(this is the third in a series of essays which will carry the same title so that you can follow along easily if you should so choose.)
What is the essential nature of change? Is it a reflection of or a product of our existence? Is it manageable? Can it be managed? Could understanding the essential nature of change give us clues of how to go about regaining control of the changes in our life, even in our political life, as we move forward into the future? These are the questions with which I ended the second installment in this series of essays focusing on the nature of change.
If the desire for or the resistance to change are strong motivators in people’s conception of the world and guides their response to the world, it would be helpful to find some understanding in common from which we can speak. We often consider change and the degree of change by measuring the present against the past. As James Burke would say, “We look to the past because there is nowhere else to look.” The problem is that we only exist in the present. We have memory of the past, we can access witness accounts of the past, but if we have any questions as to the validity of those accounts, we cannot go back to check the accuracy of that account with the same mind that directly experienced that past. We can look backward through historical or scientific research, but that is done with the mind that has the knowledge and experience of the present and all that has since transpired that was not available to those living in that past.
The paradox of looking to the past with the knowledge of all that has since transpired was the thought that was burning inside me last fall as I listened and read all of the fierce talk about "superpredators" and the 1990’s approach to the crack cocaine epidemic. At the time the crack epidemic broke out, it bore a striking resemblance to to the lightning fast appearance of “the gay men’s disease” in the 1980’s. In both cases, there seemed to be no analogous past to look to in order to find answers. And in both cases, looking back only fed upon earlier social prejudices and injustice that surrounded the populations at the heart of both epidemics. With the wisdom of the intervening years' social research of both epidemics, we easily call to task those who were trying to manage a future for which there appeared to be no past. In the case of the AIDs epidemic, much of what we learned moving forward--medically, socially, legally, politically--went on to inform the social movement that has brought the lives of LBGTQ community out of the shadows. The response to the crack cocaine epidemic did not reap such rewards, but it is a source of data as we move forward to attack the opioid epidemic in our country. Will our failures there be repeated? Or will they inform our actions and lead to a successful approach to the problem? To insure that, an understanding of the failures of the programs to combat crack cocaine might be a good place to start.
The cautionary tale that results in both of these cases is that we not only color our research with what has since transpired, we also expose ourselves to the conditions in the past that created that past. Just as the fictional time traveller changes the shape of the future by meddling in the past, exposing one’s self to the the beliefs of another time without full comprehension of all that led to those beliefs can plant them anew in the present. We can, without knowing, waken from the past the ignorance, prejudice, injustice and fear that actually created the conditions for those crises to explode in the first place.
So first we must acknowledge that we have no perfect window on the past. It is all we have, but it is imperfect and it is up to us with all we have learned to try to clarify that view, to do our best to provide a full and rich context around each example so that we can better filter out the noise and so realize the essential information from our experience. And that journey into the past must be taken, or we will simply leave to chance if the next step is indeed forward. Without that knowledge, we have a greater probability of simply expending our resources in stepping sideways while making no progress. Worse yet, we may be using our resources and losing ground all at the same time.
Knowing our past is crucial if we are to come together in coalitions with the power to influence our common destiny. It is the most useful tool in combating agist propaganda that seeks to divide us and prevent the formation of powerful alliances. You can only make the claim that the baby boomers destroyed our future if you don't know the country they inherited was so polluted that Lake Erie was declared biologically inert, that the Cuyahoga River used to catch on fire, and acid rain was decimating the Adirondack forests and watersheds that were the source of fresh water for New York City. If you knew nothing of Freedom Riders, Days of Rage, Bull Connor, political assassinations, and anti-nuke demonstrations, it would be easy to think that it was a wasted generation. (BTW, this list only scratches the surface... apologies for the omission of so many examples whose cost was dear to so many) Having experienced this era, boomers have an obligation to bring that knowledge and experience to their own understanding of the Greatest Generation, Gen-X'ers, and Millennials, and to share that knowledge when appropriate. It's sorta like this: If you are concerned about a lack of knowledge, teach. If you are concerned about a lack of understanding, listen. (And yes, my favorite Zen koan is, "If you want to know the way of the universe, sweep.") If we are to become shapers of our collective destiny, we need to be able to draw upon everyone's knowledge and experience. Coalitions must be formed, and understanding is the critical "means whereby."
There is one more point to make about the past. It is never repeated in exactly the same way. What we know of the world, our understanding at this point in our human development, is that we exist in a world that only makes sense if we accept the concept of time; if we accept that there is such a thing as the past, that there is a present, and that a future stretches out in front of us. The other dimensions—height, width, depth—help us locate positions in space. These paired concepts are how we measure our world and our experience. And everything we create or act upon is within that reference. In many ways, this framework for understanding our place in the world at any given moment both illuminates and reflects our understanding of the universe as a whole. It is both the cause for and the reason why this conception exits.
If we take a look within the universe of which we can conceive of, there is an interesting phenomenon. We can never “go home.” We can never return to where we were or when we were. At least not in any universe the scale of which we would be alive to witness. If we take the rotation of the Earth, factor in its orbit, the influences of the other planets and their companions, we see that while there are cycles within which we move about the Sun, and they never replicate to bring us back to the same place in the universe. Include in your musings the the path the Sun is taking through our galaxy, with our solar system in tow, and it is easy to see why we will never again be in this moment of space time ever again. And if we are truly of this universe, then we not only can’t go back, we can’t stay in place. We cannot choose to go back to some preferred past in either place or time anymore than we can freeze this moment for eternity. The acceptance of change is the only course that is in harmony with our inner understanding of the cosmos. Because it is contrary to our understanding of our nature, the resistance to change in an unfolding future is in itself an unreconcilable conflict. Perhaps the strength of this conflict is what generates the anger in those whose longing for a place in the past is the most potent.
The question that we are left with, in the end, is this: If change is inevitable, and looking back is fraught with peril and I have no way to peer into the future, but I have to have two points in time by which to judge the direction I’m going, how do I manage change? Or does change simply manage me? If it is true that "God does not play dice with the universe," that we are somehow looked into the turning of a cosmic wheel, is it even possible to change our destiny? Or are there means whereby the future can be influenced to provide outcomes that are more closely aligned with our ideals of what human society should be? If so, to what degree is chance involved? Am I always confronted with “house odds” when I take a seat at the table?
The next installment is titled, “Where to From Here: Reflections on the Nature of Change (Playing Against House Odds)”
The previous postings in this series are, in order:
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