Things change. Things stay the same. There is no contradiction between those two statements. The changes occur in the uppermost layers of the ocean, nearest the surface. Down below, things are less subject to alteration. The deeper one goes in the ocean, the greater the tendency for conditions to remain constant because the deep currents have the greatest mass and power, and are least affected by the chaotic activity at the surface.
I’m pondering this metaphor in the context of human history, human behaviour, human society. I don’t even know if it is entirely valid. My own experience tells me that it approximates to the truth, but there are inevitable exceptions to the rule. This may all amount, in the parlance du jour, to ‘my truth’, and my truth may or may not align with the truth.
The need for this pondering hasn’t sprung out of nowhere. Nothing ever does. There are always prompts, in this case from both the long-term and the short-term.
The long-term nudge, for me, is an ever-greater sense of the need to try to understand ‘what it’s all about’ - life, that is. So, nothing piddling about this exploration!
The short-term nudge has been what is to my mind some extraordinary and revelatory Christmas writing from novelist and essayist Paul Kingsnorth. Two pieces in particular: Our Godless era is dead in Unherd and The Cross and the Machine in The Free Press, here on Substack.
What I find particularly intriguing about the Kingsnorth connection is that he and I appear to be very different in our mindsets and beliefs … and yet, and yet …
In ‘Our Godless era is dead’ he asserts:
Everyone, everywhere, lives by a story. This story is handed to us by the culture we grow up in, the family that raises us, and the worldview we construct for ourselves as we grow. The story will change over time, and adapt to circumstances. When you’re young, you tend to imagine that you have bravely pioneered your own story. After all, the whole world revolves around you. As you age, though, you begin to see that much of what you believe is in fact a product of the time and place you were young in.
I believe this to be indisputably true and, for me, it immediately called to mind some words of Douglas Murray from his 2019 book, The Madness of Crowds:
We have been living through a period of more than a quarter of a century in which all our grand narratives have collapsed. ... In the latter part of the twentieth century we entered the postmodern era. An era which defined itself, and was defined, by its suspicion towards all grand narratives.
Then, of course, there’s that familiar, pithy statement by L.P. Hartley at the start of The Go-Between (1953):
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
And perhaps 20th century management guru Peter Drucker summed it all up in Post-capitalist Society (1993), with this :
Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. ... Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself – its world view; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. We are currently living in such a transformation.
What are we to make of it all?
That cross-head is, so to speak, my text for 2024 … with particular application to Business but also, of necessity, more generally, because Business is part of Society. In some earlier posts I have written on aspects of this issue but I now feel impelled to tackle it with greater urgency.
The great, deep currents of the ocean are, it seems, undergoing one of their extremely rare, radical changes. Here’s a Kingsnorth paragraph (it’s from The Cross and the Machine) that really got to me (and I’m an atheist!) :
Whatever had got us here, it was clear where we were going: into a world in which industrial humanity has ravaged much of the wild earth, tamed the rest, and shaped all nature to its ends. The rebellion against God manifested itself in a rebellion against creation, against all nature, human and wild. We would remake Earth, down to the last nanoparticle, to suit our desires, which we now called “needs.” Our new world would be globalized, uniform, interconnected, digitized, hyperreal, monitored, always-on. We were building a machine to replace God.
I hope that you will find this relevant. I hope, even more, that you will join me on the journey.
Thanks for reading!
The images in this post are from Shutterstock.