The Language of Change
How to Understand a World in Flux
Does the world seem out of whack? Are familiar rhythms of life becoming more erratic? Are answers harder to find amid a pastiche of fragmented truths? Is the future, once a canvas of unconditional possibilities, now shrouded in unforeseen challenges? If so, there is a word for that. In fact, there is a glossary of terms that depict the current state of unease.
The best-known of these is change, which defines the process of becoming different in some way. In social systems, significant shifts in human relationships can beget critical alterations in beliefs, values and behavior; and there have been sundry, and sometimes contradictory, attempts to explain how and why this happens.
Among the most widely recognized is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Adherents like philosophers Auguste Compte and Herbert Spencer believed that, as in biology, societies move along fixed periods of development, adapting as they go. Unlike this linear passage, historians Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler identified repeated cycles in civilizations that rotate through emergence, growth, decline, death, and renewal. Karl Marx reckoned that economic factors are the primary drivers of social change, and inevitably lead to revolution. Alternatively, his contemporary and fellow countryman Max Weber held that more measured reforms come from a combination of cultural, religious, and political, as well as economic, influences. Whatever the cause, sociologist Talcott Parsons supposed that maintaining stability during transformations requires continually improving institutions. But as humanity becomes more advanced, observed anthropologist Joseph Tainter, its institutions get more intricate, until the costs of managing the complexity outweigh the benefits, ending in collapse.
Stuck in the Middle
Then there is organizational consultant William Bridges. “It isn’t the changes that do you in,” he argues, “it’s the transitions.” For Bridges, change is a tangible, external situation that alters the status quo. Transition, on the other hand, is an internal psychological journey people must take to come to terms with an entirely new situation. It is a venture in three stages.
Stage one is what he labels the “end:” that point at which people relinquish ingrained attitudes or conduct. The final part of the process is the “beginning:” when they embrace a different reality with its novel ways of thinking and behaving. In between is what Bridges designates as the “neutral zone,” where “all the old clarities break down and everything is in flux.”
This middle phase is also known as liminality, from the Latin term limen, meaning threshold. Here, notes Bridges, “things are up in the air. Nothing is a given anymore, and anything could happen.” Trapped in a liminal state, individuals, organizations, and sometimes entire countries are discombobulated. Nowhere has this been more evident of late than Joe Biden’s debate debacle.
When Biden first entered the White House, he suggested he was a bridge to a new generation of leaders, prompting many to assume he would serve only one term. He chose instead to stick around for another four years, and Americans began to have serious doubts about an octogenarian in the highest office in the land. This apprehension snowballed after his poor debate performance, particularly among party members and politicians running on the same ballot.
For the next 24 days, they, along with the rest of the nation, were kept in limbo, some pleading with the president to withdraw; others plotting to replace him on the ticket; and still others resigned to his being the nominee. Even among campaign workers there was confusion as to if and when Biden would acknowledge the circumstances. When he finally did, this moment of liminality came to an end, only to initiate something equally precarious.
From now until election day on November 5th, Americans find themselves having to choose between moving forward toward an uncharted future or going way back to an illiberal past. In politics, this quandary is referred to as an interregnum: an indeterminate suspension between successive regimes or administrations. Though Joe Biden is still president, he is, to all intents and purposes, a lame duck. And despite being his vice president, Kamala Harris is essentially running as someone new and, where necessary, distinct from her boss, presenting a sharper contrast to Donald Trump.
Albeit Biden’s abdication was due, in large part, to his age, it was also because he was perceived, fairly or not, as having governed a failed state, a classic catalyst for an interregnum. Indeed, since the start of this century, governments globally have struggled to manage a succession of crises, from a plunge in economic activity that has escalated inequality, to a pandemic that has derailed livelihoods, to a surge in immigration that has provoked nationalist resentment. In these and other instances they have ostensibly dropped the ball, inciting deep discontent.
According to research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), fewer than four in ten people (39%) worldwide trust their governments to tackle complex issues. Even worse, a recent Gallup poll in the United States found that 46% of respondents have very little or no faith in the president to do a good job; still better than Congress, of whom 57% are dubious.
Far more disconcerting is an increasing and broadening disillusion with democracy. The Pew Research Center has determined that 59% of citizens globally are dissatisfied with how democracy is working in their countries. Nearly three-quarters think elected officials don’t care about their concerns, and 42% say no political party represents their views. Two-thirds of Americans are falling out of love with their democracy, with 72% no longer believing it sets a good example for other nations. All of this has promoted the rise of populists, nationalists, and assorted authoritarians vying for power across the most extensive and pivotal series of elections ever around the world.
Hardwired
Whether people are caught up in a personal liminal mindset or embroiled in a wider societal interregnum, there is a common denominator: humans are wired to resist change and the uncertainty that transitions engender. Psychologists call this an intolerance of uncertainty (IU), meaning a difficulty in accepting unknown or unpredictable aspects of life. The higher the level of intolerance, the more alarming such situations can be. Witness the financial community’s recent panic reflex to the faint possibility that America’s economy might land harder than anticipated. Wall Street’s “fear index,” which gauges investors’ aversion to bad news, hit its highest level since the pandemic.
