Healthy stability, which is not excessive or rigid, is an important part of good order.
- Housing is stability. Housing is dignity. Housing is absolutely necessary, critical infrastructure. [Raphael Warnock]
- There is a comfort in rituals, and rituals provide a framework for stability when you are trying to find answers. [attributed to Deborah Norville]
- Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations. [J. William Fulbright]
This model emphasizes change and progress but in our everyday affairs, people also need stability. It is indispensable to the development of good habits and practices. Emotionally too, people need a sense of orderliness in their lives, even people whose lives we would not use as models of stability or orderliness. Stability is what makes it possible for us to function in such a way that we can be confident of our actions, and thereby develop our capacities and express them more fully.
“. . . extreme events have a psychogenic impact, which includes both direct threats to human life and indirect threats. Psychological stability is a protective characteristic that enhances a person’s ability to adapt to environmental conditions and mitigates the harmful effects of stress.” “Social stability is an understudied construct in public health that offers a useful framework for understanding social disadvantage across multiple domains.”
“Life satisfaction judgments are thought to reflect people’s overall evaluation of the quality of their lives as a whole. Because the circumstances of these lives typically do not change very quickly, life satisfaction judgments should be relatively stable over time. However, some evidence suggests that these judgments can be easily manipulated, which leads to low stability even over very short intervals.” Stability of a person’s life story over time is also important.
Real
True Narratives
On monarchy, unacceptably flawed as it is:
- Elena Woodacre, eds., The Routledge History of Monarchy (Routledge, 2019).
- Paul Thomas Murphy, Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy (Penguin Books, 2012): in outliving most of their “subjects,” long-reigning monarchs “reassure their country that it too will survive.”
- Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change & Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (Routledge, 2013).
- John Cannon & Ralph Griffiths, The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Monarchy (Oxford University Press, 1988).
- C. Petit-Dutaillis, The Feudal Monarchy in France and England: From the Xth to the XIIIth Century (Routledge, 1936).
- Andrzej Olechnowicz, ed., The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
- A.J.P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary (The University of Chicago Press, 1976).
- Denis Mack Smith, Italy and Its Monarchy (Yale University Press, 1989).
- Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 1998).
- Christopher Storrs, The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy 1665-1700 (Oxford University Press, 2006).
- Gábor Gyáni, The Creation of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: A Hungarian Perspective (Routledge, 2022).
- Hillay Zimora, Monarchy, Aristocracy and State in Europe 1300-1800 (Routledge, 2001).
- Naotaka Kimizuka, Constitutional Monarchy of the Twenty-First Century (Springer, 2024).
On personal stability:
- Mary Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976): “As an account of growing up female and Chinese-American in California, in a laundry of course, it is antinostalgic: it burns the fat right out of the mind. As a dream—of the “female avenger”—it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword.”
From the dark side, on a large scale:
- Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump (Viking, 2021): “Ackerman contends that the American response to 9/11 made President Trump possible.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
- Israel Rosenfield & Edward Ziff, From Chaos to Stability: How the Brain Invents Our Conscious Worlds (University of Iowa Press, 2024).
- Anita L. Vangelisti, Harry T. Reis & Mary Anne Fitzpatrick, Stability and Change in Relationships (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
- Surfwise: a documentary that portrays the instabilities in the life of a strange and problematic Israeli doctor driven by a desire to surf, and take everyone with him
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Poetry
Poems:
- John Keats, “Bright Star”
- Robert Frost, “On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
The Three Sounds was a piano-forward jazz trio, consisting of a pianist (Gene Harris), a bassist (Andrew Simpkins) and a drummer (Bill Dowdy). The group stayed together from its formation in 1956 to its disbandment in 1973. Their membership never changed, though occasionally they recorded with a guest artist. To get the point further, listen to their first album, then to their last album; then listen to any of the others. They all sound the same, except in “Groovin’ Live at the Penthouse, 1964-1968”, on which they stepped forward, perhaps in response to a live audience; and on “Coldwater Flat” and “Soul Symphony”, on which they played with an orchestra. The group never grew and never changed. It just pumped out solid, listenable jazz, on album after album. Here is a link to their playlists.
Jazz, which grew out of blues and African-American traditions during the Jim Crow era, was therefore naturally predisposed toward challenging musical conventions. Perhaps in reaction to this, cornetist Bix Beiderbecke became an exponent of hot jazz, which employed more traditional, even box-like forms of musical expression. With its vocal passages that sound like a men’s ensemble from an Ivy League University, the idiom that could well be termed “white man’s jazz.” Beiderbecke left us a wealth of recorded material.
From the dark side:
- Luke Bedford, “Instability” (2015) (approx. 22’): “Ideas in this piece are torn apart by a strange energy and reform in new, dynamic relationships. There is a constant tension between growing and collapsing. That which seems durable can vanish in an instant. The piece will include the Albert Hall organ, a detuned orchestra and possibly the first use of a cricket bat in an orchestral piece.” [Bedford]
Music: songs and other short pieces
Visual Arts
- Paul Klee, New Harmony (1936)
- Ivan Aivazofsky, View of Constantinople by Moonlight (1846)
Shadow side:
- Marcel Duchamp Sad Young Man in a Train (1911-12) (shadow side)
Film and Stage
- Videodrome: a antithetical film on some simple virtues, Videodrome follows the protagonist’s descent from hardcore pornography into the torture, murder and mutilation of “snuff films”