WASHINGTON, D.C. -- I was long ago persuaded that my crusade against the use of the term "values" in moral debate was hopeless. It does no good to point out that you can just as easily speak of "Manson family values" (learned, no doubt, from watching Mr. Nietzsche's Neighborhood on PBS) as "traditional family values." The problem with the vocabulary of "values," as Allan Bloom so memorably pointed out in The Closing of the American Mind, is that the philosophical basis of the term "values" is the very thing that most value-speak is directed against. Values are relative, subjective, mutable, particular, and therefore susceptible of free choice. ("Where did I get my values? Why, from 'the roomfull of values' at True Value hardware store, of course!") Principles, on the other hand, are based on nature and reason, and hence can make a claim for universal applicability.

Yet this is, as I say, a losing crusade. Value-speak is just too dear a value these days. But it is perhaps not too late to nip "paradigm-speak" in its infancy before it gets completely out of control, while most ordinary people still think paradigm-shift is a computer keystroke combination.

The idea of the "paradigm shift" originated with Thomas Kuhn's widely cited but less widely read book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In a nutshell, Kuhn argued that prevailing scientific theories come undone when anomalies crop up that current theory can't be modified to explain, requiring a "new paradigm," or "paradigm-shift," to displace the old theory entirely. Copernican astronomy replacing Ptolemaic astronomy is a good example of a paradigm shift. This somewhat helpful intellectual model (wildly popular when I was in graduate school) was loosed upon the wider world a few years ago when the Pinkerton guards weren't watching. Now we have the new paradigm economy, the new welfare paradigm, the new paradigm for NFL offenses, the new paradigm for this and that and everything else. (You know who you are out there.)

It is not just that "paradigm" is an overfancy word for "model" that has my baloney detector on alert (though I often advise people to take their airplane sick bags with them to the American Political Science Association meetings, where, I'm not making this up, I once heard a professor remark to another that "I find his paradigm to be puerile"). The deeper reason to wonder whether paradigm-speak isn't more than a little shifty, especially when applied to the social sciences, is the fact that it looks so much like one of those self-contradictory Hegelian paradoxes, i.e., all paradigms are subject to shifts, except this one, which explains all the others. Call it the paradigm to end all paradigms. Intellectual habits like this always buy trouble over time. First they indulge intellectual vanity by puffing up ideas with the veneer of jargon. More important, they concede the historicist premise that all ideas/paradigms, like all "values," are more or less arbitrary products of their time.

So next time some itinerant smart-aleck taunts you with "Buddy, can you paradigm?", send him packing to the nearest shelter for homeless intellectuals, aka, the Ivory Tower.

--By Steven Hayward