No one should be confused about what is happening in our government. It is cultural revolution, on the scale of the program implemented by Mao in China in the 1960s and 70s. It is an attempt to create a complete break with institutional memory so as to assert greater control over the mechanism of government.
Institutional memory exists in the connections between people, and it is fragile. It’s not something that can be preserved in digital storage or even the printed page. It is even hard to articulate: it really takes place in the invisible spaces between people, and individuals may not even know that they are participating in it.
Case in point: I lead family music classes for parents and young children. A staple movement activity is the train, where one person follows the person in front of them, and we move together in a sinuous line, connected by invisible bonds held together by our individual attention and our collective intention. If you think about this, you may be able to remember doing such an activity in school or Sunday school, or at camp. It’s an activity that most people have engaged in. Instructions for such an activity could be written down, but it needs to be experienced to truly understand the subtle workings of the train.
I had been teaching and leading trains in my classes for about 20 years when Covid shut down in-person musical gatherings for a couple of years. I had 20 years of lesson plans all ready to go when things opened up again. On one level, it was easy for me to pick up right where I left off, but it wasn’t that simple. One of the first things I noticed is that people were no longer able to make a train without a great deal of description and demonstration. The first few classes I tried to just lead the train, expecting that folks would intuitively know to jump on board. Instead, people’s attention would wander, and once folks got disconnected from the train, they wouldn’t know how to get back on, resulting in a chaotic mass of divided attention. Over the course of several weeks, I was able to cultivate a community that was able to focus and have a satisfying train experience. To do this took attention, focus, patience, and trust.
So many of the structures that we rely on to get our needs met are just like this train. Understanding is passed on through overlapping groups of skilled people, whether it’s knowing how to sort the mail, understanding the needs of people who receive aid, having the wisdom to know just where to push to get an environmental protection through to legislation, or knowing first hand how a diplomat from another country will respond to certain types of language. To think that government agencies will just recover and learn how to function as the individuals change all at once is wrong–and it’s not even the point of such a cultural revolution as is happening. The current individuals in power want the institutions to cease to exist, rather than re-organize. They want to interrupt the institutional memory of how to make the train, and then to erase the cultural space that made that type of cooperation possible.
It is imperative, if we value democracy and the myriad agreements and cultural memory that makes it possible, that we stop this interruption. We must continue to nurture and cultivate the spaces where complex institutional memory can build on itself. We must focus, intend, trust, and practice patience, before the memory of how things work is lost to neglect. The time to focus is now.