Though response times are not always as immediate nor intense as that, when familiar patterns and practices do come undone, folks generally react negatively, either cognitively, emotionally, or behaviorally. One 2022 study, for example, concluded that during the pandemic, personalities changed faster than usual, and not for the better. There were marked decreases in “extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness,” principally among young people.
A more typical characteristic associated with IU is generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), which is the most prevalent mental malady on the planet, affecting more than four percent of the population, or 300 million citizens globally. In the U.S., the latest poll by American Psychiatric Association calculated that 43% of adults are feeling increasingly anxious, up from 37% in 2023 and 32% the year before that. Seventy-three percent are especially antsy about the election.
Moreover, this kind of disquiet is contagious. Research has shown that when members of a community see peers resist change, they follow suit. What follows is a pervading sense of alienation from accepted standards and values. An extreme version of which is called anomie. This condition is a state of normlessness that arises when people lose clear guidance or direction in their lives, inducing depression, suicide, and crime. To that end, the percentage of adults diagnosed with depression has risen by almost 10% over the past seven years. In 2022, the nation reported the highest number of suicides ever recorded. Violent crime and homicide surged during the pandemic, a period of extreme social detachment.
Keeping Pace
Clearly, the scope and substance of change is formidable. So too, is the speed at which it is occurring. According to sociologist Hartmut Rosa, the world’s institutions and practices are experiencing a social acceleration, which he describes as a “shrinking of the present,“ brought on by a rushing pace of life and subsequent social transformations. This, in turn, is being driven by an even more precipitous phenomenon known as accelerating change, whereby every technical innovation creates the next generation of technology faster than before, with more hurried and profound variations still to come.
The principal theory at play is Joseph Schumpeter’s creative destruction, the process by which significant breakthroughs replace established techniques, making them obsolete. The premise here being that no technology, business, nor industry has an inherent right to survive, and thus is open to disruption. Rather than respond to change, proponents are triggering it with near-religious zeal. Techno-evangelists in places like Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, China, and Tel Aviv have embraced Mark Zuckerberg’s exhortation to “move fast and break things,” often without considering the economic, social, or political consequences.
One undesirable outcome, first proffered by sociologist William Ogburn, is what he deemed a cultural lag. Ogburn divided the world into two cultures; one being “material” consisting of inventions and technologies, and the other being “non-material” comprised of social attitudes and institutions. Since the former advances more rapidly than the latter, it creates a problematic gap between the two, as epitomized by social media’s dissemination outpacing society’s ability to effectively regulate it.
Yet this predicament pales in comparison to what may ensue in the wake of artificial intelligence (AI). Fueled by both their fervor for the technology and the fear of falling behind their competitors, companies are racing to potentially spend more than a trillion dollars in what amounts to an AI gold rush. But despite their conviction that large learning models will initiate a groundbreaking revolution on par with the advent of fire or the wheel, there is considerable angst about the implications.
A Pew Research Center survey at the end of last year found that better than half (52%) of Americans were more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence in their daily lives. Similar research by the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University deduced that 55% of the public think AI jeopardizes their employment opportunities, and 66% believe it threatens their privacy. And they are hardly alone. More than half (56%) of the nation’s Fortune 500 companies have cited the technology as a risk factor in their most recent annual reports. AT&T, for example, noted that the “models used in those products, particularly generative AI models, may produce output or take action that is incorrect, release private or confidential information, reflect biases included in the data on which they are trained, infringe on the intellectual property rights of others, or be otherwise harmful.”
Accordingly, technology research and consulting firm Gartner has projected that as many as 30% of businesses could abandon generative AI projects by the end of next year. Nonetheless, artificial intelligence will doubtlessly progress, and may thrust millions of people into a transition that exceeds any liminal state or interregnum.
Engel’s Pause is a term coined by economic historian Robert Allen to describe the deterioration of working peoples’ standards of living amid a period of technological progress. It is derived from German philosopher Frederick Engel’s book The Condition of the Working Class in England, that chronicled the Industrial Revolution in Britain between 1790 and 1840, when per capita gross domestic product (GDP) grew substantially due to technical advancements, while working class wages stagnated.
Some economists and academics believe a similar shift is currently underway across Western nations. “Today’s digital innovations are doing for brain power what the steam engine did for human muscle power during the Industrial Revolution,” asserts Andrew McAfee, co-director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. Granted, the global economy is far more complex than during the late 18th and early 19th centuries and living standards in developed countries are relatively much higher, artificial general intelligence will upend a great many more lifestyles than did the steam engine.
No matter what form it takes, change is primordial, interminable, and inevitable. It is also manageable. The first step is to truly understand what is happening and why. The good news is there are more sources of information and ideas than ever. The bad news is they are harder to find amid myriad liars, conspiracy theorists, promoters, and so-called influencers. But look hard enough and answers can be found from scientists, educators, responsible journalists, and even some politicians. The task then is to continually explore and learn, and to never get too comfortable with the status quo, as it is not likely to last all that long.
