Theories of Permanence
Lucas and I were hiking down from Picu Urriellu a few days ago after a long day fighting up the really big and really scary West Face.
He was between jobs but for years had been working on this journalism project where he was interviewing a bunch of our Yale Environment classmates over and over again each year about what they think about climate change and life.
I was one of those people he’d been interviewing each year, and one of the questions he’d been asking was about our “theory of change.” As we were hiking down from Urriellu, he brought up that I’d said something about change, like about how I’m trying to change the culture, not really the phenomenal things.
We progressives love the question, “What’s your theory of change?” At Yale, this basic thing gets transformed like a chameleon into a hundred other moralized frames—what kind of impact do you want to make? Or, the more Protestant What’s your calling? Be a disruptor!
A lady in front of Lucas and me slipped on some rocks—podeis pasar!
I asked Lucas another question that’d been coming up a lot recently in my dissertation reading: What’s your theory of permanence?
This is a question that we’re not really taught to ask as Americans, though it is the basic premise of literally any major religious or cultural tradition. What are the permanent things? Which matter?
To answer this, people often turn to things like the Ten Commandments or Yama (restraints) or Niyama (observances) in part because these are, like theories of change, essentially theories of permanence. That’s the whole point of religion.
But in general it is the tension between these two sociological forces—change and permanence—that characterizes all of politics. Both have kind of tautological versions—the only permanent thing is change (Californian ideology), and all apparent change is superficial (Plato, etc). Neither of these is helpful.
The real question is what are the essential drivers—trends, conditions—that are facilitating cultural and political change or permanence in any given moment? By default—I think from my dad—I sort of fall into the sort of old Classical sense that balance is generally desirable between the poles of change and stasis. I find both questions—theory of change and theory of the permanent things—interesting in different ways.
But I think to ask only one of them is foolish.
As our world continues to disintegrate, I think people will gravitate more toward the question of the permanent things. If you look now, you’ll find that the people talking about the permanent things are generally annoying, conservative, somewhat delusional religious people.
Some of them are wonderful, but I think they’ve been getting away with a lot for a long time because people, like me, at a school focused on “sustainability” are generally distracted solely by questions of change and impact.
And, in the end, I’m not really sure if there’s a better summary of our current time than that a school specifically devoted to environmental sustainability has, in a matter of two decades, become a bastion of disruptors and innovators.
But it didn’t really matter. The sun was going down in Asturias. A big bull walked out across a field toward the sunset, stopped to look at us, then turned its head toward the orange sun. Some little rock homes speckled a green field down in the valley—still a long way down—where the glistening sound of hundreds of cowbells rang like July fireflies.
There was still another mile or two, then an hour-long drive on a cliffy dirt road. We’d stop in San Vicente on the coast and try to make last call. Small-town Spain isn’t as “late night” as it’s cracked up to be. He speaks good Argentinian Spanish to the waitress, and I’d speak bad Spanish Spanish to her, even though all I was ordering was chicken wings.
We’d sit on the street eating chicken wings and razor clams and some other big fried beef thing Lucas ordered and drinking beer. It’d smell like salt. Lucas would pay and we’d drive back listening to the radio, the sober press conference with Xabi Alonso after his new tenure at the helm of Madrid began, today, with a 4-0 loss to Paris.