A regressive manifesto

To resist change is to condemn your culture to a slow death. To quote Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa's The Leopard: 'Things must change in order to stay the same.'

But continuity is everything; the past and present can't just ignore each other. Today, most notably in our political culture, change is worshipped in and of itself. Politicians clamour to be seen as 'progressive', each with a vision of a 'progressive society'. But progressing towards what, exactly? And when has a politician, or indeed anyone, said 'well, I'm regressive, actually, and I propose no change whatsoever?' When Barack Obama speaks of 'change', he feels little need to qualify it; rapturous applause follows automatically. The word, much like 'progress', is emptied of meaning, and becomes little more than a religious invocation to the sky-gods of social progress. If you go on chanting it, it's just gotta happen.

It reminds me of an impenetrable anthropology essay I once read by some Maurice Bloch fellow on the Medina circumcision rite: language is deliberately removed and distorted from its conversational context by the village elders, so as to mystify and better subdue the populace. Rather like Bloch himself. But I digress.

Ironically, contemporary worship of change is founded on traditional Whiggish notions of social progress; namely, that the laws of evolution apply equally to the social sphere: as society 'progresses', it simply has to improve, shedding its 'unfit' features and institutions as it goes. This Darwinian picture takes us all the way back to James Frazer's The Golden Bough, where a progression from 'magical' to 'scientific' thinking is posed as a historic inevitability. The conflation of tradition/change, negative/positive – or indeed vice versa – is both risible and harmful. Be wise to it.

I shall leave you with a quotation from that great Victorian statesman, Benjamin Disraeli, that I shall one day make into a large red bumper sticker and flog to fellow regressives like myself:

'In a progressive country change is constant; and the great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines.'