The Yearning for Stasis
Stasis is a state in which opposing forces balance so precisely that nothing moves. It is a useful word because it names something real, and something increasingly common in political and social argument. There are people, and indeed whole movements, who want the world to stop where it is now, as though the present moment were a plateau to be defended rather than a point passed through on the way to somewhere else. This yearning deserves examination, because it is often mistaken for Conservatism, and the mistake matters.
The world does not hold still, and nothing in human experience stands fixed. Technologies supersede one another. Populations shift. Trade routes open and close. Institutions that once served a purpose outlive it and either adapt or decay. This has been true in every century for which records exist, and there is no reason to suppose it has stopped being true in this one.
Given that constancy of change, the demand that things stay as they are is a demand against nature, not for it. It asks reality to behave differently than it always has.
The appeal of stasis is not hard to understand. Change threatens position. Those who hold advantage under present arrangements, whether of wealth, status, employment, or habit, have reason to fear arrangements that might replace them. The guild master feared the machine that could do his work without his years of training. The regulated firm fears the entrant who is not burdened by the same rules. The tenured fear the untested.
Fear of this kind is rational for the individual and corrosive for the society that indulges it. What is protected is rarely the general interest. It is almost always a particular one, dressed in the language of stability, continuity, or heritage, because those words sound nobler than ‘my advantage.’
Stasis is not Conservatism, and the distinction must be made carefully, because the two are often confused, not least by people who call themselves conservative.
Conservatism, properly understood, is not a wish to freeze the present. It is a method of testing proposed change against the accumulated experience embodied in existing institutions, and altering course where that experience justifies it.
It does not resist change. It resists change adopted without evidence, made on the strength of theory alone, imposed by those who assume they know better than the arrangements built up by generations of trial and error.
That is a different thing entirely from stasis. The stasis-seeker opposes change because it is change. The Conservative asks whether the proposed change has been tested, and by what standard. One is a reflex. The other is a discipline.
Burke did not object to the American colonists' claims because they were new. He objected to French revolutionary theory because it discarded, in one convulsive act, institutions that had absorbed centuries of adjustment, replacing them with abstractions that had never been tried. That is not a preference for stillness. It is a preference for evidence over assertion.
Where the yearning for stasis prevails, several consequences follow, and they follow reliably. The first is stagnation of the ordinary economic kind. Protected industries do not improve, because they face no pressure to. Firms shielded from competition invest in lobbying rather than innovation, since lobbying yields a better return. The customer, the patient, the tenant, pays the cost of arrangements preserved for the benefit of incumbents.
The second is a build-up of unmet pressure. Change postponed is rarely change avoided. It is change deferred, and deferred change tends to arrive eventually in a less orderly form. Planning systems that block housing for decades do not prevent housing need. They store it up until it expresses itself in unaffordability, overcrowding, or political upheaval. Industries protected from foreign competition do not escape it. They become less able to withstand it when protection eventually lapses, as it usually must.
The third is a loss of the very stability the stasis-seeker claims to prize. A system rigid enough to resist all adjustment does not become permanent. It becomes brittle. Small systems that adapt continuously tend to survive large shocks better than large systems that adapt not at all, because the small adjustments have already tested and discarded what does not work.
The Soviet economy did not fall because it changed too often. It fell because it had suppressed the mechanism, price signals and competitive failure, by which functioning economies correct themselves continuously and without drama.
The alternative, and the answer to the anxieties that produce stasis is not to indulge them but to meet them with the genuinely Conservative method: test the proposed change, weigh it against what experience has shown, and adopt it if it passes that test. This permits continuous adjustment without either revolutionary rupture or protective ossification.
Those who want the world to stop are asking for something it has never granted anyone. The choice available is not between change and no change. It is between change tested by experience and change imposed by force of circumstance once postponement is no longer possible. The first is usually gradual and survivable. The second rarely is.
Madsen Pirie