Peripheral Visions

during the Reagan-Bush years, radical change was camouflaged with the label of conservatism.
    Sameness and difference are a matter of context and point of view, change and continuity often two sides of the same coin. We can only make sense of the relationship between change and constancy by thinking of them in layers, one flowing under or over or within the other, at different levels of abstraction: superficial change within profound continuity, and superficial continuity within profound change. The deepest changes may take generations, with old attitudes concealed beneath efforts to adapt. My mother once commented that, when a woman who was herself breast-fed shifts to bottle feeding, she still holds her infant as she was held, as if the nourishment were coming from her body; but when her daughter bottle-feeds, the echo is lost. Sometimes the descendants of religious families retain their parents’ ethical principles for a generation or more after abandoning the doctrines that supported them. Sometimes groups that have been persecuted act out patterns of self-hate when the persecutor is long gone.
    One day a senior colleague told me a joke with a typical mixture of the academic and the mildly salacious, ending with the assertion that physics is like copulation and mathematics like masturbation. He broke off suddenly with an air of contrition and said, “I shouldn’t be telling that joke, that’s a sexist joke.” When I looked puzzled, he explained that it’s only for the man that copulation is like physics, whereas, he said, for the woman, “sex doesn’t have an object.” I was chilled. He had learned that it was a mistake to be overtly sexist and was trying to watch his step, but he had no awareness whatsoever, under the effort at superficial change, of the profoundly sexist nature of the assumptions revealed in his explanation: that sex is something a man does to a woman, a process in which the woman is the object. This was for him self-evident fact.
    Changes can be made quickly on the surface that take a generation or more to affect more basic structures, so both progress and degeneration are deceptively slow. In evolution, the very continuity of survival depends upon multiple superficial changes, many of them temporary. If temporary adaptations were to become permanent and genetic (this theory, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, is today associated with Lamarck, but Darwin believed it at one time as well), survival would become harder. Thus, dogs and horses grow thicker fur when exposed to cold, but if a thick coat is inherited, the capacity to adjust fur thickness has been replaced by fixed heavy fur thickness, and the animal can no longer adjust. Natural selection works more slowly, favoring traits that prove useful generation after generation. My father used to point out that a tightrope walker maintains balance by changing the angle of the balancing pole. Freeze the angle of the pole, and the tightrope walker will fall. Death and extinction are the discontinuities avoided by the capacity to change.
    The pattern in which corrective feedback brings about the changes or adjustments that will maintain a deeper constancy is what defines a balanced cybernetic system. Human beings can respond more quickly than dogs and horses to messages of heat or cold, putting on or taking off a sweater to maintain a comfortable body temperature. But even among humans the needed adjustment is not available if, for instance, an outer garment is specified by religion. I have often felt sorry for Hasidic Jews in the furred hats and dark coats adopted generations ago in Northern Europe and carried with them to the Mediterranean climate of Israel. In the same way, when educational or political systems are frozen into some form that seems good to one generation, they may lose the flexibility to adapt in the next. Efforts to address social issues by amending the U.S. Constitution instead of learning to read it differently risk compromising the flexibility which is its greatest strength. Protecting the environment with more and more regulations may block the development of improved ways to handle wastes or conserve energy. Rigid standards can undermine thoughtful education, and sometimes overspecific codes of conduct can lead to the atrophy of ethical choice. Only children who are allowed to make mistakes can become responsible adults.
    Many kinds of addiction can be seen as efforts to maintain some constancy that at