“Paradigm shift” is a term coined by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to describe how a prevailing paradigm (set of unconscious assumptions that guide our thinking about reality) breaks down and is replaced by an “emerging paradigm.”  The term quickly spread beyond the history of science.  Paradigm breakdown begins when people encounter “anomalies” in their understanding of reality; ie. data cannot be explained by the  prevailing assumptions.  When these anomolies pile up and can no longer be discounted it creates a crisis in which the entire prevailing paradigm is called into question. At this point a new paradigm begins to take shape, and gradually takes hold when, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s term, a “tipping point” is reached. The shift from Newtonian physics to Quantum physics, and much earlier the shift from Paganism to monotheism are examples of paradigm shift.

So what does this have to do with nonviolence? In his essay, Peace as a Paradigm Shift, Michael Nagler makes the argument that we are on the brink of a shift in human culture which will delegitimate war and violence and move us to a culture of nonviolence, and that this will actually amount to a paradigm shift in which a new worldview will have to take hold, globally, that is incompatible with the old worldview and which will replace it entirely — for principled nonviolence, based on the unity of life, is not merely another idea within the prevailing, materialistic worldview based on separateness.  True nonviolence and violence cannot coexist as can, eg., Marxism and feminism.

As long as material (Newtonian) physics prevailed, it tended to influence people to hold a materialistic, mechanistic worldview geared toward scarcity and uniformity, which breeds  competition and violence; the paradigm shift to Quantum physics has made it more acceptable to speak of that which is nonmaterial as equally real and the universe as one.