Peripheral Visions

definition of any stage of the life cycle only as a plateau, without a dimension of growth, seems likely to lead to stagnation and discontent—living happily ever after is a swamp. The famous “midlife crisis” may be an artifact of such a misdefinition, so too much of the senility observed in the elderly.
    Raising children does involve the transmission of continuities, but it also requires sustained and loving attention that welcomes particularity. It involves both providing a base of security and continuing identity, and freeing the individual for risk and experimentation. In a rapidly changing society, parents struggle to make tradition available and to affirm their own continuing convictions while affirming that a child who comes home with a new religion or sexual identity or a Mohawk haircut is still beloved.
    The weave of continuity and creativity in the ways that individuals “compose” their lives is not unlike the way they put together sentences and other sequences of behavior. In speaking, we follow culturally transmitted rules of grammar, but these allow totally original utterances; most sentences we speak or hear have never before been spoken, and the most profoundly original insights are only intelligible because they are phrased in recognizable form. Even that family of art forms referred to as improvisatory, such as jazz or epic recitation, actually depend upon endless practice and the recombining of previously learned components so that each performance is both new and practiced. Children need to learn both kinds of skills. No list of appropriate behaviors, no finite set of skills is sufficient.
    A story used to be told about the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener. Sometime in the fifties, they say, he was riding in a car driven slowly by a student through narrow streets, when they glancingly struck a child chasing a ball. The student pulled over, helped the child up, crying but unhurt, took her into a nearby pharmacy, got a Band-Aid for her scraped knee and a lollipop, called her mother on the pay phone, delivered her at home a few houses away, and eventually got back in the car with a sigh of relief. Wiener had not moved. “You have hit a little girl before with your car?” he said. The student: “My God, no, heaven forbid.” “But then how did you know what to do?” In fact, in order to know what to do in a novel situation, he had to draw on a truly vast amount of existing knowledge: law, psychology, first aid, how to use a telephone. Even in completely new situations response depends on recognizing continuity. Yet from year to year I have to make allowances, as I tell the story, for changes. Neighborhood drugstores disappear, lawsuits multiply, lollipops are branded bad for the teeth and become unwelcome favors.
    All around the world we can find transitions under way in which the challenge to leadership is to make change tolerable by providing affirmations of underlying continuity, as Ethiopian Jews arriving in Israel are able to greet the most radical shift in their circumstances by saying they have come home. The nuns who outlasted the reforms were asserting, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more it changes, the more it’s the same).
    Without such a sense of underlying continuity, change is so frightening that some are driven into reactionary identities. The pitfall of fundamentalism—whether it is Jewish, Christian, or Islamic, or cropping up in some other tradition—is that when some item is held constant while the context varies, constancy is an illusion, and those who resist change often suffer the reverse, Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change (the more it’s the same, the more it changes). The long coats and fur-trimmed hats worn by Hasidic Jews, like the habits of nuns, were only slightly different from general patterns of dress when they were adopted, but freezing these styles created later situations of extreme differentiation. Christian fundamentalists claim that they are practicing “that old time religion,” but when they assert the literal truth of ancient words of scripture in the context of modern notions of truth and falsehood, they are in effect asserting something new. Translating the cosmology of the Old Testament into the format of “creation science” turns the insight of an ordered universe into a caricature. The return to tradition that fundamentalists promise, carried out in a new context, often results in radical change, just as,