TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/011491/0114640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.5 KB | 216 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 65

Old Paradigm, New Paradigm


By Lance Morrow


    Paradigm has become a buzz word for theorists of the
emerging world. The term, from the Greek paradeigma, means an
example, a model, a pattern. People in business schools, in
think tanks, in the White House, use paradigm as a sort of
reality thresher -- a way of comparing past and present, an
implement for sorting out history at a moment of tumbling
global change. Paradigm is a buzz word that does not sing, of
course, but never mind. Buzz words, being often tricky,
insincere or brainless, are part of the Old Paradigm anyway.

    The term paradigm, however, is useful, like a Swiss Army
Knife. The world, with a surreal, decisive crispness, has been
sorting itself into categories of Old Paradigm and New
Paradigm. The 1990s have become a transforming boundary between
one age and another, between a scheme of things that has
disintegrated and another that is taking shape. A millennium
is coming, a cosmic divide. The 20th century is an almost
extinct volcano; the 21st is an embryo.

    New Paradigm-Old Paradigm makes a game of lists: what's in,
what's out. More important, it is a way of considering what
works (New Paradigm) and what doesn't work anymore (Old
Paradigm).

    The cold war was the paradigm of the old world order. The
New Paradigm is what we are seeking. Communism and socialism
are Old Paradigm. Big ideology is dead, and global
environmentalism will come more and more alive. "In effect,"
says Lester R. Brown, president of Worldwatch Institute, "the
battle to save the planet will replace the battle over ideology
as the organizing theme of the new world order. The goal of the
cold war was to get others to change their values and behavior.
Winning the battle to save the planet depends on changing our
own values and behavior."

    Ted Kennedy and Strom Thurmond, let us say, are Old
Paradigm, being yin and yang of old wars (New Deal liberalism
vs. Dixiecrat conservatism) that seem somewhat beside the point
now. American government is not dead, but it cannot proceed as
before, on the old model. The long crisis of the Democratic
Party has been its struggle to emerge from its once powerful
and successful old paradigm and find a new one.

    Other Old Paradigms: Fidel Castro, apartheid, the American
Century, cigarette smoking, labor unions and strikes, alcohol,
CBS News, charisma, knowledge (as opposed to information),
blood-feud revenge, corporate loyalty and paternalism, Northern
Ireland, Mario Cuomo (the politician as a Frank Capra movie)
and letter writing.

    New Paradigm: Vaclav Havel, Cable News Network, information,
fax machines, computers, Sam Nunn, the new Germany, pluralism,
democracy, F.W. de Klerk, unsentimental ruthlessness, William
Safire, the Pacific Rim.

    Old Paradigm is not necessarily bad. New Paradigm is not
necessarily good.

    Old Paradigm and New Paradigm are often blended. Ham-handed,
mired stupidity, sheer dumbness, are Old Paradigm. Stupidity
is New Paradigm as well, but in a different style (shallow,
amoral, empty, ignorant of the past). Television, the medium
of the New Paradigm, has a devastating addiction to the
mediocre that it now and then overcomes. The New Paradigm in
haste and distraction sometimes goes for the simple-minded.
Entertainment and news media, for example, find themselves
"dumbing down" their content on the strange assumption that
their audience, or reality itself, has grown stupider. It is
not true, but the idea is pernicious and self-fulfilling: the
stupider the public's sources of information, the stupider the
public must eventually become.

    In George Bush's mind, Old Paradigm and New Paradigm circle
each other warily, like father and son fighting it out in a
sort of Oedipal struggle. Bush is often New Paradigm in
international affairs and Old Paradigm on freighted moral
issues like abortion and patriotism, which send him scurrying
back toward patriarchal absolutes.

    Mikhail Gorbachev? An object lesson in how fragile new
paradigms can be, how quickly they can be menaced by newer
ones. Clinging to the Old Paradigm once its time is gone is
fatal.

    Saddam Hussein and the Persian Gulf? A last spasm, perhaps,
of the Old Paradigm -- a conflict over natural resources in the
way that so many of the wars of the O.P. were fought over land.
In the New Paradigm, big land means less than microchips, which
contain the new riches. The implications of landscape are
environmental and recreational. Power has gone miniature -- out
of muscle and expanse, into mind. The Soviet Union has endless
territory. Japan has little, Hong Kong virtually none.

    Yitzhak Shamir and Yasser Arafat are Old Paradigm. The
trouble is that there is no New Paradigm for them to migrate
to. Not yet, or maybe not ever. Most of the conflicts in the
world occur because the parties cannot shed themselves of the
Old Paradigm and find the new one. It is difficult to run a
closed universe on an open and shrinking planet.

