Cultural stasis may be the historical norm, not the exception.

Evidence

Kurt Andersen was confident that our cultural stasis was a temporary phase: “If this stylistic freeze is just a respite, a backward-looking counter-reaction to upheaval, then once we finally get accustomed to all the radical newness, things should return to normal.” But we should consider the opposite: cultural change may follow a pattern of punctuated equilibrium, moments of dramatic transformation followed by long periods of stasis. Anthropologist A. L. Kroeber surveyed all civilizations and found that “aesthetic and intellectual endeavors resulting in higher values preponderantly realize themselves in temporary bursts, or growths, in all the higher civilizations examined.” In other words, the breakneck cultural change of the sixties may have been the exception, not the norm. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 798

Categorization

• SEED: Potential essay angle: questioning Google’s normative ideal of endless flux by marshaling Kroeber and punctuated-equilibrium in our perceived era of stagnation.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting reframe of the natural history of cultural change — casts our age’s perceived drought as the baseline, not the aberration. One of the strongest claims in the chapter.
• XREF: connects to: Internet hyperspeed produced a paradoxical cultural stasis — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 31; Culture, unlike science, can always revisit superseded conventions for value — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 685; Cultural stagnation is reversible political choice rather than inevitability. — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 848 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Cultural stagnation can be reversed by choosing new norms and values #responds-to (0.88) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 38
• Cultural stagnation is reversible political choice rather than inevitability. #responds-to (0.85) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 848
• Cultures represent themselves as fixed but are always changed by history #qualifies (0.80)