Renovation

Description

Nathan Gardels:

"“The most responsible course of change in modern societies is renovation,” Nicolas Berggruen and I wrote in our 2019 book, “Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism.”

“Rebellion is a cry for justice without a program for change,” we argued. “Populism, as we have seen, hurls pent-up passions at complex problems. Reform hews to the inertia of what has been. Revolution always ends in disaster because breaking from the past means purging the present in the name of the future.

“Renovation is the point of equilibrium between creation and destruction, saving what is valuable and discarding what is outmoded or dysfunctional. It entails a long march through society’s institutions at a pace of change our incremental natures can absorb. Renovation shepherds the new into the old, buffering the damage of dislocation which at first outweighs longer-term benefits … Its aim is transition through evolutionary stability, within societies and in relations among nation-states and global networks.”

In short, evolutionary stability is the better bet for making change than the confident ineptitude of shock and awe tactics that impede it by arousing reactive resistance and rejection before any new approach to governance can take hold."

(https://www.noemamag.com/evolutionary-stability-is-the-better-bet/)