PERSPECTIVE ON CHANGE : A Protean Self in the White House : Clinton’s vacillating style may be a plus; he can adapt quickly while working toward a coherent standard.

Bill Clinton, impressively able and intelligent, has puzzled many of us with his contradictory behavior. White House observers have been struck by his mixture of compassion and impatience, narrow and visionary outlook, easy friendliness and authoritarian stance.

In carrying out his policies, he has frequently vacillated (controversial appointments, what to do concerning the former Yugoslavia, his meeting with Salman Rushdie) and at other times has been clear and decisive (in pressing for NAFTA and the Brady bill).

I believe that Clinton, like the rest of us, is living out a contemporary psychological pattern of fluidity and many-sidedness, a response to the confusions--and the possibilities--of recent history. I call this pattern the “Protean self” after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms. Like Proteus, we become capable of not just one but many modes of being.

The Protean self emerges from the extraordinary dislocations of the modern era and especially those of the late 20th Century. These dislocations result not only from war and genocide and the threat of nuclear holocaust, but also from the unmanageable velocity of historical change. Contributing powerfully to this process of breakdown and renewal is the mass media revolution, which can make available to anyone, almost instantaneously, virtually any image from any culture, present or past.

While the Protean self contains no guarantees of personal or presidential success, it does permit one to extricate oneself from dead ends and to undergo various kinds of change and transformation. In that sense it is a self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our era.

Basic to the Protean style are odd combinations of the self. There can be a linking of what might appear to be irreconcilable tendencies in a continuous effort to mold them into something functional and coherent. In a recent New York Times article, Thomas Friedman wrote that “What seemed to be contradictory or unrelated strands of (Clinton’s) politics are beginning to weave together into an ideology that the the President himself has yet to fully articulate but is clearly groping toward.”

The desired coherence, then, is bound up with a search for a moral center. Indeed, much of the Protean struggle--and this is its paradox--is a quest for inner and outer form, for ideas and principles that are personally authentic and at the same time have significance that extends beyond the individual self. In pursuing that quest, however, the Protean self tends to distrust all-encompassing ideologies and must often construct its coherence from relatively piecemeal ideas and actions.

Czech writer and political leader Vaclav Havel provides an important example because he was able, as a dissident under a communist regime, to bring an ethical core to a pragmatic, trial-and-error approach. He said of himself then: “I get involved in many things, I’m an expert in none of them . . . though I have a presence in many places, I don’t really have a firm, predestined place anywhere,” and went on to speak of himself as “mercilessly skeptical” yet “an eternal dreamer” who could be “a constant source of hope” for many while at the same time “always succumbing to depressions, uncertainties, and doubts.” But through it all, his commitment to the principle of “living in truth” enabled him to endure years of imprisonment and, indeed, be prepared to die for that principle.

To be sure, there are very few Havels in this world. But the larger point is the necessity for leaders, no less than the rest of us, to balance experimental tendencies with integrative ethical principles, and in that way contribute necessary form to the turbulence of our times.

In both personal and political life, that coherence may be fragile and there is a real danger of individual drift and social chaos. Those in turn can lead to a collective impulse to eliminate all ambiguity and confusion by means of a plunge into religious or political fundamentalism, with its promise of unyielding, once-and-for-all truth. Much of fundamentalism can be understood as a reaction to Proteanism, an effort to close down what has been opened up.

Whatever its uncertainties, Proteanism--including Bill Clinton’s version of it--is our fate. Like you and me, Clinton faces the dilemma of the Protean self, that of maintaining an ethical compass through changes and transformations. For an American President, that kind of balance must apply everywhere, in principles guiding foreign policy no less that those applied to domestic politics and to social and economic reform. For the American people, awareness of the possibilities of the Protean self enables us to engage in constructive dialogue with our President, and indeed with the rest of the world.