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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?").