On the Backswing

I golf. But I cup my left wrist on my backswing. I am also prone to the dreaded flying elbow. As a result, I often hit my drives offline. Why do they plant trees just where my ball in prone to go, anyway?

The backswing determines, in oh so many ways, where the ball will go. Even while the muscles and the brain cooperate to try to correct its path, the backswing, and the grip, the stance and the ability to keeps one's head down, determine the quality of the resulting swing.

This posting is not about golf, however. It is more about a Hegelian synthesis, and what it means to see the pendulum of cultural evolution swing so far in the reverse of its ultimate and inevitable course. I just thought it was more interesting to tie the concept to golf than to an arcane philosophical model.

Let me illustrate. In a Hegelian synthesis, inevitable progress is made when the pendulum of cultural evolution swings far into uncharted and unfamiliar territory. There is always a popular response that causes the pendulum to swing far in the opposite direction, often leading to repressive and regressive policies, actions and tendencies. Over time, the pendulum of cultural evolution comes to some kind of synthesis. While that synthesis represents neither end of the pendulum's swing, while it reaches neither extreme, the compromise situation that it reached moves the culture onward and forward.

We can say, to some degree of certainty, that the cultural evolution in which we find ourselves is expressed in the pendulum swing toward otherwise radical inclusion, acceptance of diversity and the unity of all persons. The pendulum has swung far from the comfortable and familiar confines of past traditions, values, understandings and assumptions. This swing has caused some, if not most, to respond in fear and anger, focusing on the stasis that is lost therein instead of looking to what progress lay ahead. That segment of the population has attempted, at least somewhat successfully, to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction, back toward sectarianism, segregation, white male hegemony, privilege and power. The pendulum had swung so far in the first fifty years of cultural evolution that it has caused a regressive and repressive response.

This is no surprise. It is unfortunate, however, mainly because it has been accompanied by a violent inhumanity, a narrow mindedness, a name-calling, exclusionary partisanship that tears at the fabric of who we are as a people and a culture. Terror attacks have become the norm. Violence against other human beings is commonplace. Abridged human rights are justified by the need for safety and security in a fearful and dangerous age. Life is being devalued in the pendulum backswing.

Here is the good news. Despite the desperate attempts to reformulate culture in repressive and regressive ways, cultural evolution is inevitable. It will no longer support divisiveness, segregation or undo privilege. Culture marches on toward its ultimate constitution. We can be confident that the utlimate constitution of culture reflects acceptance of diverse persons, positions, identities, life-styles, backgrounds, races, genders, etc. The list is all-inclusive and unfolding.

Here is the cautionary tale, though. Just as the backswing in golf determines where the drive sends the ball, so the pendulum swing against the tide of cultural evolution determines how healthy and whole we will be in the synthesis. How much damage will we have to suffer? How many lives will be lost? How much violence will be relied upon in the name of social order? How far will we devalue human life or trample on human rights?

It is enough! It is time to find the cultural synthesis. To do so will take work and compromise from those at either end of the extreme pendulum swings. The vast majority of those between the extremes must demand that the conversation lead to solutions instead of continued divisiveness, violence, name-calling and devaluation. The entire course of human culture depends upon it...upon us.