Evolution or Revolution

Again I was listening to Speaking of Faith and again I was struck by an insight. The guest this week was Xavier Le Pichon who is one of the world's leading geophysicists, and his pioneering research on plate tectonics revolutionized our understanding of how the earth works. He has also spent decades living in community with people and families facing disability and has emerged with a rare perspective on the meaning of humanity — a perspective equally informed by his scientific and personal encounters with fragility as a fundament of vital, evolving systems.

Somewhere along in the show there was discussion on evolution and revolution.

Mr. Le Pichon: Communities which are very strong, very rigid, that do not take into account the weak points of the community, the people who are in difficulty and so on, tends to be communities that do not evolve. And when they evolve, it's generally by a very strong commotion, a revolution, I would call them in French.

Ms. Tippett: You make that distinction between systems that incorporate fragility and evolve and then systems that become rigid and need revolutions to move forward.

Two things jumped out at me in the conversation, or better put, two ideas came to mind. First was the idea of evolution vs revolution. It is an old sermon illustration to contrast the rigid trees that will sway in a wind storm and not break versus those that re overly rigid and tend to crack in those same winds. This week we in the US celebrate a revolution. Probably the first successful and democratic revolution. There was a rigidity in the British monarchy/parliamentary system in 1776 that made revolution the only viable way.

But what probably allowed that revolution to succeed where so many others have not is in the foundation that Le Pinchon described- an awareness and acceptance of fragility. The American Constitution was built on a mixed view of humanity and on the need to take care of the weaker members. They built checks and balances into the Constitution because humans are very fallible and someone had to watch out for sin. But at the same time they were aware that the majority can be overpowering to those who are not.

This is based, of course, on the underlying Anglo-Saxon/Magna Carta society. There was already a semblance of caring and support that the American revolutionaries built on.

For Le Pinchon it all comes down to an understanding of God and society that he first learned in the slums of Calcutta and then in religious communities for handicapped people. The man who discovered plate tectonics then applied the difference between fluidity and rigidity in the earth's plates, went on to live in a powerfully humble way.

Mr. Le Pichon: Human people are not adults in full possession of their means. Human people, it starts with babies, it continues with growing people, it continues with adults, it continues with older people and with great age and people who die. All of that is part of humanity and humanity is not complete if you have some of the spots out.

And the way to build the society is the way to integrate these people in a way in which they can interact and each of them can find out that they have their place, that their life has a meaning, that they are needed by the others. So often I have found, for example, among very old people that they have the impression that they are not useful anymore. You know, nobody needs them. And then they want to go. They want to go. So there is this problem that the society cannot live by itself, if it doesn't recognize that it heterogeneous and highly diverse.

And that the weakest have to get their place in there.

--Link to Transcript

The 60s: You Got Your Revolutions - Who Won?

On Tuesday I talked about the "revolutions" of The 60s. On the surface it appeared to be a "liberal" revolution, an attempt to give "Power to the People!" Power was the word; power was what people wanted. Who got the power? What happened? Who won?

In short, it depends on which part of the revolution you talk about. It is only natural to talk about the political revolution first. Civil Rights and the War in Vietnam were the dominant issues. But the truly underground revolution of the day- the one we didn't see coming- was the conservative revolution. Ronald Reagan led the charge beginning in the mid-60s when people would joke about a movie actor as a governor. (See, times haven't changed!) Nixon's style and politics, personal disaster aside, was not this type of conservative. Reagan and followers and heirs have instead turned it all upside down.

If civil rights and war policy are used as measuring sticks, The 60s only got so far and then got stuck. Polarized. The war policy disagreements went away when the war did. It popped up here and there at times but never went anywhere. Even now (but that will be for next week.)

If popular politics, political strands of thought, who has controlled the politics, it would have to be said that the conservatives and neo-conservatives took the revolutionary flag. The Old Liberals are often just that - old. Ted Kennedy, for all he may have had for and against him, is the image of the Old Liberal. He has become iconic- which in this case means outdated. Fritz Mondale also comes to mind. We don't have many Paul Wellstones who are a 21st Century version. Where, in fact, will "liberal" politics go in the next few years? Who will be the neo-liberals or will there be a whole new way of looking at it?

Business perhaps comes out as the biggest winner of The 60s. Perhaps it always does. Business is self-centered, profit-centered, If they can find a way to make a buck, they will. That's business. Business, starting with the clothing and record industries, learned how to market to the revolution. They took the styles and ideas and turned them into cash. Which just fed into the basic "Me-ism" of the Boomers being the most unique thing to hit the planet since fire. Business learned that one in a hurry. And made it big.

The religious revolution at first looked interesting. Remember the Jesus Freaks? We had hippies tuning in, turning on, and dropping out to Jesus. The long-term result has been the worship revolution, contemporary Christian music (from pop to metal), and a proliferation of styles of churches based on worship and age as much as anything.

