"Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est la Même Chose" (The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same).

How Long Does it Take for Cultures to Really Change?

I love an epiphany as much as the next person, but I don’t expect one to land in my lap everyday. That would be epiphany overload, and I’m not sure human beings are built to handle that. That’s why listening to Beethoven’s Fifth, reading Virginia Woolf, working-out to failure, or artificially messing up your serotonin uptake with too much Instagram scrolling or too many gummies should all be activities that are carefully planned. Too many “a-hah!” moments in one day could kill you.

Did I hear you say, “Curmudgeon”? Not me. As Billy Joel said, “Only the good die young”. Epiphanies are like little madeleines for the mind, and like most of us, I’m a sucker for anything that tastes that good. I’ll take a dozen of those epiphanies over there, thank you. Mercifully, most of the time epiphanies float into our lives unplanned and a few at a time, as if gently falling off a fairy’s wing, so just when you think the most revelatory part of your day was when you woke up and put on your socks, bang, the sun shifts, a shaft of light pours through your window, a bird sings on the other side, you catch a smile from an unknown soul on the subway, the smell of an outdoor grill brings you back to a beach and a day and a time that suddenly explains your whole life all over again, and then no matter what you’re supposed to be doing, and wherever you are supposed to be going, you just have to stop and sit down.

Last week, I was supposed to be going into a classroom at Fordham University, where I was guest lecturing in a graduate MBA program on cross-cultural global business negotiations. Though I fantasized that my good and dedicated students had every right to expect a cascade of epiphanies from me, I did not anticipate, in that moment, in that place, that it would be me who was about to have my looking-into-the-eye-of-God moment.

My epiphany came while I was in the middle of telling a story. A story about US culture and the importance of “friendliness” in interpersonal relationships, a concept not universally shared by other cultures. My epiphany came toward the end of my story, when, expecting the usual “ahah” expression of understanding from the class, I got instead, a group deer-in-the-headlights blank stare. Something had fundamentally shifted, and I realized, “ahah”-style, that the point I was making about a fundamental, established US cultural norm was, at least for these 20- and 30-somethings, no longer valid. I had lived long enough to see my culture change, right before my eyes. A-hah, indeed.

“Think of a culture as a kind of fruit”, I said at the start of my story. “It’s not so strange really, since all cultures are a little fruity…”and I knew to wait for a slight laugh. I’d told this story a million times before.