    In America Ronald Reagan somehow made way for the New
Paradigm by allowing the nation to feel for a time innocent
again. All of that seems far away now. Reagan took America so
far back into its Old Paradigm (a dream of America, a nostalgia
for Dixon, Ill.) that it emerged refreshed, if only for a
little while. America is Old Paradigm. But the genius of the
country, beyond its natural wealth and its Constitution, has
been its capacity for self-transformation, for renewal, for
improvisation -- the gift of old paradigms for begetting new
paradigms.

    Early in his Administration, George Bush tried to sum up the
spirit abroad in the world as the "New Breeze." The phrase
evoked not history on the march but a summery mid afternoon in
Kennebunkport, Me. A young White House aide, James Pinkerton,
has proposed the "New Paradigm" as the overarching idea, the
signature, of the Bush years. We shall see. The President has
used the phrase New Paradigm a few times in a glancing way, but
the phrase may not be his style. Budget Director Richard Darman
mocked Pinkerton's New Paradigm in a speech a few weeks ago
("Brother, can you paradigm?").

    Pinkerton, who is only 32, a onetime libertarian, explains
paradigms in terms of the Ptolemaic and Copernican models of
the universe. The mind, in order to explore and solve problems,
must operate upon certain models, certain sets of assumptions.
For 13 centuries, humankind assumed, as Ptolemy taught, that
the sun revolved around the earth. It was a workable paradigm
of the universe, in its way, but became the Old Paradigm when
Copernicus propounded the New Paradigm that the earth revolved
around the sun.

    In Pinkerton's universe, centralized bureaucracy and Big
Government are the Old Paradigm. The idea, of course, has been
evolving since the abdication of Lyndon Johnson and the dawning
realization that the American government does not have endless
money to spend. In Pinkerton's New Paradigm, government would
be subject to market forces as never before and people would
be empowered to make their own individual choices (using school
vouchers, for example), while government would be decentralized
and decision making pushed down as close as possible to the
level of the people affected. Programs would be judged by
output rather than input -- by results rather than
appropriations. The test of the New Paradigm is What Works. It
universalizes John Kennedy's definition of politics as the art
of the possible.

    Or is this New Paradigm, as some say, only a bright
intellectual flourish meant to cover the retreat of the Federal
Government from almost everything? "No," says Pinkerton, "it
is an intellectual construct to make things work. It is a way
of thinking about change and making it rational. I have never
said we should cut spending. The conventional wisdom around
Washington is that nothing works. Americans don't believe it."

    The New Paradigm is above all struggling toward a working
model for the information age. The great totalitarianisms of
the 20th century (Stalin's, Hitler's) depended upon the
dictator's power to isolate the people and control their minds
by controlling all information. The great work of inspiring the
democracies also required heroic manipulations of image and
information -- by F.D.R., by Churchill, for example. Such
leaders gave an eloquence and resonance to the Old Paradigm --
a powerful accumulation of moral experience. It is possible to
feel wistful sometimes for those profound frames of reference
while wandering around in the New Paradigm, which is almost
by definition callow. You must not let daylight in upon magic.
Now that information is transnational, daylight pours in.
Certain shadowy and thunderous effects upon which charisma and
old leadership depended have now become impossible. The New
Paradigm is not haunted by the furies and ghosts of its
parents. It looks upon the world with a disconcerting alien's
eye. It is not a sentimentalist.

    A fragment of poetry by the Greek Archilochus recorded these
enigmatic lines: "The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows
one big thing." In a famous essay, Isaiah Berlin described
Tolstoy as a fox who knew many things and Dostoyevsky as a
hedgehog who knew one big thing. The Old Paradigm knew one big
thing (centralized government, one organizing ideology, one big
idea). The New Paradigm is a fox that accommodates many things
-- it is decentralized, undoctrinaire, pragmatic, multifaceted.

    When Theodore Roosevelt became President around the turn of
the 20th century, he called in architect Charles McKim to
remodel the White House. What McKim did, in effect, was to tear
the 19th century out of the mansion, knock down the heavy
Victorian screens and airless brocaded atmospherics, and let
in light -- a clean weightless look that at the time seemed
stunning. History is filled with regenerations, with new
beginnings, new models. Vatican II did such work upon centuries
of the Roman Catholic Church, Ataturk upon the dying remnants
of Ottoman Turkey.

    Regeneration is always cleansing and usually dangerous. The
First Law of Wing Walking cautions, "Never let go of what
you've got until you've got hold of something else." But
sometimes getting to the New Paradigm involves spending a
certain amount of terrifying time in midair. And so we are
pinwheeling now in black space, trying to figure out whether
apocalypse is very Old Paradigm or very New Paradigm.