JME McTaggart argued in the 1920s that everything changes when anything changes: “If anything changes, then all other things change with it. For its change must change some of their relations to it, and so their relational qualities.”
David Weberman finds this “perfectly consistent,” but concludes that “it offends our sense of economy and good common-sense to suppose that I and everything else change in virtue of a butterfly’s slightest move.”
Yes, it is an offense to common sense. But I wonder if that “sense of economy” is simply a passion for control. If everything changes when anything changes, then there’s no way we can conceptualize it all, no way to capture it all in a theorem. If infinite change happens, then perhaps the world manifests the infinity of its Creator. And we can’t have that.
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.
First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.
But we can’t do it without readers like you.
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