by Ross Bishop
Society is always changing, but today the pace of change has dramatically increased, and that leaves some people who don’t handle change very easily, out of the loop. Their response is to cling to old ways of being that are fast fading into the sunset. They feel like they are losing their grip on reality. These people grasp for stability amongst chaos. Whether it is race relations, gender roles, fundamentalist religion, gays, guns, white privilege, patriarchy or robust individualism, they cling to a myth of a John Wayne America that never really was.
Complicating things is the nature of change itself. Thomas Kuhn in his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions provides a helpful framework for understanding how change happens. He argues that change in almost anything is never a linear process. We go from a stable state into chaos for a time as we sort out the new truths. This can be a time of great upheaval, as people are forced to come to terms with new ways of thinking and doing things. However, it is a time of great opportunity, as new ideas and possibilities are created. Eventually we settle into a new “paradigm” (his term) at a new plateau for a while, then we repeat the process.
Kuhn's version of how we change differs dramatically from the traditional linear version. It basically trashes our old way of understanding of the world. Where the standard account saw steady, cumulative “progress,” Kuhn saw discontinuities – a set of alternating "normal" and "revolutionary" phases. He saw that the new paradigm represented a quantum jump in understanding. The jump to a new level is chaotic and if you chart the change, the graph when it takes in the new knowledge, goes almost vertical. That can be incredibly unsettling to someone vested in the old way of doing things. Interestingly Kuhn’s book that has been described as the most important book of the 21st century, sold only 919 copies in 1962 when it was published.
To illustrate his concept, Kuhn used an example from world of physics. For centuries scientists had been guided by the stable and unchanging Newtonian model of the physical world. But when research found that nuclear particles behaved differently than predicted, the concept of quantum mechanics was created. Quantum physics revolutionized the physical sciences. And the chaos created by that change was incredible!
As another example, consider what happened when Christ confronted traditional Judaism and Roman pagan beliefs. The first thing they did was to execute Christ! Then as Christianity spread, the reactionary Romans tried to stamp the emerging religion out by burning the early Christians at the stake! Eventually, after a great deal of struggle, Christianity won the people over, buried the Roman pantheon of gods and turned Rome into the world center of Christianity for the next thousand years.
In that same light, in England the beheading of Charles I in 1649 was the culmination of political and military conflict between the royalists and the parliamentarians in England during their Civil War.
These revolutionary phases correspond to great conceptual breakthroughs and establish the basis for new paradigms. The fact that his version seems unremarkable today is, in a way, the greatest measure of Kuhn’s success. But in 1962 almost everything about this ideas was controversial because of the challenge they posed to powerful, entrenched philosophical assumptions, as is always the case.
If we consider our society, we came through the chaos of WWII to the relative calm of the 1950’s and 1960’s. But the balloon burst over The Civil Rights movement of the late 60’s and the anti-Viet Nam War protests of the 70’s. Nothing would be the same after the “Woodstock Revolution” and “The Summer of Love.” For a time, society went into a reactionary relapse during the Reagan and Bush years of the 1980’s and 1990’s as some parts of society strove to recreate the past, but the die had been cast, patriarchy was dead, the KKK was disenfranchised and the Church had lost it’s grip. Society would be forever changed.
Blacks now had a seat at the table. There would be no more “whites only” restaurants, hotels or drinking fountains. Sexual roles and rules were changing too. The workplace was beginning to move to greater racial and gender equality. Then came the women’s rights movement and American society would never be the same. What really changed was our perspective on the world.
Today we are on the verge of a new order. It is this change that the MAGA adherents are having a difficult time with. The struggles over gun rights, abortion, gay rights, global warming, social networks and the continuing battle over women’s rights are all struggles they have already lost. The floor has essentially dropped out from under them and they are struggling for a foothold. What they desire is to return to a conservative world that was a fantasy in the first place. History teaches us that we are entering a period of reshaped values, and the morays that have propelled us for the last 75 years are shifting.
Today’s young people are turned off by the hidebound politics of the aged dinosaurs in Congress, state legislatures and the conservative Supreme Court. And if you don’t believe me, watch the election results in the fall of 2024. The new paradigm is forming out of the chaos of the last few years and should eventually result in a period of relative stability.
What’s in the next wave? It isn’t flying cars, but AI is about to change almost everything we do. Those with access to information will be important players. The struggle for gender equality will continue as gender roles continue to evolve, but the essential struggle is already behind us.
In other areas, possible changes are: The concept of work will shift as the role of the corporation in society evolves. Billionaires, who today own 40% of the nation’s wealth, will likely fade into the past. Global warming will assume a dominant presence from it’s back bench status today as millions of the poorest around the planet are profoundly affected. And weather changes will drive dramatic geographical agricultural shifts. Our expanded understanding of crime will dramatically shift our approach to treatment. America may lose its dominant role in world society. These are a few possible changes. What the future really holds is always difficult to predict.
copyright@2023 Blue Lotus Press
