Change for Change's Sake

We share this world with many who are fulfilled spiritually by their efforts to change the way others think.  While I have the tendency to condemn this practice, I believe that many of us progressive thinkers are getting a little ahead of ourselves these days in our desire to stomp it out, and we’re all paying dearly for it.

As an evolutionist, I believe this trait can be traced to a need to survive at some point in our history.  Here’s the recipe for human survival:  Large portions of faith and tenacity mixed with intolerance and a pinch of innovation.  All it took was one innovative person to start agriculture, but it took many to sustain the practice.

It took discipline and faith to plant crops in the spring that were not harvested until months later.  It took a good dose of faith and stubbornness to plant crops again in the spring after a season where the crops didn’t grow at all.  Those who tried to innovate themselves out of a prolonged drought perished while those stubborn enough to try year after year ultimately survived. 

Of course in our history books, we read a lot more about innovation and a lot less about determination.  We all know Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, but do we spend any time at all studying the nameless multitudes who toiled for centuries to develop cotton as a crop?

Fast-forward to our era and our culture here in the US where for most of us, our body and safety needs are easily met.  We’re left with way too much time on our brains.  We need far less stubbornness, narrow thinking and faith to survive.  However, our instinctive need to harbor those traits has not magically disappeared.

We also have far fewer barriers to innovative ideas.  Believe it or not, as a species we have not gotten much better at innovation over the past two thousand years.  Innovative ideas are not inherently good ideas.  One could say that HeavenlyDoor.com, which sunk $26 million into a web site peddling caskets and burial plots, was an innovative idea.  To a greater extreme one could say that the evil ideas of Hitler and Osama Bin Laden were innovative.

As a society, we praise the pursuit of innovation – often times even when it is of little worth.  While extraordinary innovative ideas improve our lives, poor innovation continues to waste people’s time and money, and evil innovation continues to emerge.  All this has not dulled our faith and tenacity – we have as much as ever before.  This environment makes for the classic political tug-of-war.   Liberals accuse conservatives of stifling innovation.  Conservatives accuse liberals of abandoning faith.

So where are we now?  We’re where we’ve always been – in a changing world and in a changing culture.  Some of us are ahead of the curve, and some of us behind.  Neither position is more commendable.  Just as it took centuries of brutal war for countries like England, France the US and Japan to settle into relatively pleasant places to exist, it’s going to take centuries of global strife to work the rest of this stuff out.

I’m not going to be around for centuries.  But my descendants and the descendants of my loved ones will be.  There’s a lot to do in the task of making the world a better place that doesn’t involve changing how others think, so I think I’m going to focus on that.