Paradigm Shift

introduction

A popular explanation of the New Age sees it as a paradigm shift. This explanation is based on Thomas Kuhn’s influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in which Kuhn introduced the idea of paradigms which are worldviews or ways of viewing reality. This explanation maintains that the New Age movement is a paradigm shift from the conventional scientific paradigm which has dominated our culture to a more holistic paradigm. “The essential ‘new paradigm’ belief,” Walter Truett Anderson says, “is that just as scientific theories are sometimes replaced by new theories with greater ability to explain observed phenomena, so will the old culture of Western civilization be replaced by ‘new paradigm’ values.”[i] Marilyn Ferguson in her influential book The Aquarian Conspiracy agrees with this interpretation of the New Age movement; she describes a paradigm shift as an intuitive, sudden, non-rational leap from one paradigm to a new one.[ii] The new paradigm is one that is more holistic and less individualistic than the old paradigm. Ferguson maintains that the New Age paradigm sees all things as interconnected and interrelated while the older scientific paradigm emphasizes disconnection and unrelatedness.

Pros & cons

This description of the New Age movement is much better than most explanations because the New Age does represent a paradigm shift in our culture. The problem with this explanation, however, is that this change in paradigms is not a sudden and irrational shift, but a long and gradual process that is thoroughly grounded in Western intellectual and cultural history. Thus much more can be said about what kind of paradigm the New Age movement is developing and how this new paradigm relates to other movements in Western intellectual and cultural history.

Kenneth R. Pelletier agrees that the New Age movement came about because of a paradigm shift. He relates this shift to changes in modern science, particularly from the strict determinism of Newtonian science to the uncertainty of quantum mechanics.[iii]

conclusion

While Pelletier is right that the changes in quantum mechanics have had a huge influence on the movement, much more can be said about the nature of the paradigm shift because it is not a sudden shift in paradigms. Rather, it is part of a long attempt of our culture to come to terms with its oscillation between the Enlightenment values and Romantic values.

Copyrighted 2009

FOOTNOTES

[i]Walter Truett Anderson, Reality Isn’t What it Used to Be (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), pp. 245-6.

[ii]Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1980), pp. 27-30.

[iii]Kenneth R. Pelletier, A New Age: Problems and Potentials (San Francisco: Robert Briggs Associates, 1985), p. 1.