Block That Paradigm!
Ehrenhalt, Alan
Books Block that Paradigm! By Alan Ehrenhalt On the day that James P. Pinkerton decided to become a futurist and political thinker, Madison Avenue missed its opportunity to recruit a copywriter...
...When he is going at full speed, Pinkerton appears to challenge the accepted notion that there is no such thing as a private language...
...When they can think for themselves, be in charge of something...
...People are happiest when they can choose," Pinkerton says...
...But Pinkerton, to be fair to him, has a larger point to make, even if he doesn't make it with perfect clarity...
...It seems simpler and more logical to say, for example, that government fails to cope with the most difficult social troubles-violence, teenage pregnancy, decaying cities-largely because society hasn't got a clue what to do about them and refuses to admit it...
...Alvin Toffler, Gingrich's intellectual mentor and the man who all but inaugurated present-day futurism, has some of the naming passion as well...
...Fortunately for the history of science, Copernicus was not a futurist, just an observer...
...It seems to me that most of us, liberal or conservative, will find that the appeal of choice varies dramatically from one area of policy to another...
...Whether "bureaucracy" is the best explanation of this failure is another question...
...On the other hand, it is one that he appears willing enough to impose...
...Once all students have vouchers," Pinkerton insists, in a characteristic burst of enthusiasm, "good schools will spring into being almost as quickly as Blockbuster video stores...
...What Comes Next, his new book about the culture and politics of the approaching millennium, is his phrase-making masterpiece...
...he is the Dr...
...And the results will be miraculous...
...On that day, the New Paradigm will have arrived...
...They will have vouchers for education, vouchers for health care, vouchers for job training...
...The "New Paradigm," though it has been part of the language of American public policy for the past five years, has never had a very distinct meaning even for most of those who use it, whether they are refugees from the Bush administration, enthusiasts in the Gingrich Congress, or re-inventers of government in the Clinton White House...
...At a time when government is so obviously failing on so many fronts, choice is a powerful policy idea...
...No one will find this unfamiliar, and few will fail to see some wisdom in it...
...Together, they bring the Cyber Future...
...The new paradigm is Choice...
...Seuss of contemporary political thought...
...In his passion for words, names, and slogans, moreover, Pinkerton is hardly alone among thinkers who choose the future as their field of study...
...As a manifesto for the next millennium, it leaves a great deal to be desired...
...For all the compulsive wordplay, there is something undeniably appealing about Pinkerton and his curiosity...
...Pinkerton mints literally dozens of shiny new verbal constructions, from "hypercrime" (the combination of rising fear and declining actual crime rates) to "vealocracy" (a bureaucratic system run by the clients, rather than the bureaucrats...
...The old-fashioned way to think is to have ideas and then come up with names for them...
...it is authority...
...Nothing about choice or vouchers or empowerment is as big an idea as the one Copernicus released into the world...
...Nothing that Pinkerton says about bureaucracy makes it sound comparable in historical scope to the notion that the earth is the center of the universe...
...And few will disagree with that...
...The Old Paradigm isn't just bureaucracy...
...They will have so many vouchers they will need extra wallets to carry them all...
...After a few chapters of Pinkerton on bureaucratic evil, you begin to feel as if you were watching a horror movie with Don Knotts cast as Satan...
...It's much less clear that it is a big enough idea to be called a New Paradigm...
...He would have started by proclaiming the "New Cosmology" and only then set out to determine whether there was one...
...It is the persistence of these old ways that brings the divided cyber-economy and the paralyzing fear of hypercrime...
...But the Bureaucratic Operating System is collapsing of its own weight...
...It must be said that Pinkerton makes a brave attempt...
...It is people in positions of influence- not just government bureaucrats but politicians, planners, and elders of all sorts-making decisions on behalf of ordinary people who would be better off making the decisions themselves...
...It replaced corrupt political machines that made decisions on the basis of nepotism and greed...
...Ever since the day in 1990 when he emerged from the recesses of the Bush White House to proclaim the "New Paradigm" to a meeting of the World Future Society, Pinkerton has been coining slogans, phrases, and trends with a facility that rivals the output of the Ted Bates Agency during its heyday in the 1950s...
...Initially, this was a good thing...
...These are, to say the least, not easy points to prove...
...Had he been a futurist, he would no doubt have operated differently...
...The Old Paradigm, he argues, is bureaucracy...
...He is capable of quoting Alan Greenspan in one paragraph and Douglas Coupland in the next...
...he had scarcely set foot in Congress before he began proclaiming the existence of the "Conservative Opportunity Society" and setting off on a long quest to figure out what, if anything, it might be...
...When the New Paradigm arrives, Americans will be free to exercise all sorts of personal options that somebody in bureaucracy-somebody in authority-always used to make for them...
