Ways of Knowing

Changing the paradigm

We need new ways of knowing if we are to challenge the intellectual and artistic conformity engendered by a monolithic Social Justice framework, writes Ildi Tillmann.

Our old people are very powerful in spirit.
They have all kinds of powers.
But we are forgetting these powers.
Now, all the power that people have is
selfishness, money and politics.

Ben Okri: The Famished Road

Human beings have many different ways of knowing. There is subjective knowledge, born in the realm of our perceptions and feelings, and there is objective knowledge, one that we we see as verified by outside reality. Different concepts of ‘knowledge’ determine our understanding of the truth – and of untruth.

What human ways of knowing share is that they are created within a given cultural context, within a specific frame of reference. They are created within a paradigm. Paradigms are shaped by local experiences and they function through language and a given way of logic. Paradigms serve as backbones to interpersonal communication and understanding. They ensure that conversations between people have a predictable structure and agreed-upon boundaries. But they also serve as invisible prisons – we unknowingly lock ourselves inside familiar paradigms.

Beyond cultural frames of reference, knowledge has dimensions, just as there are various dimensions to human life. Art, science and religion all produce knowledge that is relevant to and mirrors distinct areas of existence. If we make them compete, and search for the winner, we lose sight of the wholeness of life.

Religion, ideology and art

In the region of the world where I come from, the Eastern part of Europe with its European and West-Asian based historical and cultural paradigm, people have been raised to be aware of the power of ideology and propaganda, be it a religious or secular kind.

A few hundred years ago, through an institutionalized spirituality and the political and economic power of the Catholic Church and of Christian religious thought in general, it was a framework religious in nature, founded on the idea of transcendent salvation, that drew the boundaries of acceptable thought. During my lifetime and the lifetime of my parents, we lived in a world of ideologies founded in the salvation of the oppressed in the here and now: fascism and communism.