Paradigms and Perception Page 2

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  What is popular culture? Perhaps the word itself is misleading. It seems to suggest an amorphous mass of society that may not, in fact, exist.

  If high culture is the tradition that the American upper classes have inherited from Europe, then popular culture is everything except that culture, a collection of different styles created by many very different social groups. There is probably no one popular culture but a vast array of subcultures all vying for attention. The dominant stream of influence for home-grown American popular culture, however, clearly emanated out of Congo Square in New Orleans, which birthed improvisational rituals fomenting blues, jazz and rock’n’roll.

  More and more social scientists have begun to consider culture as the establishment and communication of meaning. When Thomas Kuhn studied the history of science, he began with the assumption that experience had to be drastically limited in order for what we call “science” to take place. For a community to conduct research they first have to agree on a set of principles which inevitably limit their perception of the world to manageable levels.

  “A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share, and, conversely a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm,” wrote Kuhn in his groundbreaking study.

  Perhaps one role of culture is to limit experience to a digestible level. Paradigms establish the priorities and protocols of meaning and they’re most often invented, established and celebrated through ritual and ceremony created in public events.

  David Riesman used the term “social character” to describe the different characters of classes, groups, regions and nations. The term is useful but it doesn’t really explain why some people dress, talk and behave in similar ways; it merely acknowledges that it happens.

  Kuhn’s paradigm is a set of principles or an outlook which may be difficult to articulate fully, but one which is shared by the members of a scientific community. My suggestion is that social communities share paradigms as well.

  A metaphor that might be useful when thinking about the implications of paradigms is to view them as the structure on which the meanings of life are displayed. And any individual could have many paradigms depending on how many social groups he felt he was part of.

  You can also think of a paradigm as a particular vantage point out of an infinite number of possible vantage points. In this way it’s like the parable of the blind men and the elephant: one blind man held the leg, one the trunk, one the ear, but all were sure they grasped the essence of the beast.

  An example of how structure can influence perception can be obtained by looking at an experiment conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by a group of psychologists studying language. In the experiment subjects listened to a sentence during which a click occurred, and immediately afterward were told to write down the sentence afterward and indicate where they heard the click. The experiment showed that the subjects heard the click not where it actually occurred, but during major syntactical breaks, such as the beginning or the end of a phrase. In other words, the structure of language altered the perception of sound. Similarly, paradigms, alter perception of the world.

  Kenneth Burke explored this phenomenon: “…can we bring ourselves to realize just how much of what we mean by “reality” has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems?” writes Burke, who used the word “terministic screens” to describe the process.

  “We must use the terministic screens, since we can’t say anything without the use of terms; whatever term we use, they necessarily constitute a corresponding kind of screen; and any such screen necessarily directs the attention to one field rather than another. Within that field there can be different screens each with its own way of directing the attention and shaping the range of observations implicit in the given terminology.”

  The problem with Burke’s analysis of the phenomenon, however, is too much stress on language and not enough on meaning.

  In the experiment at MIT the perception of meaning was not changed, and meaning is the crucial element. The Sphir-Wharf hypothesis, which sounds very much like Burke’s terministic screens, states that since people have different languages they have different perceptions. Burke commits the same error of linguistic determinism. Just because an Eskimo may have six different words for what we call “snow” doesn’t mean his perception of snow is different from ours.

  Burke did raise an interesting point concerning the difficulty of locating the primary screens though.

  “Must we merely resign ourselves to an endless catalogue of terminstic screens, each of which can be valued for the light it throws on the human animal yet none of which can be considered central? In one sense, yes. For strictly speaking, there will be as many different world views in human history as people.”

  In a cultural sense, what’s important is not individual world views but shared cultural views, and cultural views may be better understood by using a word like paradigm. Meanings are manifested in a social process of ceremony and ritual or else communication would be difficult, if not impossible.

  Difficulty comes in trying to decide where to draw the limits of what is a cultural group. Some are easily recognized while others are very secret and difficult to sort out. Technology has created communications groups in radically new ways. Long before the Internet arrived, people who owned citizen-band radios comprised an emerging subculture, while those with only regular radios at the same time did not. The CB subculture quickly invented its own vocabulary, symbols and rituals, most of which were shaped by truck drivers, although the culture became so widespread that soon English professors could be heard conversing with truck drivers without any discernable difference in the sound and slang of either one. Even though they probably have very different paradigms in other situations, while on the CB radio, they are brothers who behave similarly, respecting a shared paradigm. Inclusion is drawn solely by the participants themselves. If they feel part of a group, identify with that group, then they comprise a culture together. But even if a person seems to hold the necessary prerequisites to be a member, if he doesn’t feel he’s participating, then he probably isn’t part of it.

  Sociologists are fond of setting up society into sub-cultures and giving them titles like: “upper-lower-middle-class”, or “youth culture,” but unless a group actually feels itself as the upper-lower-middle-class, then that culture probably doesn’t exist except in the mind of a sociologist.

  When popular culture first attracted attention it was attacked as a vulgarization of high-culture. This attack was a paradigm clash between advocates of the old intellectual European culture and the new American culture, which was morphing every generation through its improvisational nature.

  Herbert Gans correctly pointed out that rather than a vulgarization, popular culture was created by and for a different audience, and neither culture can be judged better than the other. But after coming to the conclusion that no culture was better than another, Gans finishes by saying his culture is better because its audience is better educated? (Which is little more than accusing popular culture of being a vulgarization all over again, but in different words.)

