Any change process, by necessity, must bootstrap itself from what is currently available. In that sense, the cultural evolutionary record of a succession of paradigms points to one paradigm after another transcending itself, a pattern commonly known as “emergence”. Cultural systems tend to be very sticky and persistent, because folkways are learned at early ages by small children in the context of emotionally charged intimate relationships. Crawling out of our early childhood inculturation is about as easy as crawling out of our own skins. My general advice to students is to embrace both the skins - and the cultures - they were born into. Changes built on that sort of acceptance are more firmly rooted and more likely be dynamic than change programs that swim against the personal tide.
What sense does it make, then, to “build a new paradigm”? It makes total sense, because prior paradigms have brought us to this precise occasion. For one thing, there is enough historical record available (via LLM and otherwise), that the notion of comparative paradigms or alternative paradigms is plausible. It’s pretty clear that humanity has evolved through a series of very different big picture cultural frameworks, so it just seems likely we might evolve some future framework beyond what is currently on offer. But again, whatever that new one is will arise from currently available materials, hence the aptness of the term “Renaissance”. Evolution, in general, seems to favor exaptation - the repurposing of some current structure for unanticipated purposes.
In reading Huston Smith over 30 years ago, I absorbed his cogent critique of the scientisitic mind as focused on control through prediction, objectivity, and number. Against these Smith juxtaposed a perennial wisdom of values, purpose, meaning and quality. In retrospect, this looks like another version of McGilchrist’s left-brain/right-brain distinction, but of course similar patterns are attested in any number of analyses of specifically western cultural trends of the past half millennium. So how exactly do we crawl out of that?
First of all the Western cat has been well-belled for a century or more by any number of authors generally representing “post-modern” schools of thought. The critique of modernity is not especially novel or emergent at this point - it has emerged. Why? Modernity turning modernity’s methods on itself results in post-modernity. Even in systems science, linear controls turn out to have their limits. Cybernetics, systems theory, chaos theory, and many others embrace the non-linear. The whole point of an LLM is the underlying algorithm is non-linear and beyond direct control. So the MIT culture Huston Smith was pushing against in his works of 1980s is not exactly the dominant culture now.
My sense is the “modern” paradigm got blown to smithereens decades ago. The problem of the moment is not too many scientific moderns grasping at too much control through too much calculation. It’s more like too many post-moderns thrashing around helter-skelter and ceding too much control to malicious, atavistic political actors who don’t bother themselves much with ethical or existential questions. I’d rather have imperfect people taking the field of action for ambiguous reasons than for all such people to retire in contemplation and give free reign to the unambiguous rotters. Paradigm basically means pattern, and a pattern is no more than some form of action become habitual. At the very least, we ought to be dabbling with actions that may become worthy of elevation to a new habitual.