Is "change" our "redemptive idea"?
The Austrian novelist Robert Musil began writing his masterpiece The Man without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) in 1921 and was still working on it when he died in 1942. The three-book work is set in a country called Kakania, a parody of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the story includes a patriotic movement called Parallel Action, which is devoted to the "redemptive idea". The leaders of the movement evoke it constantly in the vaguest terms because they have no idea what it means or how it might be applied.
One of the group's most ridiculous figures is General Stumm, a man who has almost no experience with ideas. Despite this drawback, he is determined to discover the "redemptive idea" before anyone else, and with the utmost efficiency. Says Stumm: "It turns out that there are lots of great ideas, but only one of them can be the greatest — that's only logical, isn't it? — so it's a matter of putting them in order."
In his excellent essay "Exhuming Robert Musil", Ted Gioia says that the protagonist Ulrich "... changes his ideas with the ease of an actor learning a new role. He is prone to making sweeping statements, such as: 'In times to come, when more is known, the word 'destiny' will probably have acquired a statistical meaning.' His eloquence and ability to turn a phrase are stunning, yet his ideas never cohere into a philosophy or a belief system. They are as ephemeral as a passing storm."
Is the mantra of "change" the "redemptive idea" of our times? Jeff Jarvis now hates the word.
