(UNDATED) The earth doesn’t literally move when paradigms shift. In fact, it might be years before anyone truly notices. But shift they do, and there’s no going back.
Consider my typical day in summer 1963: I called friends on a hard-wired family telephone and borrowed my mother’s big Ford sedan to drive to the mall on “our” side of town. I browsed a local department store, prepared for a private college whose annual tuition equaled the price of a Chevrolet, and later spent a family hour watching network television.
If it was Sunday, of course, the mall was closed so we could attend our neighborhood churches.
Can you count the paradigm shifts?
Hard-wired telephones gave way to cell phones and Internet phones. Big American sedans are yielding to small Japanese hybrids. Shopping malls can’t compete with stand-alone Wal-Marts or on-line retailers. Racial profiles no longer dictate residential patterns. Local department stores were acquired, re-branded and sometimes closed. The cost of that private college now equals a Mercedes-Benz, moving it beyond the reach of middle-class families. Networks must share a shrinking television audience with cable and computer media.
Stores are open seven days a week. Once-thriving neighborhood churches either re-branded as “destination churches” with specialized offerings or shrank to enclaves serving the elderly.
I don’t feel the least bit nostalgic about any of this. But I do notice how much futile energy institutions devote to fighting history.
In fact, people have just moved on, as they tend to do when free. People don’t spend two hours on Saturday finding entertainment at a mall. Parents resist paying $50,000 a year for college. A consumer economy cannot afford to set aside a full day for religion. Faith-seekers don’t worry about denomination, location or convenience. Driving has become an expensive hassle, and suburbs based on driving seem less inviting.
Paradigms don’t stop shifting. Banking and finance, for example, are losing their luster as career choices. An economy based on manic consumer spending-by-borrowing has collapsed. The job market doesn’t swoon over elite academic credentials. Religion has become a self-led personal quest, not an exercise in brand loyalty or indoctrination by experts. The over-involved parent is unmasked as self-serving and abusive. Any paradigm associated with suburbia is in flux.
Custodians of fading paradigms tend to fight back, often with moral imperatives, calls to patriotic duty, and pleas for government favors. The race, however, goes to those who adopt new technology, study the marketplace, accept volatility, and learn from misfortune and mismanagement.
In the end, you see, reality prevails, and settled patterns go the way of fedoras, Ma Bell and Bobby Vinton. That’s why Detroit either goes “green” or goes bust. Private colleges will either sell education at a price people can afford or become academics-optional playgrounds for the wealthy. Religion, too, must escape its own overhead.
Paradigm shifts aren’t necessarily toward the better, more humane or more efficient. But neither can those who resist paradigm shifts claim the moral high ground. Self-described “defenders of tradition” are often just bullies or lazy.
Change is like the weather: it happens. A free people are like the clouds: they keep moving. Rain dances are misguided. Raincoats are wise.
(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)