Column: On Cultural Change
By Charles Jeanes
What makes change last? The meaning of historic transformations
“We study History in order to intervene in history.” — Adolf von Harnack
“History is tangled, messy, contradictory. But is where we are.” — Eamonn Duffy
A film about changing times
If you have not seen the biopic about Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, I recommend you go and view it, at least if you were a teen in the 1960s.
I came from the movie wondering how the decade of my teens had changed the world – and also, how they had failed to change it, despite the multitude of speeches made at the time, and since, about how these years were truly “revolutionary.” Dylan, music, Youth: did they change our world? [see Appendix]
Historians and their habit of mind
“To have a sense of history, one must consider oneself a piece of history.” — Alfred Kazin
I make myself think about this: I live in history, and it makes me — who I am.
The past is not the same as the present; the causes of change are questions anyone asks themselves about their own life and its course. I want to know why some large human changes are clear, profound, and undeniable; other changes are argued: whether they happened, and reasons why or why not.
Historians study the human past and offer what they find there as a kind of useful knowledge for humans in the present. They are fascinated by change and want to know – and argue endlessly – cause, explanation, process.
My question for the ‘60’s: did music transform Western culture then? Were Dylan and folk music, the Beach Boys and California style, the Beatles and the British sound, revolutionary? Many people at the time said “Yes, indeed!” {Appendix]
Cultural changes: do we recognize the Big Ones ? How? Why? Who?
“No real change in history has ever been achieved by discussions.” — Subhas Chandra Bose
The hardest change to document over time is cultural change, the process that alters how people think and act. Humans once did things a certain way, had thoughts and ideas held in common that were “normal, orthodox, consensual” – and then, they did not. After a cultural shift, people do things differently, think differently, value new, different things. Was it a deliberate plan that made change happen?
Sometimes, it is definitely “Yes” – there were plans. Religions are the obvious example. A whole new religion arrives in a society, at odds with the one(s) already holding force among the people. And in time – a long time or a sudden mass conversion event – the new religion triumphs. Conversion was planned.
How? How does a mass conversion of hundreds of thousands, happen?
One genius spreading spiritual Truth by teaching? ( e.g., Gautama Buddha )
Or: A church institution of such force and organization it overwhelms inferior rivals? ( e.g., Greco-Roman-imperial ekklesia organizing the [Jewish] Christos’ Apostles/Popes/Patriarchs [Paul, John, Peter, Constantine, Theodosius] over four centuries of obscure zealots’ evangelism, and, later, State policies).
Or: Conquest, with coerced conversion? (e.g.,Islam: from Mohammed, the Caliphs, the early Sultans, in a 600-year-march across Africa, Asia, east Europe).
Technology
Changes in human tools are easiest for historians to track. Does technology change everything else about human living – is it the deepest root of change?
Marxist historians think so; technology is the mode of production (“base”) of human life, and determinant of everything else (“superstructure”) in society, they say, drawing their conclusions from a dogmatic reading of Marx. (= Class societies inevitably moving from ancient to feudal, to capitalist to socialist.)
The advent of A. I. has many – experts and ordinary folk — in a state of hyper-expectation of change. I would agree: terrific, and terrible, change will ensue for humans from A. I. My personal take on A. I. demands sharp focus on context.
This new tool has come to human use in a particular, definable, environment. I see it as a possibility for advancement of human flourishing, if we all have equal power over it. But: it is already severely narrowed in probabilities of the best-possible result by the system into which this new technology is birthed.
A. I. is not a pure phenomenon born to a pristine, unstructured human world. A.I. did not come to us as fire did, when we were tribal, egalitarian, and tiny in population, a long way from being the ‘Dominant Life Form on Earth.’
A. I. comes to us as we live in a system — I call it Capitalism for short, but it is the totality of the modern way of life in the West, which penetrates most everywhere on earth even outside the West — the culture, the consciousness, the kind of mind and character and human being that is shaped and limited by that system.
A. I. will not transcend its origins among people who are immersed, living in capitalism as way of being. Because Capitalism is so far from being optimal for so many human lives, I cannot see how to perceive A. I. as anything but a mighty instrument for the continuance of a tiny ruling few who have power over the vast numbers of people not in that few. It simply cannot escape the shape forced upon it by its origin in Capitalism. Marxians, capitalists and other doctrinaires can agree on this. Even techno-optimists see the peril of it.
A. I. cannot “save” humanity, transform our being to something finer, higher, more loving. Think of the automobile: did it liberate us in some manner? No!
War, the change-maker humans have loved to choose in our history
I doubt anyone would say War changes nothing, but the devil is in the details. There have been countless wars that changed almost nothing, but no one would say that about the two World Wars of the 20th century.
Death, destruction, and the feelings left behind after war, do not lack deep consequence, and the change resulting is always beyond any human’s capacity to foresee. Resorting to war in expectation of controlling its result is insanity.
Conclusion: individual and mass
Every day, someone somewhere feels a profound alteration in that thing they call “the Self”. It is by no means so simple to see change in masses of humans.
An individual who exercises sweeping power over others – a Genghis Khan, a Donald Trump, past popes and caliphs and caesars – believe they make The Change. Historians can almost never agree on an intelligible apportionment of responsibility for who leads and effects transformation of entire societies or civilizations. Let me illustrate with an example: “Did Jesus of Nazareth create Christendom, or did all Christians do that equally?”
