Transformational Dynamics

In the 1930s, 40s, when I stepped or, rather, crawled onto the scene in Europe (but it was then the same pretty much everywhere) appropriate behavior had to be learned and learned the hard way. Code words are upbringing, manners, etiquette. Kinderstube in German, which simply means “children’s room” signaled where it all began. It was already there at the dinner table where rules guided the use of cutlery and “children are seen, not heard.” We had to learn the habits of society; it didn’t take place spontaneously. But these were habits. The applicable code words here are customs, traditions. Worth noting is that habits can be formed without much inward understanding of the whys and wherefores that lie behind them. My mother, fortunately, made sure that we understood more than simply behavior; she dug up the roots of it; we knew why it mattered. She knew full well that using one hand for the fork, another for the knife, was arbitrary—and that manners at table had a transcending meaning of which these arbitrary signs were simply symbolic tokens. We knew that, even growing up. This somewhat subtle distinction has strong bearing on what follows.

In the conservative lexicon (thinking of Burke now), tradition is understood as the slowly formed deposit of a collective value. At the broad social level, thus at the level of habit and behavior, customs and morals are the same—as the etymology of the word (mores, customs) indicates. The fact that traditions preserve bad habits as well as good is the source of the tension between traditions and the urge to break them. I view the subordination of women as one of these bad habits.

Long ago and far away it genuinely pleased me to encounter the word enantiodromia, a coinage by Carl Jung, derived from Heraclitus, meaning “counter-running” and used by Jung to indicate the tendency in nature, certainly in society, of things to morph into their opposites: growth becomes decline, decline eventually transforms into growth. Why is it that foreign words derived from people long, long dead have a curious authority? Why doesn’t opposite-tending have the same clout as enantiodromia? Is it a deeply rooted respect for…tradition? Probably. But the key to the Greek as well as the mundane English version of it is that this tendency is natural, thus that it belongs to a certain level of reality, the habitual, the behavioristic. It does not pertain to the higher level that my Mother never tired of linking to its mundane expression.

Easing the strictures of social behavior has been a powerful tendency throughout the years of my life—and always framed in positive ways, formally as “Question authority” and in thousands of informal ways relating to dress, language, the content of books and dramas, sexual norms, etc. Just how far this opposite-tending force has pushed its way to the front of the line—since my childhood—came unpleasantly to view last night. I was upstairs reading, late, when Brigitte called me. Quickly. You’ve got to see this. And we watched the last ten minutes of a reality show called Jersey Shore. Stuck in the past as we are, very abstemious re popular culture, neither of us had seen or heard of this phenomenon until last night. Enough said. We’ve come a long ways, baby…

But enantiodromia is natural, not human, as it were. Persistent and genuine pursuit of excellence and virtue does not naturally lead to moral collapse. Nor does persistent and genuine practice of vice naturally lead to virtue. Hence mindless liberation leads to license, license to decadence, and decadence, ultimately, to disorder—and disorder, as history shows, can last and last and last for many, many centuries. The turn-around actually requires a ray of transcendental light to fall upon the stricken population from on high. It isn’t natural or automatic. It is, as the philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev used to say, a kind of vertical descent of grace transecting the horizontal dimension of nature.

"Liberal" and Other Changing Words

Some words carry such a heavy cargo of meanings that controversies can boil up around them almost spontaneously. “Liberal” is one such word, here taken in its adjectival sense. It carries positive and negative connotations. Liberal describes a kind of education. It can mean generosity or amplitude (“a liberal helping”), also lose or free (“liberal translation”). One of its meanings is broadminded, thus “not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or traditional forms.” An obsolete meaning of it (obsolete according to Merriam-Webster, but I’m not so sure myself), is licentious, thus lacking moral restraint. The word’s root is from the Latin (liber, free), thus free concerning often restrictive customs and free with means often tightly held. In politics it once meant favoring free trade—what today is usually labeled conservative, but the older meaning still survives in Europe.

Curiously a liberal education, strictly speaking, is the medieval curriculum called the trivium and the quadrivium. Brigitte once gave me a wonderful book on this for Christmas, The Trivium, by Sister Miriam Joseph (Paul Dry Books, 2002), something of a classic on the subject. Let’s look at how “liberal” that curriculum sounds: the trivium itself is logic, grammar, and rhetoric; the quadrivium, according to Sister Miriam’s description is “the four arts of quantity pertaining to matter,” thus arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Liberal once, obsolete now. “Music?!” a modern would say. Words gain meanings and loose them. Courtesy once had a vastly greater meaning than it has at present; I have in mind Castiglione’s The Courtier; rhetoric once had status enough to label a whole curriculum; now people have trouble spelling the word.

“Stereotyping” is another word that has undergone extensive redefinition over time; it once meant a metal plate made from a pattern—to be used for printing. It used to mean making many true copies of a single mold; it has come to mean imposing a single meaning on highly variable and changing situations. Functionally, I think, it is a word meaning prejudice, but precisely because prejudice has become extremely pejorative in the wake of the civil rights movement, another word needed stamping out as it were. Prejudice itself is a word that has undergone great transformations. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) knew it, and used it, to mean pre-judgment, consensus, custom, tradition—thus in a positive sense*. Each of those words, in turn, resemble stock on Wall Street if we take a long enough view. Up they go and down, and around and round they go…

All this in shy reaction to a small controversy on another site which intrigued me enough to engage in this totally liberal, meaning free, examination of words—which never fail to fascinate me, especially not when some minor explosion causes their energetic ricochet to draw my attention from a safe distance.
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*Extensively discussed in Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind on p. 38 and elsewhere.