Some Reflections on Change
I have not posted to Historia in a while. I have not gotten into the habit of writing a journal on even a semi regular basis. However, I do keep reading other peoples blogs from time to time. I just read Andrew’s most recent blog on Rationality dated June 14th entitled some things have to be changed. I urge you to read it for yourself, but the basic gist of it is that some things just get neglected and nobody bothers to change them.
Today we are used to change in our lives, very radical changes in technology and society happen all the time. Yes, many things stay the same and have been inherited from the past. To give you a completely random and uncontroversial example (I just happened to be reading about banking reform today) the banking system in the U.S. would never have been designed the way it is today, it just sort of evolved that way and now it has sort of gotten messy. Our society is similar, our attitudes towards women are ancient hand-me-downs passed on from one generation to the next. However, modern Americans have taken change for granted. I have seen attitudes change in my short lifetime of almost 40 years, and I expect attitudes to be very different 40 years from now.
In the past, I mean 200+ years ago, things changed very gradually. Change was rare. Of course there were radical changes, wars revolutions, but society and history as a whole would change very little. For the most part, change was invisible to the ordinary person, sort of like plate tectonics is for us today. Things started to change more rapidly for people in Europe with the French Revolution (guess what another one of my reading assignments was today?). The people who came together in 1789 at the Estates General were not radical revolutionaries. France had to change, everybody knew that, but they did not know what was going to happen. They did not know that once the status quo was shifted, it would give way like a row of dominoes. Many of the people supporting change in 1789-91 lost their heads to the guillotine only a few years later.
French society was in a straightjacket, resistant to all change, such that when one thing went so did the entire society. Today change is pervasive and modern society is used to adapting to it. So if something in our society changes, life just goes on. Many people get hurt by change in our society, but it does not collapse. So for the people who want to make a change in today’s world I say stand up and make your mark. People may be angry with you for changing society, they may call you dirty names, it might ruin part of your life, but you probably won’t go to the guillotine for it
Today we are used to change in our lives, very radical changes in technology and society happen all the time. Yes, many things stay the same and have been inherited from the past. To give you a completely random and uncontroversial example (I just happened to be reading about banking reform today) the banking system in the U.S. would never have been designed the way it is today, it just sort of evolved that way and now it has sort of gotten messy. Our society is similar, our attitudes towards women are ancient hand-me-downs passed on from one generation to the next. However, modern Americans have taken change for granted. I have seen attitudes change in my short lifetime of almost 40 years, and I expect attitudes to be very different 40 years from now.
In the past, I mean 200+ years ago, things changed very gradually. Change was rare. Of course there were radical changes, wars revolutions, but society and history as a whole would change very little. For the most part, change was invisible to the ordinary person, sort of like plate tectonics is for us today. Things started to change more rapidly for people in Europe with the French Revolution (guess what another one of my reading assignments was today?). The people who came together in 1789 at the Estates General were not radical revolutionaries. France had to change, everybody knew that, but they did not know what was going to happen. They did not know that once the status quo was shifted, it would give way like a row of dominoes. Many of the people supporting change in 1789-91 lost their heads to the guillotine only a few years later.
French society was in a straightjacket, resistant to all change, such that when one thing went so did the entire society. Today change is pervasive and modern society is used to adapting to it. So if something in our society changes, life just goes on. Many people get hurt by change in our society, but it does not collapse. So for the people who want to make a change in today’s world I say stand up and make your mark. People may be angry with you for changing society, they may call you dirty names, it might ruin part of your life, but you probably won’t go to the guillotine for it
posted by Jon Benignus @ 11:42 PM
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