I ask only to give a demonstration of the extremes that are possible historical explanations for European Christian civilization. One sees the challenge that historians face trying to explain vast changes.
Some people are more likely to make history than others. Dylan most likely created more change than the person in a nameless grave whose burial plot I walked by in the Nelson cemetery. But no one knows for sure …
We can likely agree on this – change is interesting, fascinating, to humans.
And this is a curse: “may you live in interesting times.”
[see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times ]
And this is good advice: “Make friends with Change, it is the one thing that will always be with you.”
Appendix: a sample of historian’s writing about the Sixties
I had thought I might argue my own thesis about changes from the decade of my teens (1964 – 71), but I had an attack of humility. Instead, I offer a ‘teaser’, excerpts from a book I strongly recommend.
The Sixties
Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958-c.1974
ARTHUR MARWICK
Oxford University Press
from chapter 1
Was There a Cultural Revolution c.1958-c.1974?
Mention of `the sixties’ rouses strong emotions even in those who were already old when the sixties began and those who were not even born when the sixties ended. For some it is a golden age, for others a time when the old secure framework of morality, authority, and discipline disintegrated. In the eyes of the far left, it is the era when revolution was at hand, only to be betrayed by the feebleness of the faithful and the trickery of the enemy; to the radical right, an era of subversion and moral turpitude. What happened between the late fifties and the early seventies has been subject to political polemic, nostalgic mythologizing, and downright misrepresentations. If asked to explain the fuss, both survivors of the decade and observers of the repeated attempts subsequently to conjure it up again could probably manage to put together a list of its most striking features, which might look something like this: black civil rights; youth culture and trend-setting by young people; idealism, protest, and rebellion; the triumph of popular music based on Afro-American models and the emergence of this music as a universal language, with the Beatles as the heroes of the age; the search for inspiration in the religions of the Orient; massive changes in personal relationships and sexual behaviour; a general audacity and frankness in books and in the media, and in ordinary behaviour; relaxation in censorship; the new feminism; gay liberation; the emergence of `the underground’ and `the counter-culture’; optimism and genuine faith in the dawning of a better world. They might, in addition, be able to contrast this with a list of key features of the fifties, including: rigid social hierarchy; subordination of women to men and children to parents; repressed attitudes to sex; racism; unquestioning respect for authority in the family, education, government, the law, and religion, and for the nation-state, the national flag, the national anthem; Cold War hysteria; a strict formalism in language, etiquette, and dress codes; a dull and cliche-ridden popular culture, most obviously in popular music, with its boring big bands and banal ballads.
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What I shall hope to demonstrate is that the various counter-cultural movements and subcultures, being ineluctably implicated in and interrelated with mainstream society while all the time expanding and interacting with each other, did not confront that society but permeated and transformed it. I shall also hope to convey the message that this transformation was not due solely to counter-cultural protest and activism, but also to a conjunction of developments, including economic, demographic, and technological ones, and, critically, to the existence in positions of authority of men and women of traditional enlightened and rational outlook who responded flexibly and tolerantly to counter-cultural demands: I refer to this vital component of sixties transformations as `measured judgement’, to signify (by means of the distant echo from Shakespeare) that it emanated from people in authority, people very much part of mainstream society.
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My complaint about the Marxists will be that they are so busy looking for a revolution which could not happen that they miss the fact that another kind of revolution did happen (or so I shall be arguing), a `revolution’, or `transformation’ in material conditions, lifestyles, family relationships, and personal freedoms for the vast majority of ordinary people; certainly there was no political or economic revolution, no fundamental redistribution of political and economic power. Slightly hesitantly, I am calling this `revolution’ or `transformation’ a `cultural revolution’. When I say `cultural revolution’ I very definitely do not mean `counter-cultural revolution’, although that, I recognize, is what other writers (including non-Marxist ones) have usually meant when they have used the term `cultural revolution’ My usage is much broader. The activities of the minorities in the `counter-culture’, the New Left, the student movement, played some part in changing the lives of the majority, though there were many other factors. To me the full significance of the sixties lies not in the activities of minorities but in what happened to the majority, and how it happened. For me, `cultural revolution’ is a convenient shorthand term to describe that entire process. What is important is giving an accurate account of what happened, not the label one puts on that account; all labels are imperfect.
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I set out here is a numbered list of developments, characterizing and expressing the significance of my `cultural revolution’, or `long sixties’; some emerged out of one or more of the other developments, and most interacted with each other. There is no hierarchy of either chronological or explanatory primacy, but the ordering is not purely arbitrary: given all the complexities inherent in the way in which things do actually happen, it is intended to convey my sense of how things happened in the sixties. I mix developments in which there was a high element of willed human agency and developments in which economic, technological, or demographic imperatives were of greatest importance.
It is a fundamental principle of mine that readers should be fully informed as to the basis upon which I am making my arguments and statements so that they are at all times free to disagree with me: I have gone on record as saying that I don’t think any historian, in any one book, can ever get it more than about 80 per cent right–leaving 20 per cent which may be sheer speculation, or just downright wrong.
Arthur Marwick.
ISBN: 0-19-210022-X
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