It seems unlikely that there has ever been a civilisation that lasted long on a policy of constant change. I'm not talking about the ones that went absurdly to the opposite extreme: the ancient Egyptians, for example, whose depictions of the human form were governed by a bizarre formula that remained unchanged for an almost unbelievable 4000 years. We don't want that. But it is almost as bizarre that our own society has made a fetish of change and built into its systems a powerful bias towards radicalism as an end in itself. ‘Managing change’ has become a discipline in its own right, whose practitioners (dare I call them priests) display an arrogant contempt for consolidation and gradual evolution from tradition, processes that created sensible progress throughout history as they tempered rare, but of course essential, revolutions.
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