But there’s may be more than mere inertia at work. A tradition is a living thing, animated by custom and practice to preserve, propagate and elaborate the collective know-how of an entire society. That’s powerful stuff and it actively resists disruption — using shame, ostracism and taboo just like an immune system uses antibodies to defend self against non-self.
As human beings, we’ve also developed the ability to invest in a long-term course of action. We defer gratification and avoid distraction, because to change direction could mean losing our investment or at least putting it at risk in ways that were never planned for. This is another force for continuity.
Indeed, the interest that people acquire in a course of action isn’t just limited to the hoped-for end result, it’s also present in the activity itself. To be the one who sets something in motion and keeps it moving along is to establish one’s relevance. It is you who becomes the story. It is for you that other people work. It is through your hands that money flows — and information, influence and patronage.
While ideologues may seek power in order to ‘do something’, the reality of politics is more often one of people doing something in order to gain power. Which is why governments keep on doing the same old thing whether it works or not; as long as it keeps on delivering power to the same old people, the other outcomes are secondary.
Finally, I’ll mention what may be the most powerful force for continuity: copying. We may like to think of ourselves as innovators, but most us of us are imitators. It’s what makes us so successful as a species, we don’t have to individually and independently invent each and every new thing — we just copy from the creative minority.
As René Girard taught us, copying is also competitive — we want things for no better reason than that other people want them. In a world of scarcity, success therefore means having — and being seen to have — more than what other people have. Thus imitation as competition is not just a force for continuity, but hyper-continuity — of things becoming more exaggerated versions of themselves, even to the point of the absurdity. Nowhere is this more amply demonstrated than in the world of fashion. Consider, for instance, the periwig.
Have you ever wondered why it was that European men in the 17th and 18th centuries wore wigs? I don’t mean wigs as in the surreptitious concealment of hair loss (which continues to this day), but as an adornment for its own sake. It all started in the early 17th century, when it became the fashion for young men to sport long curly hair. The ageing process does terrible things to the male hairline and so artificial substitutes were adopted by those whose natural endowments had let them down, but who could afford the services of a wig maker. The periwig thus became a symbol of wealth and status — which may endure longer than fleeting youth. In which case, the more obviously wiggy the wig the better. Over time, these constructions became increasingly elaborate (as satirised in William Hogarth engraving The Five Orders of Periwigs) and also involved the use of special powders to whiten or colour the hair.
It seems extraordinary to us today that people should have gone to these extremes of unnecessary effort and expense. But such is the self-propelling force of the established order. Even the most bizarre and frivolous concepts can generate overwhelming momentum once they become rooted in the soil of practice and precedent. In comparison, a new idea is an insubstantial thing — a dandelion seed floating on the wind, unrooted in anything that might nourish its development.
Being sold on notions of progress and enlightenment, we imagine that history proceeds on the basis of a battle of ideas — of thesis and antithesis. But the struggle between old and new is not between one idea and another, but between solid practice and vapid theory and in most cases that’s no contest at all.
Even the best ideas — that is to say, the true ones — can go ignored. We love the story of the emperor’s new clothes — because it tells a story in which truth triumphs just by being told. But the bitter irony is that this is a fairytale. In reality, the truth can be told, and heard, and yet make no difference. The Five Orders of Periwigs, published in 1761, was truth in the form of satire — and yet wig-wearing would go on for decades longer.
New ideas that succeed on their own merits, challenging and changing the old order by virtue of their content alone are exceptional. As Tom Holland shows in his masterwork Dominion, Christianity is one of those rare examples — changing societies long before (and after) the ruling class claimed the Christian faith as the source of their authority.
But apart from these occasional bolts from the blue, what changes history is not the old order challenged by the new — but the old order interrupted so that something else can take root in the space left behind.
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Looking back over history, these interruptions often take the form of war or natural disaster. For instance, the Great Fire of London allowed a new London to rise from the ashes. The baroque splendour of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, as we know it today, replaced its gothic predecessor. (However, it’s also worth noting that the city’s medieval street plan was retained — and not for lack of contrary proposals from eminent persons. But what were these mere ideas compared to the practice of established property rights?)
The destruction wrought by the Second World War is another example of how interruption can bring about change — though, in this case, not for the better. The postwar planners and architects transformed the urban landscape, but that wasn’t just down to the force of their ideas. In fact, their schemes — such as Le Corbusier’s plan to rebuild Paris — were thankfully frustrated before the war. But, afterwards, in those cities where bombing had destroyed the old order, the modernists finally got their way. It wasn’t long before we realised what a horrible mistake that was, but that’s the thing about interrupting the old order — it gives new ideas their chance, including really bad ones.
That was certainly true of the First World War — which brought about the end of empires. We retrospectively edit history to present the successor regimes as the inevitable embodiment of challenger ideologies whose time had supposedly come. But the reality was messier. In Russia, for instance, the Tsarist regime was brought down by crushing military defeat — allowing a wide variety of revolutionary movements to contest for power. It was certainly not all about the Bolsheviks. In the elections of 1917, they won less than a quarter’ of the vote. Nevertheless, Lenin seized power because, amid the chaos, his forces happened to be in the right places at the right time. Other communist revolutions — for instance in Germany and Hungary — did not luck out and were soon defeated.
