Unlike a web view of knowledge, in the world of foundationalism, when a disrupting event happens, the framework often pushes us to a much different response. When we believe we’ve been building on the right foundation, when we’ve been using our building materials—the ones that have always worked for us—difference becomes a challenge. We see another floor plan, or a truck load of different kinds of materials than we’ve always used, and everything inside us fights the thought of integrating it into our building. We often throw the plans out (“that just isn’t my kind of building”) or see the new materials as a threat (“if I include that, it will ruin everything I’ve been building.”)
It gets worse.
As we continue to hold on to a foundationalist way of thinking, but begin to see a world that is increasingly diverse and divided; as we are exposed to more and more completely different cultures and frameworks and expressions; as people realize more and more how truth is culturally expressed—we run the risk of uncritically seeing the bias out there and not seeing it within ourselves. We run the risk of throwing up our hands, and sticking only with OUR (particular) expression of the foundation, the root, the universal.
When we live with a mindset that our foundations are set, and universal, and unchangeable, what happens when we encounter particulars and data and experiences that challenge our beliefs? For many, difference does not become a way to better understand the world, or to better understand universal truth. Instead, these differences often become things that threaten the ability to live in the truth. They become (when Plato lives unnamed in our heads) the parts of matter and the real world that are different only because they are not the perfect, universal forms. They don’t belong, and must be rejected, in order to hold to the Truth I have always held.
And therefore we become more and more disconnected from reality.
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