Patterns of Change

(WARNING: Long and philosophical post)

This post is for Raven.  Though we have never formally met, Raven and I are both members of a community that is considered very “fringe” and “out there” by the vast majority of the people in this country.  That is the Burner Community, best exemplified by the Burning Man Festival in the desert of Nevada, but now grown to include many regional festivals around the country.  I have no intention of trying to explain what the Burner Community is and will leave it to anyone who is interested to do their own research, including perhaps participating in a regional festival.  It is much more than you might imagine.

I bring this up because Raven came to this blog due to an email I sent to our regional Burner listserve and she has written a couple of comments in response to posts I have made.  The following excerpt captures what I believe to be the heart of Raven’s, and so many others’, dilemma in trying to understand and engage with the larger political and economic system as it currently exists.

I state all this as an example that no matter what more the government does to destroy its people, we still have the “power” to change it all. Its called “effort”, but with no leadership today to make a movement come around like that, I myself feel lost. What do we do? What “ACTION” can be taken to start the steps? I stated before when I first made a post that I purposely made myself ignorant to politics knowing it was a bunch of BS, untruth after untruth. They will continue to be blatant as long as “WE THE PEOPLE” allow it. Personally, I have to say I feel its so lost that nothing can be corrected.

As someone who has studied politics and economics extensively and also worked within the system to try and create change, I deeply understand the feeling of powerlessness that comes with butting up against entrenched concentrated power that is fundamentally destructive to the majority of the people the system is supposed to serve.  I’ve come to recognize that creating that sense of powerlessness in individuals is a feature and not a bug, so to speak.

Raven also writes that she has come to this blog to be educated.  Unfortunately, any education into the reality of our political and economic system will just prove empirically what Raven intuits.  It is a bunch of BS.  The “Idealists Anonymous” post, while tongue in cheek, was written during one of my bouts of hopelessness because of my understanding of how fucked up things really are.

But I have also put a lot of thought into what I would call Patterns of Change over time and it is here that I begin to see hope for the future.  Many years ago I came upon a concept from evolutionary biology called Punctuated Equilibrium.  This concept was first put forward by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge, two paleontologists whose research in speciation (how new species are formed) led them to posit that the history of biological species was not one of gradual change, in which “evolution generally occurs uniformly and by the steady and gradual transformation of whole lineages through genetic changes within the existing species” (called phyletic gradualism).  Instead, they posited that the history of species is actually dominated by stasis because in large populations genetic mutations “are diluted by the population’s size and are unable to reach fixation due to factors such as constantly changing environments.”  Whereas smaller populations of the same species that have in some way been isolated from the larger “parent” population, “are decoupled from the homogenizing effects of gene flow. In addition, pressure from natural selection is especially intense, as peripheral isolated populations exist at the outer edges of ecological tolerance.”

I imagine your eyes might be glazing over right now, but bear with me because we are getting to the good stuff.  To simplify the above paragraph and put it into a form that we can work with for our purposes we can say that change doesn’t happen in a larger population that is established and stable.  Basicly, potential change is averaged out and stasis and stability becomes the norm (We are moving away from biology and into more of an analogue of sociology and even individual consciousness now.  Something biologists would definitely frown upon).  Socially speaking that means we can’t look for change coming from the established social, political, economic order.  There are too many forces acting to dampen anything that might upset the established order.  I think we can see that clearly in American society and it explains, in my view, why Obama’s campaign slogan of “Change we can Believe In” rings so hollow now.

It gets better and this is where I relate back to Raven and our connection to the Burner community.  If we can’t look for real change to come from the larger established society, where might it come from?  Just like Gould’s and Eldridge’s hypothesis of new species arising from an isolated population on the ecological fringe of the parent population’s range so we might posit that real social, political, economic change comes from smaller communities on the fringes of the larger society.

So Raven, you ARE creating the real potential for change by virtue of your willingness (you might even say need) to be a part of a smaller community on the fringes of the larger non-changing society.  The final analogy that I take from Punctuated Equilibrium, and one that is truly exciting for me, is the hypothesis that once a small isolated population changes enough genetically to become a new species, and if those changes give the new species an evolutionary advantage over the non-changing parent species, the replacement of the parent species by the new “improved” species can be very rapid (in the evolutionary time frame).

So, to bring us back to the social analogy, fringe populations that adopt ways of being that confer some advantage to that community versus the larger society might just be able to radiate those advantageous practices and ways of being out into the larger society at a relatively rapid pace, even in the face of resistance from those who want to keep things the same.

OK, that’s enough for now.  Raven, you might have gotten more than you bargained for when you asked to be educated.  The cross that I bear as I make my own way through life is a burning desire to understand and find meaning in the world around me.  This blog is my forum for sharing what I have learned and will continue learning.  Take from it what you will and please add your voice as you see fit so that I can continue my own education though dialogue with others.

RadicalNOTA