Austin Hall Library

Change Won't Make Us Happy; It Will Make Us Nostalgic

This image is by Shepard Fairey and it pointedly captures the visceral impression one gets when one thinks of the current presidential campaign of this candidate. The Obama campaign has been very effective at presenting him as the candidate of "change" and "progress", and it seems to have taken hold at a popular level.

This infatuation with progress reminds me a bit of the "progressivism", I previously mentioned here--a sort of liberation from the fading restraints of the past, the idea that things newer are better, and an uncritical devotion to the applied sciences.

In any event, this post is not about politics or the evils of scientism. It is a cautionary reminder that, while the idea of substantial change in any context may have its attractions, it is always a destabilizing force in society. In fact, "dismay at massive change," contends David Lowenthal in The Past is a Foreign Country, "stokes demand for heritage." History reminds us, it seems, that when change and national obsession with progress tend to disorient and dehumanize people, they seek shelter in history and memory. In times of disruption, according to Lowenthal, artifacts of the past appear like "remnants of stability" to those who seek reassurance.   

When change in society is needed (and it sometimes is), it should be kept in mind that people need reassuring images of tradition and the past. That is why so many resources, public and private, are directed toward historic preservation and reconstruction of icons of our country's origins. The past offers us havens of order, tradition, and stability that counter the depersonalization brought about by change and obsession with progress. 

Read Lowenthal and beware of vague appeals for change and any idea that progress, whether industrial, technological, or otherwise, is always a good thing. Perhaps each year, of the last twenty years of my life, I have become more efficient, while consequently becoming less free.

The Irony of it All

It is ironic, by the way, that the early chapters of St. Augustine's City of God had to be devoted to a defense against the charge that Christians were to blame for the fall of Rome in the early fifth century. As Lesslie Newbigin noted in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, if there had been no Judeo-Christian worldview, the barbarians would still have invaded the classical world and sacked the City of Rome (ca. 410 A.D.). Everything that world achieved could have been swept away by the barbarian hordes--but it was not. The fact that it was not--that, instead, many of its greatest achievements were preserved for later generations--was because the great Christian thinkers of the first four centuries had developed a way of thinking that could safeguard what was priceless in the classical tradition.

In 410 A.D. and beyond, it must at times have seemed dark to St. Augustine as he recorded his thoughts in the midst of the collapse of a culture previously considered the greatest the world had ever known. At times he did so while his city was literally under siege. He did this not knowing that he sat on the cusp of a "golden age" of culture and Western civilization made possible by him and other Christian thinkers. From Augustine until the 18th century Western historians worked with a providential view of history.