Last night, I attended an online class led by Steve Thomason of St. Mark\u2019s cathedral in Seattle. He mentioned Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts as a tool for understanding the forty-seventh presidency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Simply mentioning \u201cparadigm shift\u201d brought me back to my first university classes in the late 1960s. A reading was Kuhn\u2019s Structure of Scientific Revolutions<\/em>, one of the most discussed and cited books of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Oh how naive that farm boy was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cParadigm Trouble Ticketing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A paradigm shift is shifty. (Sorry. I can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This morning, I decided play the fool and declare my choice for the 2025 paradigm shift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n G. K. Chesterton, an incorrigible polemicist who I think often thought clearly, wrote in 1928:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I am afraid that America\u2019s \u201cunconscious democracy\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But paradigms don\u2019t only move away from old assumptions. They also move to something new. I don\u2019t know what the new paradigm will be, but I have my eyes open. I hope I will not be blinded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last night, I attended an online class led by Steve Thomason of St. Mark\u2019s cathedral in Seattle. He mentioned Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts as a tool for understanding the forty-seventh presidency. Simply mentioning \u201cparadigm shift\u201d brought me back to my first university classes in the late 1960s. A reading was Kuhn\u2019s Structure of Scientific … <\/p>\n\n