Last night, I attended an online class led by Steve Thomason of St. Mark’s cathedral in Seattle. He mentioned Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts as a tool for understanding the forty-seventh presidency.
Simply mentioning “paradigm shift” brought me back to my first university classes in the late 1960s. A reading was Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most discussed and cited books of the twentieth century.
Up until that class reading, I understood science as a steady progression of discoveries starting from formulating a hypothesis, then confirming or disproving the hypothesis with experiments that eventually led to established scientific law; science forever changing as knowledge accumulates, but a gradual incremental process.
Oh how naive that farm boy was.
Kuhn ended that neat scenario. Instead of a steady progression, he amazed me with a series of revolutions from Aristotle to Galileo, on to Newton and Einstein. Each revolution came as an abrupt change following a period of a growing doubt that the reigning paradigm could answer or explain increasingly pressing issues.
I liked the notion of paradigms so much that twenty years later I jumped on the bandwagon to name one the first software products I designed and developed. We called it “Paradigm Trouble Ticketing.”
A paradigm shift is shifty. (Sorry. I can’t help myself.) During a shift, the obvious and important is in flux, making paradigm spotting difficult while the shift occurs and seldom plain until the dust has settled.
This morning, I decided play the fool and declare my choice for the 2025 paradigm shift.
G. K. Chesterton, an incorrigible polemicist who I think often thought clearly, wrote in 1928:
“The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.”
I am afraid that America’s “unconscious democracy” is the paradigm that is going by the wayside, destroyed by the 2024 election. I fear that the assumption of equality that sustained the United States for the previous century has been rejected and replaced by faith in oligarchy, government by the wealthy.
We saw it in the conclave of billionaires at the inauguration, we read it in the executive order to abolish the directive against racial discrimination in federal hiring.
But paradigms don’t only move away from old assumptions. They also move to something new. I don’t know what the new paradigm will be, but I have my eyes open. I hope I will not be blinded.