Adam Blatner

I’m aware that this phrase, paradigm change, has become somewhat cliché’d, but I think it useful to recognize what we are going through many cultural trends or shifts of world-view. It occurred to me that while the years around 1901 have been called “fin de siecle,”—meaning the end of the century, our own era, the beginning of the 21st century, might be recognized as being a big ol’ many-paradigm-shifting avalanche! Starting in the 1960s and reaching into the foreseeable future, our neo-Renaissance among the creative class or the spiritually privileged—i.e., those who feel free to shop and choose—includes some trends that include such shifts from reductionism to holism, from patriarchy to androgyny, from believing that there was a proper right or wrong-ness for many decisions, and that is shifting into a recognition of the validity of preference—different strokes for different folks.

We are shifting from an era when everything was being addressed by specialists to an era in which many things are being recognized as worth of being addressed as inter-disciplinary. The modern era was logocentric, which means that most believed that only (or mainly) the real and good stuff could and should be expressed in words, but our present time recognizes that we need more of an inclusion of art, dance, poetry, story, myth, drama, music, etc. to best appreciate the complexities of reality. Communications and communion thus become more complex. These are only a small fraction of all the changes going on, and this small note aims at alerting readers to the fundamentally changing way folks are beginning to perceive reality in our time.