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C

hange is something that the military is interested in. It is not their goal to turn decent, upstanding citizens into mindless killing machines. Their need is to change recruits from disaffected teenagers into hard working adults who will conform and trust authority. The military expends a great deal of effort encouraging the concept of tradition.

Tradition is the tool used to create a sense in the recruit that he is part of a greater whole. To do something because it has been done that way for two hundred years might, one imagines, encourage a rebellion of the new. The young ought mock those primitive and obsolete mannerisms and at first most of them do. Their rebellion will continue until two things happen.

First comes the day of epiphany where the recruit first respects their instructors. Admiring the professionalism, competence and the enthusiasm of their drill instructor is critical to everything that must come after. A well-trained recruit will forever keep one of their school NCOs in their memorial catalogue as an ideal. This happens equally at Ellis Island and the armoury floors of Nowhere Ville. When the Sergeant shows up, ever energetic, with glistening boots and turnout impeccable, demonstrating absolute competence in everything that the recruit is required to do, they see a manifestation of Perfection. He is an Avatar of Accomplishment. He never complains but he acknowledges challenges. He never gives up but finds ways to win. His overriding goal is to get every student up to the standard that he is setting.

That is the second step on the path to respecting tradition. For two hundred years, young men have been achieving the same standards. Those levels of achievement seem beyond the recruit at that early stage. How can I march ten miles with a 50-pound pack on my back? Why should I? It is the standard. There are a good many rituals that mark the passage into manhood. What tradition offers are rituals of a certain standard of manhood. It is the difference between getting laid for the first time and bringing a woman to orgasm.

Many come to the military already looking to be challenged by those rituals. They know them from the movies or tales from parents. Even so, they do not always appreciate the more subtle rituals and standards that they will undertake. They will also go from testing themselves to be cool to doing it to be a better person.

Boot camp does not need to be as rigorous and dehumanizing as it so often is. Recruits want it though. They want their favourite drill instructor to scream insults into their face so that they can remain unflinching. They also want their sergeant to use colourful and humorous language. Being a drill instructor is akin to being a stand up comedian. It requires all the same skills including timing, presentation and good material. Very much of the performance is improvised so one must be quick witted. The same skills are needed in student art critique sessions but there we replace invectives on the bovine nature of a soldier's perversions with compliments on the post-modern comment on the media through use of refused found forms. The art student has not passed the ritual of critique until someone has said something positive about her use of negative space.

When an aspiring art student looks to his mentor, she judges him on his work. There is nothing so quick to discredit a teacher or drill instructor as hypocrisy. They must unflinchingly be all that they advocate. More though, the teacher must set a standard. The student wants and needs it.

"I am good. Be as good as I am and then be better."

Those that cannot do, teach poorly. In being a paragon, the professor sets a standard that the student will then choose to aspire to. Civilians do not go to recruit school looking to learn respect for tradition and authority. They believe that they can get through the rigours without ever gaining new values. They go there wanting to beat the system, to trick it. They are changed though. They come out the other side with a fresh appreciation for things they once mocked. In every case, by conforming to the system, they come out with more self-respect than they ever could have gained by triumphing over the system.

Conformity is not something that the military uses to crush the individual. Their mission is to strengthen the individual by removing selfishness and petulant individualism.

Soldiers learn to trust authority not through deception and brutality but by demonstrations of how the system responds to internal errors and by showing that those in power honestly seek to do the best for their soldiers. Every instance of failure of the army to protect its troops is a firmer foundation for doubt and disloyalty. It isn't just the top brass that can generate this conflict but at any level down the hierarchy down to the corporal. The army is no less a Lernaean Hydra than the arts community. Every time bad or ugly art is foisted on the public, the art world becomes less credible.

But of course, the art world is not trying to change anyone. They are not trying to make the young more mature or to encourage anyone to conform to some standard. Nobody is pushing Saul off of his horse.

Modern Art might be a celebration of selfishness. Perhaps this is true for all of art. The self does not seek out change. It is too selfish. It instead seeks confirmation and assurance. Nobody takes the road to Damascus anymore. The human mind must scheme to find a means to have alterations forced upon it. When life is dire enough, and our present self has crawled toward some foreseeable doom, it will continue to wriggle and writhe and die, if it must. It will resist with heroism any escape into a cocoon.

Institutions and cultures too resist change with determination. We are a species that, in the vacuum of other intelligent life, pride ourselves on our exploration and inventiveness. We imagine that this quality of reaching for the stars will be what alien cultures will admire about us. This collective trait, to our subjective selves, seems so remarkable because it is the opposite of our true nature.

The military employs very young men as officers precisely because of this, our natural tendency to stagnate. We will not surrender directly to entropy but we will fight hard to maintain the previous way of doing things. Young Officers still have a vitality that is born of misguided rebellion. Officers fight to change and explore new ideas for a couple of years until, opposed by the necessary drag of more senior NCOs, a middle ground of necessary and moderate change is found in healthy growth.

In the long span of our individual years, there are but a handful where we wish to change the world radically. It is a phase that we grow out of. We learn, through experience, that 'new for the sake of the new' is a poison. The vast majority of new is naught but bad ideas. The new must be taken in moderation.

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