The moving pendulum

“The moving pendulum swings, and having swung, swings back”

I can’t remember when this idea or concept first occurred to me, but it’s been unconsciously building and developing, until I think I can now express it (fairly!) coherently.

The “moving pendulum” seems to be a natural consequence of Newton’s “equal and opposite reaction” – and it applies to other than pendula, too.

It also applies to people, on national, cultural, social, group and individual levels.

A repressive culture holds the pendulum unnaturally far to one side; the longer and higher it’s held back, the more extreme the release reaction will be. when that pressure is eventually (and usually suddenly) released. (I can remember watching the Berlin Wall come down, and hoping that the newly-united Germany wouldn’t let the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction – so I was sort of thinking about this at least twenty years ago!)

A culture of repression suddenly fails, and the pendulum, having been held back so far and for so long, swings to the opposite extreme: this provokes a reactionary backlash, which provokes a counter-backlash, and so on, and on, and on …

Each time the pendulum swings, it will move almost as far in the opposite direction, and almost as far as that back again – and the higher and the longer the pendulum is held to one side, the more violent the reaction will be when it’s finally released.

Note “almost as far”. As the pendulum continues to swing, the wild oscillations will gradually lose momentum and settle down into a regular rhythm. If given the chance!

The counter-reaction will want to hold the pendulum back: maybe not quite as high as it was before, but in the same general area of its previous locked-down position.

And the people who enjoy the free-swinging will oppose that and, in the joy of being able to move at last, will move too far the other way.

And so we proceed by a series of wild oscillations: first too far in one direction, then too far in the other.
The pendulum isn’t given the time to settle down to a regular rhythm; it keeps getting bumped and jolted.

Swinging 60s from post-war austerity …
Edwardian extravagance from Victorian prudery …
Convent girls becoming sex kittens …
Poor people winning the lottery and becoming spend-a-holics ….
Laddish yobbism from the backlash to New Men which waas itself a backlash from Macho Men …
And laddette yobbism, too …
Russians harking back wistfully to the Communist regime, because the system collapsed rather than slowly dissolving, and capitalism came as one hell of a culture shock to most of them …

People can’t really handle too much change too quickly; we want stability, even if it’s a stability of repression: we might not have liked it, but at least we knew where we were then.


As I’ve said elsewhere, I have no formal science education (we did a year of basic science at my grammar school, then a year of separate biology, chemistry and physics, but girls weren’t exactly encouraged to pursue these classes after that – we were girls, what did we need to know about science other than the “domestic” variety? [This has to be a topic for a future rant!])