The Wealth of Nature. John Michael Greer

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      Sooner or later, though, a mismatch opens up between the paradigm and the facts on the ground: the research methods drawn from the paradigm stop yielding good answers, and the paradigmatic theory no longer allows for successful prediction of phenomena. Scientists normally respond by pursuing the research methods with redoubled energy while making the theory more elaborate, the way that Ptolemy’s earth-centered cosmology was padded out with epicycle after epicycle to make it fit the vagaries of planetary motion. Crisis comes when the theory becomes so cumbersome that even its stoutest believers come to realize that something is irreducibly wrong, or when data emerges that no reworking of the paradigmatic theory can explain. The crisis resolves when a researcher propounds a new theory that makes sense of the confusion. That theory, and the research program that created it, then becomes the new paradigm in the field.

      So far, so good. Kuhn pointed out, though, that while the new paradigm solves questions the old one could not, the reverse is often true as well: the old paradigm does things the new paradigm cannot. It’s standard practice for the new paradigm to include the value judgment that the questions the new paradigm answers are the ones that matter, and the questions the old paradigm answered better no longer count. Nor is this judgment pure propaganda; since the questions the new paradigm answers are generally the ones that researchers have been wrestling with for decades or centuries, they look more important than details that have been comfortably settled since time out of mind. They may also be more important, in every meaningful sense, if they allow practical problems to be solved that the old paradigm left insoluble.

      Yet the result of that value judgment, Kuhn argued, is the false impression that science progresses by replacing false beliefs with more true ones, and thus gradually advances on the truth. He argued that different paradigms are not attempts to answer the same questions, differing in their level of accuracy, but attempts to answer entirely different questions — or, to put it another way, they are models that highlight different features of a complex reality, and cannot be reduced to one another. Thus, for example, Ptolemaic astronomy isn’t wrong, just useful for different purposes than Copernican astronomy; if you want to know how the movements of the planets appear when seen from Earth — for the purposes of navigating a boat by the stars, for example — the Ptolemaic approach is still a better way to go about things.

      These same considerations sprawl outside the limits of the sciences to define the rise and fall of paradigms in the entire range of human social phenomena. The difference between the believers and the disbelievers in limits is a difference in paradigms. Those who believe that modern industrial society is destined for, or capable of, unlimited economic expansion have drawn their paradigm from the Industrial Revolution and its three-century aftermath, with James Watt and his steam engine playing roughly the same role that Louis Pasteur played in the old paradigm of bacteriology. Like any other paradigm, the Industrial Revolution defines certain questions and issues as important and dismisses others from serious consideration.

      This is where the problems arise, because a solid case can be made that some of the questions dismissed from consideration by the “normal culture” of industrial expansion are those our species most needs to face just now, as the depletion of fossil fuel reserves and the soaring costs of environmental damage become central facts of our contemporary experience. The industrial paradigm can only interpret running out of one resource as a call to begin exploiting some even richer one. If there is no richer one, and even the poorer ones are rapidly being depleted as well, what then? From within the industrial paradigm, that question cannot even be formulated; the assumption that there is always some new and better resource to be had is hardwired into it.

      Thus the current predicament of industrial society demands a change of paradigms. The belief in limits just discussed derives from a different model — the model of ecology, which is still sorting out its historical vision and has not yet quite found its paradigmatic theory, researcher and discovery. From within the emerging paradigm of ecology, the models that provide the most insight into our contemporary situation are those found in nonhuman Nature — above all, the cycles of increase, overshoot and dieoff which afflict so many other species that rely on outside forces to control their numbers. The ecological paradigm suggests that unless we take that model and its implications into account, some of the most important factors shaping our future are completely out of sight.

      The change from one paradigm to another, however, is not an overnight thing. Kuhn points out that in the sciences it usually has to wait until most of the older generation of scientists, who have been trained in the old paradigm, have been removed from the debate by old age and death. The same thing is too often true in other fields. Thus it’s uncomfortably likely that even as the industrial paradigm fails to explain an increasingly challenging world, a great many people will cling to the faith that progress will bail us out, and ignore the fact that all the complex economic activities of the industrial world depend ultimately on Nature itself.

      Primary and Secondary Goods

      This is one of the many places where E. F. Schumacher’s work provides a vital analytical tool. As mentioned in the Introduction, Schumacher made a distinction between what he called primary goods and secondary goods one of the foundations of his economic thought.⁹ Secondary goods are the goods and services provided by human labor, the ordinary subject of economics as the discipline is currently practiced. Primary goods are the goods and services provided by Nature, and they make the production of secondary goods possible.