The pace of change, the rapidity of a generational adaptation to the effects of change, these are the measures of progress or conservation. These are the markers by which we judge the fitness of a people. Adaptability and the willingness to adapt is, in a dynamic cosmos, the hallmark of civilization while, in contrast, the resistance to change and the consecration of bulwarks against change is the signature of barbarism.
A people who are content to live as they have always lived, have never accepted who they are, and can never accept who they will become. It is in the relationship between what-is and what-may-be that the identity of all things human is found. The fitness of a thing lies in the breadth of that relationship and the utility it provides. The greater the scope of the relationship between is and may-be, the greater the utility, and consequently, the greater the beauty. Such a system applies to all things, but in those things for which generality is the essential principle, it is most applicable.
The human is the most general of all beasts, and yet it’s use of tools and language creates an artificial extension to it’s being. This artifice detracts from the essential generality and consequentially the fitness, the utility, and the beauty of the human, particularly in groups. En masse, the density and connectedness of these groups induces another layer of artificial specialization, as the division of labor becomes not simply an advantageous arrangement, but necessary for the integration into the group.
There is no recourse to either of these conditions, they are. There is only the choice to understand or to eschew understanding. Any understanding places us into the repose of the relationship, and the artifice. This tension between the potential and constraint is the engine of human existence, it is the motive force of society.
It is in this engine that the forces of progress and conservation are set in action, not in opposition, but in concert sometime in balance, sometime one yielding to the other. In this way, we dance among and within ourselves, progressing if we chose to understand, conserving if we do not. For those who chose understanding, bustle is neither aid nor ally. Understanding only emerges in the repose, not that rapid. Rapidity uninformed by repose is blind and unfocused. Only within the repose can we come to an understanding of the relationship between is and may-be or of the artifice. Succumbing to the bustle is to eschew understanding.