The title of Joseph Heller's other novel is Something Happened. I am among the many millions who did not read the novel but for whom the title --- if you'll pardon the current cliche --- resonated. There are times when many of us realize in a deep, inchoate way that some basic shift has happened. Three examples come to mind. Starting with the largest, most abstract, and most difficult to explain, and moving toward the more specific, the first is the shift from the medieval world to the modern world; the second is the shift from a pre-1960's world to a post-1960's world; and the third --- the most contemporary and most easily noticed --- is the shift from a precise and correct use of language to an imprecise and incorrect use of language.
I find myself more and more suspicious of the necessarily backward looking imposition of descriptions and explanations for large cultural shifts such as these. In retrospect, the qualities of the change are visible to careful historical research. It is not incorrect to say that the qualities of medieval Europe were thus and so and the qualities of modern Europe were this and that. Historians and social scientists are able to describe and, in many cases, to quantify the phenomena that substantiate these descriptions.
But historians, no matter how erudite in their respective fields, do not do a very good job of explaining how and why the change came about. Descriptions of the realities of life --- personal, social, and institutional --- before the shift and after the shift are detailed and based on evidence. It is clear, describable, and understandable that a serious change took place. History texts, even of the most narrow and detailed kind, are very good at such descriptions. History students, for the most part, are taken up with the recording of data that show the ante reality and the post reality. But no one is very good at explaining the how and the why.
Some historians (and other cultural commentators) attempt to explain by imposing a theoretical construct and fitting the data into that construct. Historians with a Marxist bent will provide one explanatory thesis; historians with a feminist bent another. Perhaps they are right (although they can't all be right); perhaps there is a single correct historical lens through which all the phenomena of change can be observed and explained. For what it's worth, I doubt it. Such thinking is comforting, allowing us to think that we understand it and --- by extension --- can control it. But I don't think we can really do either.
As a semi-pro (or maybe semi-pro-minus) historian, I have held such explanatory beliefs about large shifts in the zeitgeist. But the older and, I think, more honest I become, the less I trust these theories, despite my long love affair with them. Rather, I have come to think that such cultural shifts are the product of (literally) countless events of individual thought, of encountering and responding to stimuli, of conversations participated in or overheard, of the reading of books or articles or fiction or flyers or posters, of listening to speeches or watching theater, of sitting in church and listening to sermons, of seeing magazine covers, of watching televised interviews, of contemplation, and probably a host of other such experiences.
There is what I have long thought of as "the great democratic conversation" in which an unimaginable variety of people in an unimaginable variety of situations encounter one another and exchange ideas, feelings, prejudices, hopes, and so on, sometimes in a rational and logical way, sometimes in purely visceral and incoherent ways, but always in ways in which each is affected by each of the others.
There is an explanatory theory about how this happens which has always made sense to me, perhaps because I have always been, in one way or another, an academic, but I don't buy it anymore. The theory goes that someone in a rarefied position in the academy creates a new theory to explain the essential phenomena of his discipline; preaches that theory to his students, some of whom go on themselves to hold important positions in the academy; and so on, so that there is a kind of geometric progression of the spread of the influence of the theory.
At some point, the theory is presented at conferences and in prestigious journals thereby affecting hundreds or thousands of others; within a generation or so, the ideas have made it out of the prestigious journals and into the popular venues, including but not limited to newspapers, and thus into the popular conversation.
Hence Darwinian biology moved from being part of an intramural battle within a narrow band of the scientific world, to being an influential and widely-read book, to being an idea that challenged the religious beliefs of a whole generation, and finally to being an informative metaphor for understanding all of reality for a large percentage of the contemporary population.
One could put together the same sort of description for the Marxist critique or Freud's theory of the unconscious, or, in our own time, the post-modern challenging of reason and logic and any kind of disinterest in favor of nothing but self-interest. What was once an esoteric discussion among a small group of intellectuals has become a set of unexamined first premises for a huge number of people.
But again this is much more descriptive than explanatory. Correct as far as it goes but not much help is explaining how and why it happened.
My belief --- and I will make no more authoritative claim for it than that --- is that these changes happen out of the "great democratic conversation." Somehow we decide to change things.
If true there are two obvious implications. The first is that attempting to explain the phenomena of cultural shifts by imposing some theory in order to feel that we are somehow in control is a fool's errand.
The second is that we really are in control; that these big changes happen because we choose for them to happen. What that means is that we are responsible for them. If they are for the good, we get the credit; if they are for the ill, we get the blame.
Freedom is a burden and if we are going to be free in practice we have to learn to think carefully about how we want things to be, and why.
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