Fast movers vs. Slow movers: an obnoxious but reasonable theory of socio-political polarization
"Time makes more converts than reason."
- Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Our society has been changing at an increasingly rapid rate during the post-WW2 era - not that it wasn't changing pretty rapidly before that, but the pace of change seems to be always accelerating. For many people (including me), it hasn't moved rapidly enough. But for many others, it's all been too much, too fast. Destabilizing. Bewildering. Unsettling. Frightening.
Change in itself is a problem for many, who just want to settle into a stable sense of who's who and what's what. For such people, “progress” is a euphemism for chaos. Liberals and Progressives are the enemy because they are constantly pushing for ever more change in a society that has already changed so much in the past few generations.
This desire for consistency and a stable sense of normality (really, a stable sense of reality) is an important driver of the reactionary tendency in American political life. For every one of us who is impatient for more change - more "evolution" - there is an American who wants things to stay the same, or, better, to go back to the way things used to be before everything became so volatile and inconsistent and confusing.
I'm a progressive - I'm impatient for change. I'm constantly exasperated by what I see as pointless and irrational impediments to entirely feasible steps we can be taking to make this world a better, safer, kinder, more enlightened and altogether more beautiful place. I don't believe that the reactionaries are in any sense correct. But I do believe that their concerns are understandable and, what's more, normal.
In the usual course of human affairs, a reasonable idea that happens to be true will ultimately prevail. Nevertheless, it’s also true that, in the usual course of human affairs, this process takes time. Consider the once-controversial question of whether the sun revolved around the Earth, or vice versa. It’s been a very long time since anyone seriously questioned the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun, but it took centuries after the facts had been confirmed by science before they became a matter of consensus. Copernicus introduced the heliocentric model in 1543; ninety years later, in 1633, Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition for promoting it. The Catholic church ultimately lifted its ban on books promoting the heliocentric model in 1758 – more than 200 years after Copernicus published his major work, and more than 100 years after Galileo was forced to recant. In the meantime, the theory had taken hold and become a matter of uncontroversial scientific consensus among those who were not subject to the Catholic church’s scrutiny and authority. But before the question was fully resolved, a great deal of pointless persecution and suffering had been inflicted by the defenders of orthodoxy and those who held to the mere long-standing sense of what was what in the cosmos.
The problem is not just change in itself; it’s the pace of change. We may take some consolation in the fact that, no matter how fiercely they may resist at first, people tend eventually to come around to the truth. But that offers little consolation to the millions of real human beings who continue to suffer indignity, or oppression, or deprivation, or brutality while the rest of society take its own sweet time getting comfortable with a new set of facts. And when those facts are directly implicated in the matter of survival, whether as an individual in an unjust society or as a species on a warming planet, it offers no consolation at all.
This is a problem that I don't know how to solve. Experience is teaching us that it can't be solved by hurling facts and statistics and ridicule at the people you’re trying to win over to your view of things.
What, then, must we do?