theory of relativity didn’t immediately result in atomic bombs, satellites, and cell phones.

But in each of these cases, the eventual acceptance of a new paradigm hinged upon the adoption of a new set of underlying assumptions that challenged old ones and had ripple effects not just in the scientific world, but in political and cultural realms as well.

• If our globe is not the center of the universe, then did God really put Hell at the center of the      Earth?
•  If we value our emotions in the expression of our ideas, then how can we assume that reason     trumps all?
• If space and time are relative, what happens to the concept of absolute truth?

Enter Covid-19—the first pandemic in over 100 years. In a slower motion version of 9/11, when we watched planes fly into the Twin Towers and knew that the world would never be the same again, today we know that our response to the coronavirus will result in a paradigm shift as well even though we know it will take a while to figure out exactly what our new life will look like. We already know that avoiding contagion will be a basic assumption in our new world, but what other assumptions will be present but unspoken about our new culture that will affect how we work, play, create, and love?

Those who are thinking that once we find a vaccine for the virus that our world will return to the way it was prior to 2020 are ignoring history. The world has never re-used an old paradigm and history shows us that we can’t operate with the right foot in one and the left in another, half believing that the earth is at the center of it all while half accepting the sun is central.  And we can’t really go backward either—we might swear off Facebook for a while, but we can’t ignore the paradigm that the world transmits messages through social media. And so, vaccine or not, and as much as we may want to, we can’t go back to a pre-pandemic world. 

Getting back to my summer class on the history of the science and perceptions of mental illness, I can’t help but wonder if, having experienced this pandemic, my students will grasp the concept of Kuhn’s paradigm shifts more easily than past classes have. And I also wonder how they will feel about the idea that people eventually accept new paradigms because they solve problems better than the old one.

Barbara Burgess-Van Aken, an early modernist specializing in Shakespeare and women writers, teaches undergraduates at Case Western Reserve University. While waiting to see what the post-pandemic paradigm looks like, she is refreshing her Italian, trying to write daily, taking long walks, and playing the piano.