...In the course of outlining his New Paradigm political agenda, Pinkerton has something interesting to say about a whole range of subjects, from taxation to drug treatment to veterans' hospitals...
...He worries that the future holds a "byte-driven bobsled to the bottom line" or, even more ominously, "the bladerunner runoff of a rusting paradigm...
...Alan Ehrenhalt, a columnist for Governing magazine, is the author, most recently, of The Lost City...
...they like to coin phrases and ask the hard questions later...
...By Alan Ehrenhalt On the day that James P. Pinkerton decided to become a futurist and political thinker, Madison Avenue missed its opportunity to recruit a copywriter of awesome potential...
...When that measurement is performed, it comes up a couple of tons light...
...And he does it all with an enthusiasm and sense of adventure that excuse a multitude of rhetorical excesses...
...Copernicus overturned a thousand years of astronomy, speaking truths that might have been obvious to any educated person but that nobody else had been able to understand, because everyone was imprisoned in the old heliocentric way of thought-the "Old Paradigm...
...The "New Paradigm" has always been a slogan in search of a definition...
...What Comes Next is Pinkerton's attempt to demonstrate, first, that Kuhn's unquestionably powerful ideas about scientific change have some relevance to American government in the 1990s, and second, that a revolution of comparable importance is in fact about to occur...
...Newt Gingrich certainly does...
...Perhaps that is holding Pinkerton to an absurdly high standard...
...He doesn't just introduce his inventions one by one: He combines them into equations...
...He seems to regard choice in education as a virtual vaccine against the educational pathologies of the inner city...
...Someday soon, Pinkerton predicts, American society will break loose from these shackles of authority and turn more choice back to the individual...
...It is symbolized, in the 1990s, by the ombudsmen and inspectors general who prowl the halls of federal agencies to prevent them from becoming utterly dysfunctional...
...Large segments of the federal government continue to remain in business long after they have proven themselves incapable of solving the problems they were created to solve...
...All Americans," he proclaims, "whether they deem themselves Democrats, Republicans, independents, or anything else, must sooner or later adapt to the reality of the New Paradigm...
...What it does have is a pedigree...
...It is the style that Pinkerton, for better or worse, frequently chooses to apply...
...He warns of a "demoralizing dollar-falling downdraft," in which the "simultaneity of suffering and surfeit are unmistakable...
...I can't help believing that it shows far too little respect for the depth and complexity of the problem...
...He has as much fun with ordinary words as he does with his Capitalized Concepts...
...For roughly the first 90 years of this century, American government has attempted to solve public problems by creating ever more complex bureaucratic layers-rules, regulations, hierarchies, endless stacks of paper, whole administrative cities full of civil servants dedicated to nothing more than following the rulebook as they understand it...
...They will thrive on the freedom...
...He is interested in health care and budget reform, horror movies and grunge music...
...Current politics are still mired in the precepts of the Old Paradigm," Pinkerton reminds us at one point...
...I wish that were true...
...That sort of ultimatum seems to me to empower all of us readers to weigh his Big Idea on a Cosmic Scale...
...So he began by studying the heavens and published his conclusions only when they became inescapable...
...Pinkerton has never been obscure about where he got it-he got it from Thomas S. Kuhn's 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which Kuhn describes the intellectual convulsion of Nicholas Copernicus's discovery that the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around...
...He makes a much less appealing case for job-training vouchers, which still sound to me like a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle likely to shower the bulk of their benefits on a giant army of private job-training consultants...
...Future Shock, the 1970 book that made Toffler's reputation, gave us "adhocracy," "anticipatory democracy," and a whole collection of other coinages...
...Futurists prefer, when possible, to reverse the process...
...Pinkerton isn't just a phrase-maker...
...Bean-counting bureaucrats squirreled away behind green partitions at HUD or HHS are a problem...
...Or listen to this one: "It might be argued that the two subjects of this chapter, the "Vealification" of the bureaucracy and the launching of "Orbital Bureaucrats," should together be viewed as the sixth Bug in the BOS...
...whether they are The Problem in some grand historical sense is debatable, to say the least...
...As a compendium of suggestions, What Comes Next is useful...
...Perhaps that is the intellectual style of the future...
...Somehow it seems as though all futurists have an irresistible passion for naming things...
...Every few pages, he puts on a dazzling display of alliterative acrobatics...
...He is determined to examine every crevice of 1990s American culture and take all the evidence seriously...
...He declares that the old bureaucratic ways "cannot cope with the cyberflood, the gushing gigabyte magma of cognition...
...Pinkerton makes an intriguing case for the use of vouchers in health care-medical savings accounts that enable people to make more decisions about their own medical treatment but require them to bear more of the initial out-of-pocket costs...
Vol. 1 • November 1995 • No. 9
