A False Dilemma… Stagnation Or Runaway Change?
By GEORGE A. KENDALL
Whenever I get into arguments with people regarding whether technological society, with its constant change, is a good thing or a bad thing, responses tend to be along lines of: Would you want to be without indoor plumbing? Or modern medicine? Or have a life expectancy of maybe only 30 years, on average?
These responses suggest a simplistic understanding of the whole matter. They set stagnation and runaway change over against each other as the only alternatives, so that, if you don’t want runaway change, you have to accept stagnation, and if you don’t want stagnation, you have to accept runaway change.
The matter is much more complex. Change and continuity are not only not mutually exclusive, but are dependent on each other. There is no such thing as changelessness. Even the most “stagnant” society changes. Old generations die and new ones are born, someone invents a new kind of plow, and so on. Nature is always in motion, and, as we are a part of nature, so are we. You also can’t have change without continuity. Change with no underlying unity to ground the change would be nothing but a group of stagnant instants without any connection to one another. There can be no such thing as pure rest or pure change — only underlying continuity within change or change within continuity.
Heraclitus said it in his two-word fragment “metaballon anapauetai” (“changing, it rests”), which some modern-day moron had the gall to translate: “The only thing constant is change.” You can’t separate them. I am reminded here of the Chinese idea of yin and yang, expressed pictorially as a circle with two halves, one black and one white. The two halves are not divided by a straight line but by a curved one, a sort of S, which indicates that the two interpenetrate each other, that each of them partakes of the other, and without this participation in the other could not be.
In order for change to be possible, you have to have certain structures in place to hold things together while change is happening. This is true in nature as well as in society. In nature, we have an expanding universe, with all kinds of change taking place constantly — stars are born, planets form, stars go nova. But in order for that to happen, you have to have things like the forces that bind atoms together, gravity, the laws of motion. Otherwise everything would just disintegrate. There is no such thing as pure change or pure continuity. They are always involved with each other.
In society, too, there are structures needed to hold people together. Most crucial of all are stable families. You also need many, many small communities where everyone knows everyone else, and many are related — small towns and villages where most interaction is face to face. There is something about this pattern of living that encourages stability.
Unfortunately, many people in rural areas have been brainwashed by our elites to see rural life as “idiotic” (Marx), and want to get to the cities as fast as they possibly can. But many have not yet succumbed to the propaganda, and as long as they can make a living on the rural economy, want to stay put.
There is a sense of belonging to a place. I have experienced this myself. Twenty-six years ago, I bought a lot in the tiny town of Grand Marais, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, put a mobile home on it (which I later added to), and lived there the next 24 years, proving wrong those of my acquaintance who were quite certain I was romanticizing small town life, and would soon get over it and return to more “civilized” regions.
Throughout those years, I never doubted that I was exactly where I belonged (I only left when post-polio syndrome made it impossible for me to take care of myself, forcing me to take up residence in a nursing home).There is a sense that the proximity of something as concrete and relatively immovable as the land, as well as the concrete, not abstract, interaction with neighbors in such places, functions like a kind of gravity, holding one in place, “down to earth.”
City life, in contrast, is more like floating in space. Things are constantly on the move. People move from “home” to “home,” from town to town, even from country to country. This means the more restless, hence the more innovative and creative people, tend to gravitate toward this life, hence the cities are where change and innovation are major elements — art, technology, science — all the expansive forces, in contrast to the binding forces, which are more evident in rural life.
We need all this, because change is a part of life too, especially for the more restless, creative people, who would not be able to tolerate rural life, and would be a destructive force in the rural areas if they stayed there. Cities are, among other things, a safety valve for the countryside, drawing off the restless people who might undermine it. In turn, the countryside supports the cities by growing food for them and also by anchoring them, keeping them from disintegrating, because if the cities fly apart too much, there will not be enough stability to make all that creative work possible. So in society, as in nature, you need both the binding, stabilizing energy and the energy of movement and change.
But a balance is needed between them. My guess is that this is not a simple, half-and-half proposition, but that it needs to be weighted toward the agricultural side. This is more an intuitive guess on my part than anything else, and right now I can’t offer any proof for it. But somehow city life is like a bull or an elephant or a kangaroo — it needs a lot of room. It takes a lot of peaceable, quiet rural life to balance all the excitement these urban critters generate.
So a more traditional civilization where there are prosperous, active cities in which important work is being done, within a nation where well over half the population works in agriculture and lives in the countryside, would be optimal. I would suggest maybe 80-90 percent, as was the case at America’s beginning.
The above doubtless has something to do with the fact that creative people are always a minority. If they were in the majority, chaos would reign. So here we get the problem referred to above. Where a significant number of creative people are forced to live among the majority of stabilizing people, they are disruptive. But that problem usually takes care of itself, because the creative people get out and move to the cities. The more common problem happens when the non-creative people find themselves in the cities, where they do not belong.
In the cities, a substantial number of them fall into dysfunctional subcultures, characterized by crime, family breakdown, and other indices of social pathology. All of this happens because the history of the industrial revolution has been, in one aspect, the history of rural people being herded into cities, where they do not belong.
I can see no answer to this problem short of reversing the effects of the industrial revolution on rural life. That would mean getting rid of factory farming and making agriculture again a labor-intensive industry. It would mean meaningful and satisfying work for the non-creative majority outside the cities, leading, one would hope, to a degree of social peace — class warfare being largely something that happens when there are urban proletariats. Sadly, this is not likely to happen.
(© 2018 George A. Kendall)
