Opposition to change costs dearly - Cultural conservatism

JUST like peace on The Lake Isle of Innisfree, change comes dropping far too slowly in this society — at least for those who do not subscribe to the traditional and rigid conservatism that for decades masked so much inequity, stasis, misogyny, and a publicly trumpeted determination by the most powerful influences to hold the line against the advances of a modernising, Eurocentric democracy.

We seem, or maybe more correctly seemed, happy to languish, to resent the idea of change or even the need for it. This ovine acceptance of the world as it was — or is — is hard to understand. Nevertheless, it is even more difficult to argue that we have learnt the lessons or that this has become a dynamic, reforming society, one where social evolution is expected rather than instinctively resisted.

The examples of this reluctance to embrace the inevitable, this divisive and usually pointless stonewalling, are myriad.