Tommy Denton

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As former congressional majorities, chastened presidential administrations and parents of teenagers understand all too well, change is inevitable, so just learn to deal with it.

Nature offers hopeful examples of how coping more or less patiently with change can be rewarding: Winter segues blessedly into spring, even as the sweltering heat of summer eases into the crisp radiance of autumn with its splash of colors.

Certainly, some changes can be vexing. Ask any purist who is convinced that the demise of American culture began with the introduction of baseball's designated-hitter rule.

Things tend to work out eventually, though. Buggy-whip manufacturers, makers of ugly black rotary-dial telephones and Linotype operators may have to look for new lines of work, but things eventually tend to work out.

As inevitable as change may be, however, the one variable that seems to be uncontrollable in the present age has been its pace. Never in history has so much change happened so fast as in the last 50 years or so.

Lacking any mathematical or scientific sophistication, I am virtually at a loss to describe the resulting bombardment of the human psyche by warp-speed change. At my stage and station in life, I've come to refer to it as a phantasmagorical brain-fry.

A proficient mathematician could probably reduce to a quadratic equation the number of potential options for action when the hell-bent beam of change atomizes the nucleus of the status quo. Such calculations may be a fascinating curiosity for the masters of chaos theory, but most of us with simpler dispositions find ourselves doing the best we can to keep the brain-fry from shorting out our few remaining cerebral circuits.

In the face of such frenetic change, nature has equipped the human mind with certain defense mechanisms, most likely buried somewhere in the DNA strand designed for survival. That's the strand that sends a frantic message to the brain when the change-induced chaos erupts: Resist!

Some people, poor devils, simply hate change as a matter of principle. Life will roll them under anyway, no matter how determined they are to resist.

Others, though, go to the other extreme by feeding an insatiable appetite for change, the faster the better, as a deliberate end in itself. With all due respect and charity, they're nuts.

All change is not equal, and some changes are better than others. Lenin, Hitler and Mao changed their respective societies. Only a few eccentrics on the lunatic fringe would argue that those individuals were wholesome change agents.

As the pace of change in the modern world has intensified, the array of choices for conscious action has proliferated. At some point, the powers of discrimination need to kick in: Is this a good change or a bad change? Will it make life better or worse, and for whom?

When change was plodding, as when the horseless carriage was moving in to replace the steed, such assessments could be made over extended periods of time, decades even. Given the eventual energy consumption, congestion and pollution, much of the good change has been transformed, not for the better, under the iron law of unintended consequences.

With the advent of the Internet, the speed of change in communications has blurred the ability to assess the technology's implications. Porn sites, hate groups and terrorist cells have shared equal ether with museums and literary archives. Instantaneous data transfer has enabled people to bypass the postal system and even bank tellers and stock brokers.

So fast has been the change, however, that providing for the common defense in securing those transactions remains a constant challenge. If computer hackers were crafty enough to penetrate the inner sanctum of the Pentagon, with sufficient determination they can read personal e-mails, spirit away large portions of bank accounts or redirect the very outcome of elections.

Enough changes just naturally happen that those willed by human ingenuity should be subjected to tough, honest scrutiny. Reasonable answers will merit reasonable changes. "Just because we can" is probably going to yield imprudent changes, most likely grounded in vanity, sloth or avarice, in turn requiring a multitude of remedial changes to repair the damage.

Asking a vigorous "why?" is always preferable to accepting a brain-fry as society's default setting.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.