THE KEY ELEMENT MAKING CHANGE: THE "NEW STORY"


Voltaire's New Story Provided a
Foundation for the Mechanistic Paradigm

Who Are We? How Did We Get Here? Where Are We Going?

In the paradigm shift from the Medieval to the Mechanistic Worldview, the crucial factor, the catalyst that finally upended the old worldview, appears to have been the writings of the Enlightenment philosophers, especially the author Voltaire. Although known primarily as satirist and essayist, Voltaire was also an historian and scholar. His books on science and the past popularized not only the Copernican Revolution and the significance of Newton’s achievements, his true history of the French royalty gave a historical center to the new worldview, it gave the new paradigm a “Story”.

Every worldview is based on its Story, which answers three essential questions: Who Are We? How We Get Here? And Where Are We Going? Voltaire explained to his time a New Story--how the king, rather than a divine being, is just a man driven by the lust for power. Thus we should have a democracy in which the people have the power. Voltaire also declared that Laws of Nature caused events here on Earth, not God. Science should therefore guide us rather than Medieval religion. He also made the concept of progress a common one, focusing attention on science and the future in a whole new way. Voltaire gave the multiple revolutions to come a powerful image of what they could be.

It was this New Story of Voltaire, this re-answering of the three essential questions, that allowed the Copernican paradigm to finally transcend the cultish control the old Medieval powers had on the population. Once it was realized that the divine rights of the king and nobility were just made up to enrich the few, their absolute power evaporated very quickly.

 
French King Louis XV and English King George III
Discredited the Old Worldview With Mistakes,
Leading to the American and French Revolutions

By the 1760s, the rulers Louis XV of France and George III of England were suddenly faced with a large part of the population that despised them and wanted deep change. Their personal mistakes concerning foreign policy and ruinous tax structures ended up discrediting the whole Medieval worldview and the paradigm “flipped”--creating a revolutionary atmosphere.

Old paradigms disguise themselves with partial, glorified histories and lots of Public Relations. One's view of history guides opinions about everything from politics to religion, so a history based on a new paradigm changes opinions like nothing else. In fact, no New Story, no “paradigm flip”, no new future. The re-telling of the Story is the catalyst to the whole process of the new transcending the old. Once the old Story was transcended around 1760, it was inevitable that the new worldview would soon move to grab power and reinvent society itself.

Oppression by the monarchy and dogma from the theocracy had always succeeded before, yet after the paradigm flip, by 1760 the knowledge of the new history had fired up a true level of outrage. This outrage, in turn, generated the courage for a now-enlightened generation to stand up to the powers that be.

The conservative kings did not accept this act of defiance very well, and with the support of their privileged aristocratic supporters and their armies, they continued to abuse their subjects. Their ongoing mistakes proved to be most helpful to the young radical democrats, and the American and then the French Revolutions began. Most European theocratic monarchies of the Medieval worldview were replaced by scientific democracies within a few decades of the paradigm flip.

A current-day paradigm flip cannot start until all the three essential questions are fully answered with a New Story, one that gives an “organic” version of our past, present and future. Once that is in place and somehow delivered to the public and the youth, the deep changes establishing sustainability and true democracy can sweep today's world.

Today, those aware of the new paradigm understand the new view of evolution and how consciousness has evolved—or the broader answer to “who are we?” Yet the full new paradigm answer to history and the future has never been fully realized. The other two essential questions of “How Did We Get Here?” and “Where Are We Going?” still remain.

The Global Curriculum thus addresses all the essential questions directly in the Global Studies e-Course, the e-courses based on Regenerative Sciences, Renewable Energy and the Future Study Group, a never-ending discussion on the Global Curriculum Blog. This gives progressive students a center, a clear foundation of thought based on the new paradigm. They will be able to appreciate the depth of the organic worldview. They will understand who we are and how we got here. And they will fully comprehend where we’re going.

The challenge of creating new content remains. What could a true progressive curriculum based on the new paradigm really be like? Here again, we must first deconstruct and then recreate the past and the present in order to envision a new future. What exactly should a history of worldviews teach in the introductory Global Studies course?

Using syntropy as the central meaning of history, that task is now straightforward and clear. It must be a history of change.

Discussion:What are the three essential questions answered by a new paradigm and why are they so important? Essay: Who was Voltaire and how did he intellectually undermine the old power structure and the institutions of the Medieval era?

Links: Voltaire's Home

The Voltaire Foundation (Oxford University)

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Discussion Group

VOLTAIRE AND HIS FEMALE EQUAL The Marquise Voltaire had a long relationship with the Marquise du Chвtelet, Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil. The Chateau de Cirey was owned by the Marquise's husband, Marquis Florent-Claude du Chatelet, who sometimes visited his wife and her lover at the chateau. Their relationship, which lasted for fifteen years, led to much intellectual development. Voltaire and the Marquise collected over 21,000 books, an enormous number for their time. Together, they studied and performed experiments. Both worked with the "natural sciences," the term used then for physics. In his laboratory. Voltaire performed many experiments -- including one that attempted to determine the properties of fire. Voltaire had been strongly influenced by the works of Sir Isaac Newton, a leading philosopher and scientist of the epoch. He strongly believed in Newton's theories, especially concerning optics and gravity. Newton’s discovery that white light is composed of all the colors in the spectrum led to many experiments by him and the Marquise. Voltaire wrote a book on Newton's philosophies: The Elйments de la philosophie de Newton (The Elements of Newton's Philosophies), which explained the new paradigm to the general lay public. The Elements was probably written with the Marquise, and describes the other branches of Newton's ideas that fascinated him: it spoke of optics and the theory of attraction (gravity). Voltaire and the Marquise studied history - particularly the people who had contributed to civilization up to that point. Voltaire had worked with history since his time in England; his second essay in English had the title Essay upon the Civil Wars in France. Voltaire and the Marquise also worked with philosophy, particularly with metaphysics, the branch of philosophy dealing with the distant, and what cannot be directly proven: why and what life is, whether or not there is a God, and so on.