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Last week we explored the many cases of how nothing Changes. Geography is destiny. The type of land, the geographic features, and even, arguably, the political government of a place do not alter. Therefore, once the shape of the earth took on its current form, the shape of human civilization was decided.
But this does not explain everything.
For change is ubiquitous.
The problem of change consumed the minds of many ancient Greek philosophers. “We cannot step in the same river twice,” said Heraclitus in the 5th century BCE. For everything is in a state of flux. Nothing stays the same. There may be fixed, underlying atoms, (a-tomos, Greek for not cuttable) but even these are constantly being rearranged. Change is everywhere, irrepressible.
Heraclitus, in Raphael’s School of Athens, 1511
We know this to be true most of all in our personal lives. Each human life is sacred, but each life is also temporary. Nature’s cyclicity is one of life’s hardest to accept and most beautiful truths. We get the time we get. We mourn for lost grandparents, parents, siblings, friends, sometimes children. We manage through the coming and going of friends and neighbors. We watch jobs and friends at jobs come in and out of our lives. We mark the time to celebrate it, to stamp it with clarity and affirmations: graduations, birthdays, weddings, retirement parties, funerals. But nothing stands still.
The best we can do is follow the three-thousand-year-old wisdom of Ecclesiastes, “Enjoy your life with your spouse that you love all the days of you evanescent life that you are given under the sun.”
Or the two-hundred-year-old wisdom of William Blake
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise
We love and live as many moments as we are fortunate to get. For the only thing that does not change is change.
William Blake, 1757 - 1827
Beyond humans and atoms, the larger world as we know it also changes. Thankfully.
Who would want to trade being born today for being born during the Industrial Revolution? In the Middle Ages? The Roman Empire? Modern medicine, modern democracies, and modern sanitation, among many other changes, have made our lives far safer and more enjoyable. Extending the argument to absurd but illustrative ends: would anyone want to live before homo sapiens? Before plant life existed? Before the Big Bang? Without changes in the earth and its people, we simply wouldn’t be here. As one late twentieth century ballads proclaims: Change! Change! Change!
Change comes for nations, too, for good and ill. Nations are different from people, of course. As nineteenth century British economist and member of parliament David Ricardo observed: “Man from youth grows to manhood, then decays, and dies; but this is not the progress of nations. When arrived to a state of the greatest vigour… their natural tendency is to continue for ages.”[i]
But history teaches us that contrary to what we saw last week, nations do change. The physical bedrock of a nation is far more unchanging than the society that lives upon it.
Consider three examples:
Greece is the birthplace of democratic culture in the Western world. But Greece is hardly a paragon of democratic stability for all time. After a few centuries of democracy, it then spent thousands of years under imperial control. Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, and Ottomans ruled over it. After Greece became independent again in the nineteenth century, it hardly became a paragon of democratic stability. It suffered through coups, foreign regents, and civil wars. Its geography contains the same mountains, canyons, plains, olive groves— but its people and history experienced dramatic change.
England is another case study in change. When the Romans invaded England in the first century BCE through the second century CE, they battled against tribes whose political constitutions differed little from continental Germanic and Gallic societies. The Tale of Beowulf, one of the oldest works in English, is (besides being many high school students’ least favorite assignment) a depiction of an ancient tribal culture well-known throughout Europe. Yet, when William the Conqueror invaded in 1066 and decided to partner with the Anglo-Saxon natives, he launched a profound change. He laid the basis for a democratic culture that required kings to collaborate with nobles. This would eventually lead to a parliament, to constitutional monarchy, to the rights of peoples, to John Locke, and to the ideas that inspired the American Revolution. England’s physical isolation from Europe certainly has helped it militarily, but if anything it was the successful conquest of England by William the Conqueror that helped birth a uniquely democratic culture.
William the Conqueror, 1028 – 1087
The United States also exemplifies how geography is secondary to other forces in human history. America is a bizarre concoction. The first human inhabitants came to the American continents only 17,000 years ago, making it far more recently peopled than the Old World. When Europeans came to Jamestown, they came to make money. After a decade they decided to adopt the Spanish system of slavery, and they forcibly brought people from west Africa. Meanwhile, a religiously passionate congregation left everything they knew behind to go to a wilderness in Massachusetts that nearly wiped them out. Then, realpolitik played out, with the new arrivals from Europe making alliances with some of the Native Americans nations, themselves consisting of many small states that had been unevenly decimated by European disease. Then this fusion of European arrivals seeking religious freedom and sacrificing for it, European arrivals seeking to make a new fortune and working hard for it, African slaves forced to work in bondage, and Native American city-states who made common cause (or war) with the European arrivals, created a new set of norms and values. It is one of most unlikely global combinations of humanity ever. And it has become more heterogenous with time as people arrived from every part of Earth. People born in more than 150 countries live in New York City today. It is astounding that so many of us have friends whose ancestors only a few generations ago lived on every different continent (except you Antarctica, sorry). What a strange nation to come into existence! Natural geography: rivers, mountains, valleys, etc. did not stop the bizarre combination of peoples who created American culture.
And that nation, America, has changed tremendously over time.
What people wear, eat, what structures they live in, what medicines they take, how they get around — all that has changed.
Who gets to be citizens — skin colors, religions, countries of origin, sexes—have all expanded.
What was once a provincial backwater nation of only a few millions people, and expected by European powers to rapidly fail, has become a global behemoth, a font of innovation, the most populous country outside of Asia, and itself the guarantor of European democracy’s security.
So much for nothing changes.
We’ll conclude this series next week by focusing on the norms and values that stabilize American democracy, and how much those norms do, or do not, change.
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[i] Ricardo, David. The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004 (1818), 177. Chapter XIX.