ABSTRACT
The view that has generally been adopted in the past is that there is something almost virtuous about changelessness, as distinct from stability. Indeed, by some sort of theological analogy, it all but has the divine sanction – ‘I, the Lord God, change not.’ There is an assumption that we humans ought to imitate this divine, changeless quality. But the fact is that, in contemporary society, the ‘unchanging’ has lost much of its currency. A society, or even an individual, that is the ‘same yesterday, today and for ever’, does not necessarily command our respect, admiration or allegiance. We are not any longer foolish enough to think (even if we ever did) that whatever we do represents progress; but we still believe in movement, in the dynamic process of life, in change. Things never just stay as they are, they change whether they improve or decay.
