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During the 1970s, a number of scholars, including one of my teachers, William E. Nelson, now an emeritus professor at NYU Law School, and Morton J. Horwitz, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School, revolutionized our understanding of American legal history. Their essential argument was that the emergence of a modern market economy in the United States required a fundamental shift in American law.
At the beginning of the 19th century, American law was rooted in concepts that reflected the values of a slowly changing agricultural society. The law presumed that goods and services had a just price, independent of supply and demand. Courts forbade many forms of competition and innovation in the name of a stable society. Courts and judges legally protected monopolies and prevented lenders from charging high rates of interest. The law allowed property owners to sue for damages if a mill built upstream flooded their land or impeded their water supply. After 1815, however, the American legal system favored economic growth, profit and entrepreneurial enterprise.
By the 1820s, courts, particularly in the Northeast, had begun to abandon many traditional legal doctrines that stood in the way of a competitive market economy. Courts dropped older doctrines that assumed that goods and services had an objective price, independent of supply and demand. Courts rejected many usury laws, which limited interest rates and increasingly held that only the market could determine wages or interest rates or prices or the equity of a contract.
To promote rapid economic growth, courts and state legislatures gave new powers and privileges to private firms. Companies building roads, bridges, canals and other public works were given the power to appropriate land; private firms were allowed to avoid legal penalties for fires, floods or noise they caused on the grounds that the companies served a public purpose. Courts also reduced the liability of companies for injuries to their own employees, ruling that an injured party had to prove negligence or carelessness on the part of an employer in order to collect damages.
The legal barriers to economic expansion had been struck down.
Instead of focusing on public law—including constitutional law, administrative law, international law and criminal law—Nelson and Horwitz turned attention toward private law: contract law, property law, the law of torts, labor law, commercial law, corporations law and competition law. Their scholarship carried profound implications not just for the economic realm, but for family relationships. A heightened emphasis on contract, for example, fundamentally altered the way that jurists and legislators thought about the nature of the marital bond, divorce, women’s property rights and child custody decisions.
Scholars still debate the timing of this revolution in American law, who was responsible and their motives. But it seems obvious in retrospective that the American legal system wasn’t born capitalist and that the market revolution—the rise of modern financial markets, wage labor and labor unions—required changes in the law of negligence, contract, usury and government regulatory and eminent domain powers.
There are revolutions in many domains of life that seem inevitable in hindsight—and that occur so incrementally and inaudibly that when they are over, they seem inevitable.
We are currently living through a series of transformations in medicine, psychological treatment, disabilities and teaching and learning that are just as radical as those that reshaped American law in the early 19th century. Yet like those legal changes, these developments seem so obvious and inexorable that we might well miss their import.
Today, we tend to fixate on technological breakthroughs, like artificial intelligence and augmented and virtual reality, and sustainable energy technologies. But the real quantum leaps are conceptual.
Take the revolution that has occurred in medical understanding. This has involved a shift from a biomedical model of health that emphasized absence of disease and illness to a model that seeks to promote well-being across multiple dimensions, psychological as well as physical.
Helping to propel this revolution is a recognition that the nature of disease has changed profoundly in recent years, with chronic illnesses now the major cause of death and with mental disorders (often unrecognized and untreated) a leading cause of disability. Instead of focusing treatment on malfunctioning organs with drug therapy and surgery, newer models stress the importance of the immune system, genomics and behaviors, environments and mind-sets. Treatment, therefore, now involves a greater emphasis on prevention, quality of life and a more integrative, multidimensional approach to medical care.
Or take the revolution that is happening in psychotherapeutic diagnostics and treatment. This involves a shift from biomedical models to biopsychosocial models. In therapy, psychotherapists have increasingly moved from an approach that focused on personality disorders toward cognitive and behavioral approaches that emphasize managing perceptions, emotions and perceptions.
Then, there’s a profound shift in thinking about disabilities, from biomedical to social models. Instead of defining individuals by an impairment or difference, there is a greater acceptance of neurodiversity and a focus on the ways that particular social arrangements and practices and attitudes create or augment the conditions in which disabilities manifest themselves.
We’ve also, of course, undergone a profound shift in thinking about teaching and learning. In pedagogy, we have been witnessing a shift from models that emphasized the transmission and internalization of information toward constructivist approaches that emphasize the importance of mind-set, mental modeling and the learner’s role in constructing understanding. This new understanding has underscored the importance of active, experiential and problem-, case- and project-based teaching methods.
We are, in short, living through a series of far-reaching shifts in conceptual understanding that have broad implications for professional practice.
The paradigm shifts in medicine, psychotherapy, disabilities and pedagogy are only a few of the transformations that are fundamentally reshaping life as we know it. Here are some others:
- Shifts in relational paradigms
It’s no secret: new communication and information technologies are fundamentally disrupting the way people communicate and interact, whether we’re speaking of online dating or increased isolation, reduced social interaction and social skills, and increased human-to-machine interactions.
- Shifts in cognitive paradigms
There is heightened sensitivity to issues of equity, the ways that power exercised through language, labels and law, and biases that are structural and systemic rather than individual or interpersonal.
- Shifts in environmental paradigms
This includes a growing concern with animal welfare, deforestation and desertification, environmental justice, pollution, resource depletion, sustainable development, waste disposal, vector-borne diseases and, of course, climate change.
- Shifts in technological paradigms
Much of the concern about artificial intelligence and increased reliance on algorithms and big data centers on the danger that machines, acting largely apart from human oversight or understanding, can incorporate unrecognized biases or rely on false or manufactured information. Automating data collection and analysis can help instructors, for example, to identify students who are struggling in real time and administrators to identify roadblocks to student success. But these technologies also run the risk of further depersonalizing the college-going experience and discouraging the kinds of faculty-student interactions that are essential to nurturing a sense of belonging and connection.
A key reality of our time is not just the accelerating pace of change or the volatility of the economic and the physical environment, but the abrupt paradigm shifts that are taking place across many domains—and that are inadequately recognized.
If we feel confused and adrift, it’s at least partially in consequence of the radical shifts in understanding that are occurring all around us. It is extremely hard to keep up with the changes taking place.
Which is why I’m convinced that we need to rethink the way we introduce undergraduates to intellectual life. Wouldn’t it make sense to do more to systematically acquaint students with the paradigm shifts that are reshaping academic understanding and professional practice? I certainly think so.
In 2001, two of my Columbia colleagues, David Helfand and Darcy Kelley, introduced a core course, Frontiers of Science, to expose lower-division students to four cutting-edge areas of active research and discovery: mind and brain, astrophysics, biodiversity and Earth science through the lenses of astronomy, biology, cosmology, neuroscience, physics and biology. This course also familiarizes the students with basic statistics and probability, experimental design, sense of scale, feedback loops and graph reading.
I’d urge you and your campus to consider courses like that one, not just in the natural or physical sciences, but in the behavioral sciences as well. Paradigm shifts may be disquieting and disconcerting, but they also underscore what the academy is all about: questioning existing models of understanding and formulating new conceptual models, theoretical approaches, therapies and policy solutions.
Between 1804 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led some 30 soldiers and 20 civilians up the Missouri River as far as present-day central North Dakota and then west to the Pacific. Out of touch for nearly two and a half years, their journey of discovery across some 8,000 miles was the first great American epic. The academy, too, is engaged in an odyssey of discovery as epic and even grander and more ambitious than Lewis and Clark’s.
Shouldn’t we do more to share with our entering students the intellectual excitement and exhilaration of that voyage as we, in our own way, advance the frontiers of knowledge?
