The range of change

Forget the posturing, and let us get to the point. We have changed the world, which has changed us as well. Until the 1970s, the Queen of England was not even permitted to be in the presence of a divorced person. Now she has changed. Her son, the heir to her throne and a widower, is marrying a divorced woman. The American negroes were slaves until they fought for their rights and got their freedom. Martin Luther ushered in the Reformation. Lenin brought the Revolution. This is how change comes, from mother's heart, lover's charm, warrior's spear, soldier's gun, reformer's will, and revolutionary's zeal.

But the question is how big is the piece of the string? How much change is granted? How much change is good? Change is the heaving breath of eternity as lives move, events occur and history shifts. The man who claimed that the earth revolved around the sun was condemned as a heretic. Many who spoke of God and religion were burned at the stake. Prophets were persecuted, reformers ridiculed, heroes heckled, and rebels reviled; yet everything happened to bring about change.

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There is, however, a sad side to it. Change proves that nothing lasts forever, what is dear to one generation is despised by another. What change reveals is the hypocrisy that is buried in the destiny of mankind, unfolding like a play in progress, one act at a time. Another heir to the British throne once abdicated because he wanted to marry outside the royal line. But the rules have been bent this time and everybody is okay with it. There will be a civil marriage, subsequently blessed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Camilla Parker Bowles will not become the queen, and she will not use the title Princess of Wales. Never mind if the future King of England, the Defender of the Faith, may have lived in sin, seducing another man's wife, cheating on his own, and perhaps committed adultery.

Hypocrisy is the order of the day and that is the thing about change today. What was wrong yesterday is right today, what was sin is sunshine, what was ugly is beautiful, what was evil is good. Parents hope their children will drink but never get into drugs. People don't mind if politicians make money so long as they do some good work. The society is more worried about safe sex than fornication and adultery. Poverty is not an issue because it is perfectly all right to become filthy rich. Same-sex marriage is spreading like goodwill.

Challenge is the sapling of change. Believe in Hegel, believe in Marx, that challenge comes by the way of a dialectic method, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. So order is challenged by chaos, virtue by vice, honesty by eclecticism, everything by its opposite, jarring loose the social fabric so that it can be woven into a new pattern. Change is evolution, change is revolution, it happens all of a sudden, and it also takes time.

More change has happened in last two centuries than in the preceding millenniums. Physical evolution of man, learning how to make fire, developing tools for hunting, wearing clothes, building houses, satisfying basic needs for plain and simple subsistence, took forever. Then the 19th and 20th centuries brought the dizzying speed and whisked the world from local, to national to international stage and from agriculture to industry to technology to information age.

Change is good, change is godly as the old yields place to the new, yesterday, today and tomorrow, childhood, youth and old age, the sequence of time, which gives you the sense of motion within the parameters of fixed destiny. Hence, nothing stays put as life moves on, the fleeting mood of eternity working through the fickle mind of individuals as human condition fluctuates in the passage of time.

The irony is that while change endured, it eviscerated man, turning him hollow within his shell. Modern man is more glamorous, but he is also more gluttonous, he is more independent but he is also less confident. This transformation is best reflected in the Victorian Age. It was a time when horizons were limited and life was slow, the fastest thing on earth being a galloping horse. Then came the steam engine, followed by railway, which shrank the distance, and telegraph, which crushed it. Time was money and efficiency became increasingly important. Work was separated from leisure, which led to development of spectator sports like cricket and football, and the rise of music hall entertainment for the new working class.

The close-knit rural communities disappeared and the middle class started to emerge since 1812. It was found in 1851 that the attendance of the eligible population at church service on Sunday was falling. It was every man for himself, which was the ethos of the Age, and Charles Darwin's Origin of Species made it more pronounced. The change is also captured in popular fiction of that time, from Jane Austen in the 1810s to Charles Dickens' pictures of mid-century London life to HG Wells' Time Machine in 1895. It went from comedies of country manners to blistering portraits of urban poverty and, finally, time travel.

Change is motion of time, change is motion of mind, while the mystery stands still as events go by. There was a time when widows burned themselves on their husbands' pyres. There was a time when the Londoners spent their Sunday afternoons at Bedlam mocking the crippled and demented. There was a time when brothers could marry their sisters. There was a time when people owned the lives of other people, buying and selling them like cattle.

Time flowed, and changes followed. Many of those changes removed inhibitions, prejudices and superstitions to break the shackles of human minds. It brought freedom, it brought tolerance as human endeavours paved the way to higher civilizations. But higher civilizations brought higher decadence as the increased freedom sharpened itself to moral oblivion.

This is where it stands now, when keeper is usurper, ignorant is wise, guilty is innocent, loser is winner, milk is slime, the moral regimen of right and wrong locked together in inverted positions. So we are living in the age of contradictions, casting pearls before swine, decorating monkeys with medals of honour, our conceited heads bowing before contemptible men.

Lord Alfred Tennyson once exclaimed, "Forward, forward let us range/Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change." Such is the fate of men that he must charge ahead in the course of depleting himself. Looking back where he started, it is quite a change. The substance is gone, while the style remains. The man has vanished, while his vanity stands.

To talk about it, slime and milk look the same. That is the range of change, a long and arduous journey from inane to inane.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.