Swiss Minarets and Thomas Kuhn

I've been thinking of late about incommensurability, which of course moves me to think of Switzerland.

Switzerland first: As you may have heard, the Swiss voted this last Sunday to amend their Constitution's religious freedom statutes to ban minarets from being built in their country. The referendum campaign, spearheaded by a right-wing party (the Swiss People's Party, or S.V.P.), played on European fears of "Islamification," referring to cultural changes wrought by the influx of immigrants from Muslim countries. The campaign inspired a war of posters and pundits for and against the ban. The signature poster of the S.V.P (found, along with other posters, here) depicts a black, burka-clad figure in the foreground. Behind her is a depiction of the Swiss flag with a half-dozen black minarets sprouting (piercing?) like missiles from it. "Vote yes on the Minaret ban," reads the block lettering.

The vote's results surprised and dismayed the European community (see here and here), especially as the referendum passed with a 57.5% majority (in a 53% voter turnout). Swiss government officials, many of whom seem embarrassed about the amendment's passage, nevertheless admit that the vote democratically expresses the will of the people. There's no trickery here, just a simple, clear political victory.

For most liberal-progressive observers, the Swiss ban represents a disappointing, even frightening reaction to the challenge of cultural and religious difference. Given that Muslim-European tensions run much hotter in other European countries, the Swiss vote may auger a tightening of borders and sharpening of (white/Christian) cultural norms. For supporters of the ban, the referendum establishes a crucial defense against influence of a culture whose ideals and practices are seen as radically opposed to traditional Swiss and European values. One Belgian politician, speaking in support of the ban, put the case thusly: "It’s a signal that they [Muslim immigrants] have to adapt to our way of life and not the other way around."

Notions of cultural adaptation, tolerance, and religious liberty church messily within this controversy, which brings me to incommensurability. I draw this term from the work of Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher and historian of science most famous for his 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In that book (and I simplify brutally), Kuhn refutes the commonsense picture of science as a narrative of steady, accumulative progress. Instead of a smoothly ascending line where discovery builds upon discovery builds upon discovery, Kuhn argues that science instead operates more episodically, resembling perhaps a series of disconnected graphs.

Indeed, for Kuhn the very definition of "science" changes radically over time. Scientists working within a field at any one time operate more or less within the bounds of a commonly held model, a paradigm, that describes the basic contours of what a particular science (say, astronomy) is and what it should do. Paradigms function as a common set of assumptions about the way things are that give scientists a range of options for experimenting in, observing, and explaining reality. Paradigms define for scientists what there is to be done, scientifically speaking.

The Ptolemaic model of the solar system, for instance, served as the predominant astronomical paradigm for the Western world for many centuries. In this model, the Earth is the center of the universe. A set of crystalline spheres (one for the sun, the moon, each of the recognized planets, and the stars) rotate concentrically around the Earth. For a very long time all astronomical activities operated within this model. Observational evidence that seemed to contraindicate this model (the retrogression of Mars, for example) served not to disprove the model but to indicate the need for greater elaboration of the model. "Epicycles" (miniature orbits within orbits) were thus invented, complicating the system but more or less explaining away the apparent difficulties.

With Copernicus and Galileo, however, the Ptolemaic model had to be scrapped in favor of a whole new paradigm in which the earth and other planetary orbited the sun. Suddenly (well, "suddenly" on grand-historical timescales) "astronomy" had an entirely different set of grounding assumptions. Lifetimes of "scientific" work on the nature of epicycles became, in this new paradigm, the exploded fictions of a bygone era. It was not possible, in other words, to be a Ptolemaic astronomer with Copernican tendencies. One had to convert totally from Ptolemy's paradigm to a heliocentric paradigm if one wished to remain an astronomer.

Or consider physics after Einstein. One could not be a dedicated Newtonian physicist and work within a paradigm of general relativity. Scientific paradigms are, for Kuhn, incommensurate with each other, so radically different that between the two there can be only conflict or conversion, not compromise or adaptation.

I've been thinking about incommensurability in a different sense, relating the idea not to scientific paradigms but to religious paradigms, religious worldviews. In the Swiss minaret controversy I locate not two such worldviews (the right-wing S.V.P. and the Muslim immigrants) but three: those two and the tolerant-secular-European worldview that wants to see all religions as practicable within a scheme of ordered, democratic liberty. Although of those three, I identify most with the latter, I have to wonder whether that third option is in fact the least capable of conceiving of and dealing with incommensurate worldviews.

What do I mean by that?

More tomorrow,

JF