Have you noticed that these days, everything seems to have to be so important? Like, there’s suddenly a lot of commentary saying that a “sea change” is at hand – as though every new year doesn’t bring change, or every new day, for that matter. But a respected economist for Bloomberg News wrote the other day that a “sea change” is afoot in interest rate forecasts, and a political analyst said the 2024 elections will produce a “sea change.” And the more I heard of that, the more familiar it sounded. So I checked, and, sure enough, a year ago, we were being told that 2023 would bring a “sea change” for China policy, higher education and the investment climate.
These are turbulent times, surely. But are we actually so often at an inflection point, a “sea change” in so many ways? Or is it just our human tendency to egotism that’s responsible for the sense that these times are so different from what has gone before?
Of course, seas do change quite regularly: To be precise, there are two high tides and two low tides every 24 hours and 50 minutes on ocean coasts. But that’s not what people mean when they use the term. Consider the words last year of the German chancellor – who’s ordinarily so low-key that you probably don’t know that his name is Olaf Scholz. But here’s what he wrote a year ago, in Foreign Affairs magazine: “The world is facing a Zeitenwende, an epochal tectonic shift.” Scholz says we’re at “the end of an era” of relative peace and prosperity that has prevailed for the past three decades.
Zeitenwende! Imagine: We’re living at the close of an epoch — that is, a distinctive period in history — with such big change at hand geopolitically that it’s like the earth shifting beneath our feet. Maybe we should, you know, pay attention? Do you think?
We could be forgiven for failing to give a hoot when somebody predicts change. Anybody who follows political campaigns in America knows that what candidates most dependably promise and most routinely fail to deliver is, yes, change. Voters claim to want it, prompting even the most vanilla of would-be officeholders to pose as fiery agents of a new direction. But if it were truly popular, change wouldn’t be so hard to come by. Powerful institutions — corporations and banks, trade associations, governments — naturally resist departures from a status quo that has bestowed their power. As for ordinary folks, most of us really would prefer that we be allowed to get by and get along, without disruption to what’s familiar to us.
When it happens, then, change tends to kind of sneak up on us, disguised as reactions to discrete events, arriving only incrementally and at the margins of the way things are.
Take our financial well-being, for example. The middle class, which for more than a century was the comfort zone of most Americans, didn’t shrink overnight, but it has, in fact, declined steadily over the past half-century. The share of total household income held by the middle class dropped from 62 percent in 1970 to 42 percent by 2020, with most of that middle class money being diverted to the upper class.
It was a series of decisions, year by year — by politicians elected by individual voters in one election after another — that shifted that wealth upward. The impact on American communities has been enormous — yes, a sea change, I’d say — but it didn’t sweep over our neighborhoods like a tidal wave; it rather lapped up on our shores, inch by inch, so that we hardly noticed it at the time.
That’s how big changes typically occur: as a culmination of so many lesser events. Which is why the decisions we make daily – really, hourly and minute-by-minute – matter so much.
That’s what makes the current predictions of sweeping transformation so notable: they come with the suggestion that they’re breaking upon us abruptly. And they come at a time of global peril as a result of diverse forces: war in the Mideast, Russia’s assault on Ukraine, China’s economic distress, polarized politics paralyzing American democracy and disasters caused by climate change — altogether, creating what Ian Bremmer, the head of the research and consulting firm Eurasia Group, describes as the most risky situation the globe has faced in a quarter century.
And speaking of a sea change, we might want to consider that literally. You cannot turn the tides, of course, but decades of indifference to the relentless march of global warming — caused by countless daily human decisions without any corresponding political will to change — have led to rising and warming seas, which are blamed for superstorms in all seasons, even as climate change has brought devastating drought to the Horn of Africa and China, along with plant and animal extinctions in varied ecosystems, and the prospect of famine and political unrest in the global south. The seas are indeed changing, as is the rest of the world, but like most change, it is coming as a result of countless decisions made by millions of us — year by year, day by day, hour by hour.
That term, “sea change,” by the way, is one of the many gifts to the English language from William Shakespeare, along with phrases like “naked truth” and “one fell swoop” and “give the devil his due,” which are now commonplace. And it wasn’t only clever words that came from that stage in Stratford-on-Avon four centuries back. As you think about sea changes and the tiny currents that we make to set them in motion, it’s good to note how Shakespeare put it, in Julius Caesar: “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny,” Shakespeare wrote, “but in ourselves.”
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.