Rapture Fever

Introduction ‘7
circumscribed system of investigation to solve these problems.
In other words, we are limited creatures. We cannot understand
everything about everything, so we narrow our questions,
our approaches, and the range of acceptable answers in our
attempt to learn something accurate about anything.
A kind of academic guild imposes penalties on anyone who
keeps asking questions that the guild’s existing paradigm cannot
readily solve. When younger members of the academic
guild, or especially gifted outsiders, raise new questions that are
increasingly embarrassing to the guild’s leaders, a battle for
control of the guild begins. The existing leaders have to provide
believable, practical answers, or at least provide investigative
strategies that may conceivably provide answers, to these
embarrassing but pressing questions. If they cannot provide
them, they will attempt to suppress anyone who asks them, and
they will dismiss as unprofessional (i.e., heretical) or misguided
those whom they cannot suppress.
When the guild’s leaders can no longer persuade younger
members of the guild that the received strategy of investigation
- the paradigm - can adequately handle these new and important
questions, a paradigm shift occurs. Rarely do the older
members accept the new paradigm, but eventually they retire.
As the older members retire, they are replaced by men who no
longer share the faith in the old paradigm. Thus, the sign of a
looming paradigm shift is the inability or unwillingness of the
guild’s leaders to address the new questions that younger members
regard as crucial.
If the leaders find it institutionally impossible to suppress or
ridicule those who pursue embarrassing questions, they adopt
a fall-back strategy. This strategy is marked by the willingness
of the guild’s older leaders to accept (usually only in private
correspondence) changes in the details of the paradigm that
would never have been acceptable before. The leaders believe
that they can defend the integrity of the overall paradigm by
surrendering piecemeal on certain fronts. These lost fronts are