- Kuhns, Elizabeth.
The Habit.
New York: Doubleday, 2003.
ISBN 0-385-50588-4.
-
For decades I've been interested in and worried about how
well-intentioned “modernisations” might interrupt the chain of
transmission of information and experience between
generations and damage, potentially mortally, the very
institutions modernisers were attempting to adapt to changing
circumstances. Perhaps my concern with this somewhat gloomy
topic stems from having endured both “new math” in high school
and “new chemistry” in college, in both cases having to later
re-learn the subject matter in the traditional way
which enables one to, you know, actually solve problems.
Now that the radicals left over from the boomer generation are
teachers and professors, we're into the second or third
generation of a feedback cycle in which students either never
learn the history of their own cultures or are taught contempt
and hatred for it. The dearth of young people in the United
States and U.K. who know how to think and have the factual
framework from which to reason (or are aware what they don't
know and how to find it out) is such that I worry about a
runaway collapse of Western civilisation there. The very fact
that it's impolitic to even raise such an issue in most of
academia today only highlights how dire the situation is. (In
continental Europe the cultural and educational situation is
nowhere near as bad, but given that the population is aging
and dying out it hardly matters. I read a prediction a couple
of weeks ago that, absent immigration or change in fertility,
the population of Switzerland, now more than seven million,
could fall to about one million before the end of this
century, and much the same situation obtains elsewhere in
Europe. There is no precedent in human history for this kind
of population collapse unprovoked by disaster, disease, or
war.)
When pondering “macro, macro” issues like this, it's often useful to
identify a micro-model to serve as a canary in the
mineshaft for large-scale problems ahead. In 1965, the
Second Vatican Council promulgated a top to bottom modernisation
of the Roman Catholic Church. In that same year, there were
around 180,000 Catholic nuns in the U.S.—an all time historical
high—whose lifestyle, strongly steeped in tradition, began to
immediately change in many ways far beyond the clothes they
wore. Increasingly, orders opted for increasing invisibility—blending
into the secular community. The result: an almost immediate collapse in
their numbers, which has
continued to the present
day
(graph).
Today, there are only about 70,000 left, and with a mean age of
69, their numbers are sure to erode further in the future. Now,
it's impossible to separate the consequences of modernisation
of tradition from those of social changes in society at large,
but it gives one pause to see an institution which, as this
book vividly describes, has tenaciously survived two millennia
of rising and falling empires, war, plague, persecution,
inquisition, famine, migration, reformation and
counter-reformation, disappearing like a puff of smoke within
the space of one human lifetime. It makes you wonder about how
resilient other, far more recent, components of our culture
may be in the face of changes which discard the experience
and wisdom of the past.
A paperback edition is scheduled
for publication in April 2005.
February 2005 