Healing, Social Change and Cultural Lag in Awareness

Healing often begins with our bodies, but it does not end there.If we view ourselves as the universe in a microcosm, then our lives would be a laboratory for testing the power of healing attitudes.

When we find out that meditation and prayer, for example, bring peace and health to our bodies, then by expanding our awareness, we can begin to trust that these same attitudes and practices can bring healing to families, societies, and the planet as a whole.

In this sense, healing becomes a way of being in the world– one in which we are living to bring a greater flow and harmony to all.

Rick Fields Chop Wood, Carry Water Cited in Meditations for The New Age

In what has become a spiritual seeker’s classic text, Rick Fields lays out the grand aspiration:

That we can become healers to ourselves, then be healers to one another, and eventually as we align ourselves to our highest possibilities, we can become healers of our planet and all of its life forms…

IF only this ideal progression were uniformly true… and while it may remain an absolute aspiration of an ultimate good, I have to wonder about the reality of its possibilities! Having first read those words over 40(?) years ago, I could easily become cynical and discouraged. 

These uplifting ideals remain true, even though our world has largely ignored them. Even among those who fancy themselves to be enlightened and informed, for the evidence has been, at best, weak as we have failed over these decades to enact them on any significant level!

As best I can understand it, the reason that many worthwhile spiritual and psychological insights and practices etc. have been largely ineffective and irrelevant, is the overwhelming pace of social change.

When the operating principles and the effects of the energies of change are not truly integrated into one’s life and reinforced in our social values, a crisis is sure to result! 

The best explanation that makes sense to me, or the most useful perspective I can muster today, are contained within the sociocultural theory called “cultural lag.” Unearthing my old sociology teaching experience, I do believe that this perspective holds a lot of objective value for understanding the tensions and societal turmoil we encounter every day.

The generally agreed on definition of cultural lag is the difference or dissonance that occurs in a society when technology and its uses advance more rapidly than the actual comprehension of the consequences and uses of the new technology itself. 

The lag appears between the invention, its quick adoption or application, and the time that is personally and socially necessary to understand its effects. The lag or time period measures  the time needed for the depth of understanding to be more fully comprehended, and what these technological changes will mean and what their use will bring with them for the average citizen. 

Best estimates or even guesstimates of the span of time between when a new technology is introduced, and when it is clearly and responsibly understood and constructively employed, is approximately 30 years! 

Given that the personal computer was introduced with applications such as email in the 1980’s, it has taken 30 years for its use to be less foreign less intimidating for the people who have had access to its benefits.

When we factor in the working statistic that 25% of our culture is still unplugged, or underserved, you can see how the lag in greater comprehension and how the information gap and all the cultural resentments can flourish!

The inability to keep up with changes in lifestyle and technology makes individuals and groups suspicious of these changes. The current institutions become overwhelmed, as the society has not been given the education, access, and the support to use the technology wisely or well!

When a culture is not ready for such fast moving incremental and substantial change, they will certainly react defensively and/or in a reactionary way. 

Rarely is new technology fully understood before it is aggressively marketed to the public in ways that are enticing/addicting? Ways that make you feel irrelevant if you do not have it already!  When we are so assaulted by change, it is quite natural to resist, or at least meet those new technologies with some awkward skepticism! 

This is all the more compelling If these new inventions and applications can be seen as threatening to their established, relied on and comfortable cultural norms, religious beliefs, etc. It can have, as its lasting effect, feelings of being endangered by extinction or irrelevance!  

We can see this resistance in the defiant refusal by politicians, clergy, and those who are in financial control who assert the need to preserve the status quo! This resistance to adaptation, or a deeply seated reluctance, is accompanied by only a partial acceptance. With rapid advances in telecommunications and how phones and computers can be used, there is clearly a feeling of being “extinct” or at least left behind! 

The ambivalent response or the superficial and incomplete understanding of the implications of this new technology effectively slows down any whole scale acceptance: This phenomenon is especially poignant in the advances in health technology such as vaccines and telemedicine and gene therapy etc. We can extend this to robotics, artificial intelligence, and can stretch into scholarly research such as theology and religious ideas, Biblical languages etc.