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.