On Impermanence as the Way of the World

Say what you will about Sukkot, Pesach is the real holiday of impermanence. The story of the Exodus is, in the most obvious way, a story about the cyclical nature of things, the overturning of one world view for another, the rise and fall of civilizations. Just as powerfully, the expulsion of חמץ from our homes - originally what was probably the yearly disposal of a yeasty dough culture from which pre-modern people would make their bread - and with it the entire spring cleaning ritual, is a material reminder that what is here one day may, literally, be gone tomorrow. Life changes; shit happens; humans plan, God laughs.

I've been thinking about impermanence a lot lately, particularly the manners in which certain specific phenomena have assumed presumptively permanent status. And then I read one of the best essays I've read in years, "The Great Reset," by Kurt Andersen in this week's (April 6) Time. Andersen's writing here is writing par excellence - interesting, fun, insightful, and wide-ranging. He makes his points colorfully and compellingly. A true pleasure.

I've been pondering this notion of the inevitability of impermanence for months, and have found three areas on which to focus: international borders; newspapers; and companies. (I'm also interested in the applicability of these ideas to the Jewish community, but will save that for a different post.) Especially on the topic of newspapers, there were massive amounts of articles a few weeks ago that I will not now take the time to reconstruct.

Andersen writes:

For years, enthusiasts for unfettered capitalism have insisted that the withering away of enterprises and entire industries is a healthy and necessary part of a vibrant, self-correcting economic system; now, more than at any time since Joseph Schumpeter popularized the idea of creative destruction in 1942, the world must endure the shocking and awesome pain of that metamorphosis. After decades of talking the talk, now everyone is obliged to walk the walk.

The obvious is worth stating: we all know that nothing is permanent, but we all hope and wish for permanence in our own short lives. We are lucky if the upheavals of the world do not impact our own existence, if we avoid the shifts in power and resources that have disrupted so many over so long.

Jonathan Sarna likes to say that "the history of Jewish camping in America could be better articulated as the history of Jewish summer camps closing." But no one ever talks about the programs that never got off the ground, that faded from prominence slowly and painfully, that were shut down before anyone could notice. The Roman Empire did not last forever; neither did British, Spanish, or Vatican dominance over Europe. Some day, American power will be greatly reduced or destroyed - institutions that existed will be no longer. The great universities of Europe, founded maybe nine hundred years ago, are no longer the intellectual leaders they once were. The same will, someday, happen to Harvard and Yale. The Washington Monument and Golden Gate Bridge will not survive forever.

Yet we insist on assuming permanence, on crystallizing things as they are. Such is the strange and perplexing fate of the Israeli-Arab situation in the last sixty years, where, as far as I can tell, for the first time in history we have decided that, war or no war, righteous or not, boundaries must be fixed as they once were, because that is the way it must be. Where were these same thinkers as the United States expanded, as the Moorish toehold on Europe disappeared, as the same powers carved up Europe and Asia as it saw fit in the wake of two world wars. Is the Pakistani-India border sacred, after colonial powers decided to draw it? What makes Jammu, Kashmir, and the West Bank any different from those areas of Italy and Switzerland that are being redrawn due to glacial melting? (Well, a lot, but the point still remains.)

The key factor of the booming economy of the past twenty-six-odd years was expansion and growth. But in spite of that expansion, why is it so difficult to imagine that periodicals will close their doors, that the culture of information will actually shift instead of merely spreading, that at some point in time the banks, airlines, auto companies, and more will need to be thinned like an overgrown forest? And so, then, how could Congress be playing God any more than in maintaining a status quo that the cycles of life demand go through stages of birth and death, contraction and expansion? Why should Detroit's Big Three survive when, at some point in our past, the steamboat companies of New Orleans and the gold rush industries of San Francisco faded into oblivion, irrevocably altering those cities as well? What does it mean to be "too big to fail" - were the dinosaurs?

Clearly, many of my examples are more complicated than we would all like, but so too are the complex dynamics of Darwinian principles, which might predict that cockroaches are more likely to survive a catastrophic explosion - man-made or of natural origins - than the human animals who can mass produce poison that kills cockroaches. Happiness is no factor in nature, neither is success other than genetic transference. Has the survival of the idea of Judaism been worth the pain and heartbreak endured by generations of dead Jews and their suffering relatives? Will the cultural and economic triumph of the Western World matter when our birthrates plummet and the fundamentalist hordes run over our cultural infrastructures with their superior abilities to live?

And it is worth noting that it is in the shadows of destruction - of our reminders that we live and die, that winter eventually follows spring - that life sprouts anew. Andersen writes:

Recall, please, the mood in the mid-'70s: after the 1960s party, America found itself in a slough of despondency, with an oil crisis, a terrible recession, a kind of Weimarish embrace of decadence, national malaise - and at that very dispirited moment, Microsoft and Apple were founded.

He continues, a few sentences later:

The great dying off of quintessentially 20th century businesses presents vast opportunity for entrepreneurs. People will still need (greener) cars, still want to read quality journalism, still listen to recorded music and all the rest. And so as some of the huge, dominant, old-growth trees of the economic forest fall, the seedlings and saplings ... will have a clearer field in which to grow.

Change happens, whether we want it to or not. Great leadership rides change's biggest waves, at once pointing us in the direction of something new and holding our hands as we learn towards what we are moving. Sometimes, the bright future lies too far off for us to see, as those trodden by the Dickensian Industrial Revolution did not live to see the flowering of America's middle class in the glow of the post-World War II military-industrial complex. Such was the plight of the generation of the wilderness, the generation that left Egypt. The Torah seems to consciously teach that they who had experienced history's greatest high were too stained by some prior experience (or the sublime moment of God removing them from danger) for them to truly grasp the new world where their ginormous wave left them. Such is evolution's peculiar pendulum that those most keenly adapted to identify society's hypocrisies and contradictions (the Baby Boomers) are not adequately equipped to move beyond the divisions that those identifications caused. Cue the entrance of an outsider with the correct narrative arcs of history's great heroes - fatherless, transformative, able to keep his eye on a future prize that, for the time being, exists only in his mind's eye. He cultivates hope.

My mother likes to remind us that "change is neither positive nor negative - it's just change." In truth, change is often good or bad for a given individual - it's hard to imagine that the collapsing stock market was good for those invested in it. Similarly, it's difficult to imagine that the engineers who might lose their jobs as Gates and Obama reshape the defense department's priorities are benefiting from this change. But change is neither positive nor negative - from a global perspective, it is change. From Marty Linsky's "balcony," lives are people's movements on a chessboard or, if you prefer, through the game of Life.

International borders will change, as surely as the ancient weapons of money and culture alter borders without the politicians and generals being aware. The press will continue to evolve, and evolution means both the creation of new species and the extinction of those left behind. However well stewarded the world economy is in the future, businesses will fail, and as they leave the scene they will, at times, be missed. Some will die fantastic deaths (Royal Japan), others will bleed off into history (the British Empire). In some cases, the morning after a great upheaval will be bright; other times things will grow much darker before the gravity of human progress inches things forward again. Such is the lesson of the Passover - that rays of sunshine can penetrate utter darkness, but also that gray clouds can cause shade on even the brightest of days. Change is permanent; impermanence is the way of the world.