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 midafternoon 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.