War can bring about peaceful change too. There doesn’t even have to be a power vacuum for someone to step in to. The interruption of the normal routines of life can be enough for people to re-think what it is they actually want. That was certainly the case in the British general election of 1945, whose 75th anniversary was last week. Winston Churchill offered continuity, but Clement Attlee offered a New Jerusalem. Labour had offered radical change before the war too — but at no point was that enough to deliver them a majority let alone a landslide. The War, however, was a sufficient interruption to how things used to be as to make change inevitable. Labour, as the party that recognised that fact and offered a coherent vision as to what that change might be, was thus ideally placed at war’s end.
All of our most important elections have followed significant interruptions. Margaret Thatcher’s triumph in 1979 followed the Winter of Discontent. The New Labour landslide in 1997 was made possible by Black Wednesday, which had ended the Conservative’s reputation for economic competence. And, then of course, there was 2019 — an election won on a promise to complete an interruption (“Get Brexit Done”).
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And so we come to 2020, where we find ourselves living through a much bigger interruption than any of us could have imagined. Whether things return to normal is a matter of if not when.
Having had our habits broken for us, we’ve been given pause for thought. And that’s allowed us to ask ourselves that most dangerous of questions: ‘what’s the point?’
The point of work, of course, is obvious. The point of commuting, though, the point of the office — well, that’s a different matter. We went through the motions, conformed to the pattern because that’s what everyone else did. Lockdown, however, showed us that another way was possible.
Indeed, we may be surprised by the extent to which some things change. Universities, for instance, are under threat as young people — and especially overseas students — wonder if there’s not something better and less expensive they could be doing with their lives. Not even schools can assume their indispensability. In America, there are signs of growing interest in alternative ways of educating children. The teachers’ unions are quite properly concerned for their members’ safety, but they shouldn’t play too hard to get. Interrupting established ways of doing things can have unintended consequences.
The most dramatic transformations may be to our culture of consumption — and hence to our basic economic model.
While some people still struggle to cover basic necessities, it’s also the case that we’ve never consumed so much that we don’t need. This an era of luxury and not just for the very rich. Millions of households have a second or third car… or take two or three foreign holidays every year. It’s become unexceptional to spend £1,000 on a mobile phone, when a £100 would be sufficient; not everybody does of course, but there’s enough who do to support a mass market.
From fast fashion to McMansions to long-haul flights, our excessive consumption sits ill at ease with our green pretensions. But we didn’t think about the contradictions, because we were too busy copying what everyone else was doing, wanting what they wanted.
But having been taken off the hedonic treadmill by lockdown, we now have a chance to wonder whether it’s worth the bother and expense. Like our wig-wearing ancestors, we might just conclude that, no, it really isn’t.
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SubscribeI was very excited by the opportunities lockdown provided for us all to reassess our values and find new paths to follow. Maybe we could stop spending our money on things that make us fat and ill, perhaps redesign the failing shopping malls and high streets into living spaces and communities for instance. However, it seems as though we are being pushed to resume our old ways in order to “save the economy”, eg online taxes to save the dead in the water high streets, vouchers to encourage us to eat in restaurants. I had hoped our new government would be bolder and seize this opportunity for change but it seems as though innovation is in short supply and the powers that be want us to return to our old ways.
Maybe it’s too soon and these changes will be considered in the fullness of time, but I fear it will be too late and the opportunity for real change will be gone.
Candidates for the ‘periwig’ of our present times include:
‘The 5 orders of virtue-signalling’
‘The 5 orders of correctness’
‘The 5 orders of outrage’
We live amongst a veritable cornucopia of periwigs
Any suggestions for the next periwig ?
How about ‘The 5 orders of public health’ culminating in the air diet and death.
And the 5 orders of ‘the’ science.
Change always comes from new technology… even Marx got that right. Innovation is finding new uses for current technology.
Change doesn’t change itself: that’s a circular argument.
In as much as political process is a technology, Western politics is like a rigged casino wheel… house always wins barring accident: Trump; Brexit. The idea that the technology has changed is not supported by the evidence.
And where is the innovation in Boris Johnson’s Government, or the Countries of the EU? Increased empowerment of State over the individual, increasing central economic planning and control: tax; regulate.
What’s new?
Even the USA is a long way down that road.
“And where is the innovation in Boris Johnson’s Government, or the Countries of the EU? Increased empowerment of State over the individual, increasing central economic planning and control: tax; regulate.”
A lot of Leavers (especially up North) want more government, more spending, more taxation (not on them personally) and more regulation/protection.
Thank you Jeremy. I’m ‘one of them Northern buggers’ and your right. …Enough of this Southern pampering already, trains that move and aren’t 100 years old would be a good place to start. Onwards and upwards!