Americans are Why America Never Changes
Americans Can’t Change Their Society Because They Don’t Understand How Societies Change
Here’s a tiny question. Why doesn’t America ever change? Why does it seem to be, still, the same old backwards backwater it ever was? And if it does change, why does it seem to be mostly for the worse?
The reason America doesn’t change is that Americans don’t understand how societies change. In fact, the situation’s worse than that. The self-described good person, the white liberal, thinks he or she knows how societies change, and will never let you (or me, in this case) teach them a damned thing. But they are dead wrong — and so their efforts are doomed to fail, over and over again.
Americans — and here I’m speaking of the educated ones, the ones who think they’re good in particular, white liberals — have a certain theory of change. Maybe they don’t even know they have it. It goes like this. Societies change in a slow, steady, stepwise motion. Progress is like a set of stairs. Slow and steady wins the race. Climb them cautiously, carefully, one at a time — and hey presto — through that tiny but cumulative set of steps, you’ll have achieved this seemingly insurmountable goal of social change.
Where did Americans learn this theory? From their pundits and intellectuals. They’ve absorbed it without knowing it, usually, because it’s repeated a thousand times a day in one form or other, by this columnist or that luminary. Change happens one step at a time. In other words, change is incremental. I can use number of metaphors — like filling up a tub one drop a time, like writing a book word by word, like running a race foot by foot.
And because they believe that social change is incremental, a certain further set of implications are held by Americans, again usually without them knowing it. If change is incremental, then any step is a good step, no matter how tiny. If change is incremental, then it pays to be cautious and hesitate and take your time. If change is incremental, then the most important thing is to stay positive, because you need to keep on going. You must never be self-critical, because that could break the momentum you need to keep on climbing those steps.
