We Love Change…Or Do We

Change is inevitable, a reality we accept…or not

While humans have embraced (or tolerated) change for many centuries, the rates of change have gained considerable momentum for the last two centuries. Overall, the rate of acceptance has been largely positive, with the caveat that individuals have mixed opinions/emotions about a wide range of changes. This is the result of who benefits and how this is distributed. What seems obvious now, in the early twentieth century, is that the variables are numerous and also interactive. This can be very good, or problematic.

Every society has populations that vary to various degrees in terms of wealth, opportunity, access and options. Sometimes it’s fairly obvious to us which strata others are probably in, but it is also easy to get it very wrong. How open-minded (or not) others are often cannot be deduced from appearance or even casual conversation. This does not stop those with fairly rigid perspectives from making judgements about others on the basis of little knowledge and much prejudice. Those with more open minds prefer to know more first.

Change is inevitable, a reality that we accept — if only because there’s often little or nothing we can do about it. Those who are moderate or more liberal may even like change unless the disruptions are significant and viewed as negative. Those who are more conservative may find much change unnerving and unpleasant. They tend to prefer the past in a variety of ways, with the exceptions of categories they generally approve of, such as technology and health care. “Moral values,” in particular, are problematic for them — so much so that they will readily undermine the rights of others.

A well-known song by a famous female singer is about “if I could turn back time.” She’s referring to romance and love. But the more conservative citizens actually want to turn back time in a variety of ways. Being a minority among voters is irrelevant to them. Democracy is all well and good, but authoritarianism is considered justified when “values” are being undermined by those who are deemed “liberal,” which may be anyone to the left of far right. The far right wants to redefine democracy as needed.

There is no rational argument for governance by minority — a self-serving construct that fails the fundamental premise of democracy as both concept and functional reality. Authoritarianism is the absolute opposite of democracy. There are simply no credible arguments for it. An inevitable reality is therefore that over time democracies become more “liberal” in the sense that more citizens have more freedoms, not less. Every society has those who believe they are becoming a minority in their country.

The history of humans is that of change. There has been change for hundreds of years, but industrialization — approximately the last two hundred years — has accelerated change at vastly increasingly speed, driven by combinations of new technologies, higher education and evolving socio-economic growth. Many of the eight billion humans now occupying the planet have benefited, but many have not and are unlikely to do so. Climate change and the inevitable accompanying physical consequences will exacerbate these issues.

Hence the conundrum noted in the title of this piece. Uncontrolled change is not a blessing. But it can take time for this to become obvious. Those who are optimistic are either not paying attention or are fools. Wisdom says that moderation is invariably superior to excessive confidence. I wrote about this many years ago. “As a life-long pragmatist who values critical thinking and the synthesis of intelligent assessment from a multitude of facts, it is not pleasing to witness the abundance of talking heads reducing complex issues to fabricated simplicity.” Nothing has proved me wrong since then. Quite the contrary.

Only the idealistic and optimistic don’t comprehend this. As Claire Booth Luce noted long ago, the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that the pessimist is (generally/usually) better informed. A pragmatist, by nature, is a functioning pessimist. History justifies this. As an historian, I see how much has gone wrong in so many ways. This doesn’t dismiss what has been a success, but rather recognizes that success very often is the result of wisely applied pessimism.