6 – Love & Wisdom vs Postmodern Power: Modern Paradigm Part 1

Welcome back to our ongoing series about the history of the ongoing conflict in America—and how we fix it.

In our last three blogs, we discussed the basics of the Wisdom Paradigm—the dominant way of understanding life for thousands of years—for almost all cultures, religions and philosophies.

The Wisdom Paradigm teaches us that human nature has been the same through history, and that we all have the same destination in life, the same purpose, which is Happiness, fulfillment.

Happiness comes from having good relationships—with ourselves and with others.

If Happiness is our destination and purpose, then we use our reason to figure out how to get there.

Reason tells us that it’s a fact that if we practice virtues like honesty, justice, wisdom and love, we will become good people prepared for good relationships and Happiness.

Finally, the Wisdom Paradigm sees human relationships as fundamentally covenant relationships where the good of the team and the good of the individual are the same. The more you put into the team, the better you get. The more the team invests in you, the better the team gets.

Covenant relationships are the highest-trust, highest-performance and most stable relationships possible. In the deepest covenant relationships, people are willing to die for each other out of love.

The Wisdom Paradigm was the right track for the ongoing development of humanity—until we took a wrong turn and got off track several hundred years ago.

What happened? What got us off-track?
Religious Wars in Europe
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe was overcome by a series of religious wars that raged for hundreds of years.

These religious wars devastated large parts of France and Germany, and led to the deaths of millions of people. The wars took a terrible toll on Europe, impoverishing millions more and driving governments to bankruptcy.

In many areas, there was anarchy as rival armies marched back and forth, plundering everything. Civil wars broke out as people took advantage of religious differences and bankrupt rulers to take power themselves.

The suffering throughout Europe was enormous and long-lasting in a way that is hard for us to understand today. Think of the devastation of the civil war in Syria, but across Europe and for a hundred years.

People and nations became exhausted and impatient by the suffering that seemed to be unending and systemic.

Thinkers began to search for a new way to understand life—a new paradigm—that could get them out of the terrible religious and political conflicts.

They needed to find a way for people of different religions to live together without killing each other. This led to the is the rise of political philosophers like Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau that you may remember from your political sci class in college.
The Modern Paradigm--Reason Alone
The Wisdom Paradigm is based on a foundation of purpose and reason. As we said in earlier blogs, our purpose, Happiness, is our destination in life and reason tells us how to get there.

Ever since Europe had become Christian, faith had taken the role of purpose. So, for European Christian civilizations, the equation was essentially faith/purpose and reason. Faith provided the purpose, the destination (salvation), and reason helped people understand what was needed to achieve salvation.

The horrific wars in Europe were over religion, over faith, over what people understood to be their purpose or destination in life.

So, for many European philosophers, the answer to ending the vast suffering was obvious. Let’s drop that thing, faith, over which we’re killing each other, and reconstruct our entire understanding of life in terms of reason by itself.

They do that by splitting life into public and private.

Instead of the Wisdom Paradigm’s understanding of life as a unified whole focused on Happiness, the Modern Paradigm splits life into your public life and your private, or personal life.