"Names are changed more readily than doctrines, and doctrines more readily than ceremonies"
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Peacock’s line is a neat little scalpel aimed at the way societies pretend to reform. “Names” are the cheapest currency of change: rebranding, retitling, relabeling the same old power structures so they can keep doing business without admitting continuity. The bite is in the implied hierarchy of resistance. If names are easiest, “doctrines” are harder, and “ceremonies” hardest of all, then what looks like progress is often just paintwork on an old house whose foundations no one dares touch.
As a satirist in the long shadow of the French Revolution and the churn of early industrial Britain, Peacock understood that modernity loves the optics of novelty. Institutions learn to survive by swapping their labels faster than their beliefs, and swapping beliefs faster than the rituals that bind communities through habit and emotion. Doctrines can be edited on paper; ceremonies live in bodies and calendars. They’re sticky because they’re pleasurable, communal, and identity-making. You can persuade someone to endorse a new idea; it’s far tougher to get them to stop wanting the procession, the anthem, the robe, the holiday, the familiar script that says “this is who we are.”
The subtext is cynical but accurate: continuity isn’t merely inertia, it’s strategy. Elites offer symbolic change to manage pressure, while the public often accepts it because symbols feel like reality. Peacock compresses all of that into a single sentence that sounds like calm observation, then lands as an accusation: beware reforms that arrive as vocabulary.
As a satirist in the long shadow of the French Revolution and the churn of early industrial Britain, Peacock understood that modernity loves the optics of novelty. Institutions learn to survive by swapping their labels faster than their beliefs, and swapping beliefs faster than the rituals that bind communities through habit and emotion. Doctrines can be edited on paper; ceremonies live in bodies and calendars. They’re sticky because they’re pleasurable, communal, and identity-making. You can persuade someone to endorse a new idea; it’s far tougher to get them to stop wanting the procession, the anthem, the robe, the holiday, the familiar script that says “this is who we are.”
The subtext is cynical but accurate: continuity isn’t merely inertia, it’s strategy. Elites offer symbolic change to manage pressure, while the public often accepts it because symbols feel like reality. Peacock compresses all of that into a single sentence that sounds like calm observation, then lands as an accusation: beware reforms that arrive as vocabulary.
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