But remember that a good portion of the Jesus Movement was also conservative/evangelical at heart. In that area we can see the seeds for the evangelical/conservative growth in the country in the past 25 years. Some of it was based in the inward-looking style of the hippies (Boomers) becoming the personal salvation focus of Christians. Also drawn into that was the conservative political focus that inevitably crept in. The religious revolution, perhaps a renewed reformation(?), is still very much in flux as the world as a whole goes through a shift both spiritual and religious.

The personal/cultural arena may be the one place where we could say that the more liberal tendencies of The 60s won. When you think about it that is not too much of a surprise. We are definitely a more liberal-acting people. The personal morality questions are very much more evident. The freer lifestyles that were presented from The 60s are all around us. That revolution was the one that "won." But then again, hasn't it always been about sex, drugs, and rock and roll?

But for that, wait until next Thursday.

Overall, like most revolutions, this one is still going on. The morphing and metamorphosing into new forms is always happening. The 60s provided an impetus, a change in a lot of paradigms, that we have not finished with. It has moved beyond the Boomers. But I am not sure the Boomers are done yet with their part. That is a revolution that I know I will never see finished. By definition it won't be over until many years after the last Boomer is gone sometime in the 2nd half of this Century.

The 60s: You Say You Want a Revolution - Which One?

Yes, the 60s were part of a revolution. There were all kinds of people calling for all kinds of things to happen. As it turned out, there were several different ones that were started.

The political is the most obvious. Or is it? The one we most often think of is the one that pushed and prodded and demonstrated and worked for what we would label "liberal" changes in politics. It began with the Civil Rights Movement- equal rights. It showed up in the split into the "Black Power" movement that found the Civil Rights movement as too slow. It didn't take long for the development of the anti-war movement. Then, as time moved on others joined in. The Women's Movement- a long needed movement for equality of the genders arose. In June of 1969 police attacked a group of gay bar patrons at the Stonewall in Greenwich Village and the Gay Rights movement was born.

But we must not overlook another aspect of the political revolutionary heritage of the 60s. Ronald Reagan and the conservative to neo-conservative politics that we are so familiar with today. This is as much a product of that era as the anti-Vietnam War movement. Ronald Reagan became a Republican in 1962, gave a spirited speech supporting Goldwater in 1964 and was Governor of California from 1966 - 1974, elected on a platform that was as much anti-protest protest as anything else.

This conservative aspect of the 60s legacy is just as important to remember as the liberal politics that got all the headlines. But more on that in Thursday's post.

Then there was the equally obvious cultural revolution. This one was based in the sexual revolution- Free Love was one of those aspects of San Francisco that attracted a lot of people. Remember, it was the Summer of Love. And love was often not much more than sex- sex without restraint, sex without walls, sex without limits.

Of course this was brought on by a pharmaceutical revolution- The Pill. We may not remember it today but, according to Wikipedia, "although the FDA approved the first oral contraceptive in 1960, contraceptives were not available to married women in all states until Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 and were not available to unmarried women in all states until Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972." Fits perfectly into The 60s, doesn't it?

We have already talked about the music side of the cultural revolution. The gender and sexual orientation political movements also gave rise to some very significant cultural changes- acceptance, more women in the work-force which led to a higher standard of living with two-income families. Television and world-wide communications possibilities changed a great deal of how we looked at the world.

Not to mention that now iconic picture from the moon of the blue earth hanging in the dark and lonely heavens. Which started the ecology movement and that first Earth Day at the end of the 60s in April, 1970.

And we should not forget the religious/spiritual revolution. Pope John XXIII. Even if nothing else were said that one name would say volumes about a revolution that is still being fought within the Catholic Church. But the folk music that began to seep into the church through the Baby Boomers set the stage for the worship revolution (and worship wars.) We saw an explosion of new translations of Scripture. And Eastern Religion began to have a significant place in western spirituality thanks to people like the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Beatles, and Ravi Shankar.

These only skim the surface. And they only deal with the aspects of these revolutions that were happening in the United States. Just in 1968 student riots were exploding around the world, China began to become a real power, the Soviet Union ended the freedom movements in Eastern Europe- for the time being. But these were seeds for what would happen over the last 40 years.

Now, I am not a deep and trained student of history. But I do know than any age and era can be looked at as a time of change and even revolution, depending on what lens you happen to look through. There have been many "turning point" eras in the history of western civilization, not to mention the rest of the world. To look back from the 60s to say, the 20s, we could probably make a list of many, many events that contributed to what happened in the 60s. But I am not sure that those could be called revolutionary. They were extensions of what had been, not a seismic- or even quantum shift.

But there appears to be something stronger and more profound than usual in that era we call The 60s. It may have been a unique combination of many things in many places including the ability to communicate news and ideas almost instantaneously around the world, but things began to happen more quickly with greater impact than ever before. With this kind of diverse change- radical change- happening in so many places, a revolution was inevitable.

But who won? Who lost? That will be for Thursday. Suffice it to say for now that the 60s, while not the only time such a shift happened, it happened so quickly and so universally that we might even say we are still in the midst of it. The world has not been the same since.