Monday, December 16, 2013

Social Change as an example of Punctuated Equilibria

Five Germanys I Have Knownis partly written in response to the question of how the Nazi period came to be. The question lingers. Various factors are discussed. I wonder if it isn't useful in considering this issue to have lived inside a cultural shift; such a thing happened in the late 60's. There was the suppression of leftist viewpoints in the 50s, the discovery of the pill, the real price of the 'pay any price' anticommunism for a generation raised in part according to the doctrine of tell the child why. Suddenly there was a change; ultimately I think because the youth wanted to go there reorganizing the factors just mentioned. This was like a reorganization of chromosomes in a punctuated equilibrium. Ultimately I think German society wanted to go to the Nazi period out of previous factors in a similar way as a punctuated cultural equilibrium.