7 – Love & Wisdom vs. Postmodern Power: Modern Paradigm Part 2

Welcome back to our second session talking about the Modern Paradigm.

Let’s start with a review of what we learned in our first session on the Modern Paradigm.

For thousands of years, the Wisdom Paradigm was the dominant way of understanding life across all the world’s great societies, cultures and religions.

That was until about 450 years ago when Europe was torn apart by more than 100 years of religious wars that killed millions of people and devastated nations.

With Europe broken politically, spiritually and financially, European thinkers tried to come up with a new understanding of life that would allow people of different religions to live together without killing each other.

Modern, European philosophers began to replace the Wisdom Paradigm of understanding life based on purpose and reason with a Modern Paradigm of understanding life based on reason alone.

Reason is good at handling measurable, quantitative things and not very good at handling things that are tough to measure.

So modern thinkers split life into a public side of life for subjects that reason can tackle easily, and the private-personal side of life for subjects that reason has trouble with like religion, feelings and happiness.

Subjects like business, science, economics and ethics went into the public side of life. The idea was that society could use reason to discuss these issues publicly and get to the Truth about them.

In contrast, issues like Happiness, purpose, meaning, love and feelings went into the private-personal side of life. Putting them in the private side of life meant that they didn’t have to be talked about publicly. You could believe and talk about whatever you wanted in your private life.

The Wisdom Paradigm has covenant relationships—where the good of the individual and team are the same. Modern philosophers replaced those with Modern contract relationships where what’s good for the individual and team are opposite.

The Modern split of life into public and private sides made some important issues, like human nature, fulfillment and the meaning of life, much more complicated.

Modern thinkers invented disciplines, like psychology and psychiatry, to try to understand human nature using reason alone, but these disciplines can’t answer important questions about meaning or purpose in life.

When it comes to motivating people, Modern philosophers had to drop Wisdom concepts of Happiness and fulfillment—they were now on the private side of life. Instead, Modern thinkers tried to explain motivation in terms of quantifiable things like money.

Finally, when Modern philosophers dropped purpose, they lost the primary explanation for moral objectivity—for the existence of moral facts—like it’s a fact that slavery is wrong.

They tried to replace the justification for moral facts using pure reason alone, but that eventually failed. Morality and ethics went from being facts in the public side of life to being personal opinions on the private side of life.

That’s where we are so far in the Modern Paradigm. In this session we’re going to tackle how the Modern Paradigm looks at life, and the nature of Truth and knowledge, history, success and rules.
Truth and Knowledge
In the Wisdom Paradigm, the emphasis is on the development of, wait for it, wisdom.

Remember that wisdom is knowledge plus character. Wisdom is when you have knowledge of the Truth and the character to live the Truth. As you increase your knowledge and develop character more and more, you gain wisdom.

Wisdom is the knowledge and character you need to become a good person who develops good relationships and achieves Happiness in life.

The Book of Wisdom is Scripture because scripture contains the Truth and knowledge you need to live a good life and become a good person.

People gain wisdom through formation, a process that develops both intellectual knowledge and good character for Happiness.

The new,