  While European culture celebrates precision and mathematical perfection, Congo Square birthed a culture based on spontaneous expression and the unification of all people. This was a hybrid culture pieced together from bits of African and Native American culture, with some elements of European culture (brass instruments, pianos, for example) eventually added.

  The problem inherent in dealing with culture is graphically illustrated by Gans. It is impossible to stand in a neutral corner and talk about culture since everyone’s perception is colored by his specific paradigm. Gans pretends to step back and view the subject objectively, but such a step in an illusion. Everyone stands on a paradigmatic mountaintop, and there can be no other possible view except from the perch of another, conflicting paradigm.

  When the average American watches his television set, what he sees may
not be the same as what his neighbor next door sees because their lives have different meanings. Both are incapable of discussing what they see objectively.

  For example, if neighbor A is a Christian, and he watches is “The Robe,” the movie will reaffirm his paradigm and its deeper meanings easily accepted. If neighbor B, a Zen Buddhist, watches the same movie, the same meanings may misfire, be blocked out, or be altered in order to be more acceptable to his paradigm.

  I don’t mean to suggest all paradigms are directly connected to religious beliefs, which certainly is true since many have no religion, but religion often plays a dominant role in those people who are believers. Basically, your paradigm is connected to whatever your core beliefs may be, and in the case of Buddhism, that would involve vegetarianism and non-violence.

  Another example would be the 1970s show “All in the Family,” which some viewed as a liberal, progressive show making fun of racism, while others identified strongly with racist Archie Bunker and felt he was just misunderstood by his family.

  Do you see a rabbit or duck?

  In popular culture many paradigms exist alongside each other, none of which are right or wrong. There is no one real “meaning” to life, only a set of possible paths leading in many directions. The area that should be investigated, however, is the development of propaganda and its influence on the shaping of our shared symbol systems, and the possible influence these systems may have on what Carl Jung referred to as “the collective unconsciousness.” Is there a telepathic field shared by all humanity? Or thousands of mini-fields competing for the telepathic airwaves?

  Obviously, the corporate media system shapes very violent, sexually-charged paradigms. Meanwhile, global icons like Rev. Martin Luther King, John Lennon and Bob Marley found themselves constantly harassed, under surveillance, and treated like enemies of the state by the FBI and CIA. This can only happen if peace is in conflict with the official state paradigm.

  And while our corporate system tries to mold and shape the direction of popular culture, all the easier to exploit the profit potentials, the real paradigm shifts always come from a small tribe of innovators working together and apart from the dominant corporations, rather than from inside those corporations.

  For example: when hip hop emerged in the South Bronx, it was created by teenagers just then entering high school in 1971, the younger brothers and sisters of those who’d experienced the tumultuous 1960s. For an entire decade, hip hop simmered and evolved in New York’s South Bronx. Because it represented a paradigm shift, it remained invisible to the rest of the world. And yet, the gatherings that birthed hip hip in those parks and community centers? They sure look a lot like those original gatherings in Congo Square, and, in fact, congo drums appear in all the early hip hop anthems.

  Meanwhile, during that same year, on the complete other side of the country, six white boys just entering high school would birth the number “420” as a code for discussing their favorite intoxicant, a code that would spread throughout the shadows of Mount Tamalpais for more than 30 years before eventually exploding across the world, creating ceremonies among lovers of cannabis everywhere. Yet for 20 years, only a very small handful in Marin County, California knew anything about this 420 code.

  Of course some people may reject my theories. Different cultures are constantly waging war, symbolic and otherwise, to eliminate what they consider contradictory paradigms. A school board dispute written about by John Egerton (“The Battle over the Books,” The Progressive, June 1975) would be a good example of this sort of warfare being acted out in public.

  It’s important to note new cultures are created all the time, and individuals may hold a wide variety of inconsistent paradigms. Unlike a philosopher, who devotes his life to finding a consistent paradigm, the average person does not subject his beliefs to such severe inspection.

  Sometimes a paradigmatic clash occurs within an individual (known as the “identity crisis”) and those times are usually the major pivot points in a person’s life.

  Our current situation of almost perpetual war for 2,000 years is largely a result of paradigmatic clashes between religions. It’s ironic that even though most of these cultures claim to embrace non-violence as a core value, their deeds more often drip red with blood every generation, while the monks and priests often lead the soldiers into battle.

  What is obviously needed is a new concept of religion that would allow all religions to harmonize and exist together, rather than continually gearing up for war. This paradigmatic shift could easily be encouraged simply by converting temples and churches (and their altars) into environments where all spiritual symbols and cultures were treated with equal respect. This probably will not happen easily, however, as peace between religions is not something our corporate state wants to encourage, probably because the profits of war are so great and the core values of the corporate paradigm revolve around profits.

  I’m a writer, journalist, filmmaker, event producer and counterculture and cannabis activist, and was born and raised in Urbana, Illinois. I started out writing black comedy, but I'm best known as the first reporter to document hip hop and the instigator of the film Beat Street. I also founded the Cannabis Cup, organized the first 420 ceremonies outside of Marin County, while launching the hemp movement with Jack Herer and writing some landmark conspiracy articles. Some of my other books you might enjoy:

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