Same as it Ever Was: Continuity and its Illusions
The humans, unless they are trained and disciplined otherwise, can be quite accurately modeled if we imagine them constantly singing, “Same as it ever was,” to themselves as everything changes.
When it comes to understanding exponential processes, like population biology in animals or viruses or the development of information technology, this creates huge blind spots in our intuitions. Exponential processes are basic to our world. They can also overwhelm our sense of equilibrium with surprising ease, once unleashed. Our natural resistance to comprehending this can be counteracted, to a degree, through a study of exponential processes that is deep enough to retrain some of our intuitions. This habit of exponential perception can then be paired with a discipline of seeing these processes at work as they invisibly structure the fragile equilibria around us. We can then detect the hidden truth that we live in islands of calm that arise through the clash of titanic oppositions.
The “same as it ever was” also makes us aliens to our own traditions. A core perplexity that I’ve encountered, and that confronts anyone who has seriously studied any long-standing religion, is how very alien religious traditions often are to the people who most avidly claim to own them. For example, the people who canonized the Christian scriptures (in their various canons) and who developed the core doctrines (like the Trinity) didn’t understand what they were doing in the same way that a fundamentalist understands the religion. Scholars who nonetheless hold these fundamentalist positions run into this, and actively attack original positions as if they are “not original.” But the fundamentalists appeal to an imagined past that is supposedly more like their position, even as it is still more remote from them in every sense. The truths of time, like so many others, are always vanishing before their grasping hands. They are always imagining a “same as it ever was” in the teeth of the evidence, if they bother to look at the evidence at all.
This is at the top of mind for me because I do care incredibly deeply about things like tradition and continuity, even the invisible threads of continuity (invisible to the naked eye, and to our stabilizing intuitions) that connect acorns with oaks, and that bind us with our history. And because Katie and I have been planning to maintain continuity where it can be maintained, for the sake of our family and our church family, in the wake of what is likely to be a major historical transition between now and the time our daughter would graduate college. If there are colleges, or if anyone is left who would complain about sentence fragments.
Even when I think about this stuff every day, my intuitions that project the current world into the future remain firmly in place. I have to carefully tear each intuition down so that I can replace it with suitably sketchy drafts of our quivering futures.
It has always been the case that change is among the most reliable constants. It’s just that it really is like that now more than ever.
Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
