Today in Quaker Meeting for Worship, some ministry came to me, around change in the world and my associated anxiety. After some deliberation (we are urged to wait to see whether ministry is just for us or for the whole meeting), I spoke - I suspect not entirely coherently. To avoid being over-long and because it didn't seem relevant enough, I didn't speak to the full context behind my thoughts. But while they're still in my head, I wanted to capture them here, for my own sake if no-one else's.
Three sources, two of them related. First, in our meeting's book group, we're reading the novel A Single Thread by Tracey Chevalier. The book is set in 1932, and is about the experiences of a single woman in the years after the First World War, and she (and society more broadly) changed in the aftermath of that terrible conflict.
Second - and this might seem tenuous but was real for me - as part of my service to the meeting, I keep a mental record of the number of people present (which I later store in a spreadsheet to analyse patterns of attendance), and to keep it in my head I remember it in the form of a date. Today when I counted there were 19 adults in person, 2 children, and 3 people attending via Zoom - thus forming the date 1923.
That reinforced the book's setting, and made me think: how do individuals respond to the most terrible of changes? Millions died in that war (from 1914 to 1918), millions more in the terrible aftermath as populations shifted across Europe, and yet more millions in the influenza pandemic that came immediately after the war and has never been as well remembered. How do societies recover? Do they try to return to something like the time that had been before, or do they end up creating something new?
In our own time, we have seen terrible wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Syria (among others), causing destruction and considerable human displacement; we have seen an economic catastrophe in 2008 which led to economic and ongoing political turmoil which is still poorly explored; and a pandemic which caused large numbers of deaths and disruption in the short term which has led to longer term social consequences around working patterns. All significant, though none as terrible in its scale as the First World War. All however are examples of very large scale external changes, and attempts by society and individuals to respond.
My third source came from my working context. In September of this year, I shall have been working for the Open University for 25 years, something that seems just extraordinary to me. When I first joined, to teach systems thinking, we didn't at the time have a systems department but a systems 'discipline' within a kind of federal department grandly called the Centre for Complexity and Change. I remember telling this to someone I knew who told me that perhaps we ought instead to have a Centre for Simplicity and Stability. Of course, we sought to understand complex systems, and we were situated in a time of great change - as well still are. But since Quakers very much value simplicity, this old story did make me think this morning: do we over-value change? Is there a place in our world for stability? What would that actually look like?
I tend to think of myself as being quite good at change - coping well with large-scale discontinuities. But as the meeting progressed, I realised that in at least three areas of external life, I am currently quite struggling with change. In each of these areas, I don't feel as though I have much sense of agency. In each case, I don't like the direction I see things moving; I don't like the sense that I personally feel ill-equipped to handle the change; and I don't like the sense that institutions I care about also feel ill-equipped to handle the change. These changes (which are all connected in various ways):
- Climate emergency: Last year (2024) was the hottest on record and reached the dread 1.5C above the pre-industrial average; there are currently wildfires in California in January; there are constant floods and massive storms. And society not only seems unable to respond, but in many places is actively going backwards.
- Right-wing populism: Societies around the world are currently succumbing to political movements which value excessive nationalism, extreme social conservatism, cruelty in the treatment of one's enemies, xenophobia and anti-immigrant hate, and leaders who speak to the deprived of their self-interest but govern for the economic elites. Eight days from today, the United States will inaugurate a president of this kind, but they hold sway in Hungary, and could soon have significant power in France, Germany and perhaps one day the UK. They are supported by rich owners of technology firms who can amplify their message. And centrist governments (whether leftish or rightish) really struggle to counteract their appeal.
- Generative AI: In a way, I have a more self-centred concern here. My job, based on skills which I have honed over decades, is one of writing high-quality texts. The technologies of ChatGPT and comparable tools make that skill look outmoded, perhaps even unnecessary. At an ethical level, I despise the sense of dishonesty which these tools introduce - of passing off automated words as one's own writing. I despise the enormous resources required to produce these fictions, in energy and water usage; and the massive human cost to workers in the Global South who examine the training data. And I despise the potential impact on public discourse from deepfakes, on education from students scraping through education through submitting fake assignments, and on the economic impact to artists who might also lose their livelihoods. Yet the bandwagon rolls on, lots of people (including sometimes other academics) who should know better are using these tools, and tech firms who have invested billions are trying to make them an inevitable part of search engines and office suites.
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