Underwear saved the lives of peasants in the 1700's.
Innovations in the early day of the industrial revolution made underwear and changes of clothes affordable. Prior to that, clothing that lie next to the skin fostered bacteria and infection and early death. Some time later, fashion became, er, fashionable and people began to buy clothes simply to stay current rather than because their clothes were hopelessly soiled, worn or outgrown.
It is considerably harder to change minds than clothing. Thomas Kuhn's often cited and occasionally read book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions popularized the notion of paradigm. He argued that a particular worldview, or paradigm, does two things. One, it makes sense of the world by ordering data and experiences into comprehensible patterns. Two, it filters out what doesn't fit into the pattern, what doesn't support the paradigm. (At any given instance, our senses are exposed to millions of bits of data; our consciousness can process only about 40 bits per second.) Thus, the paradigm we need to make sense of reality also filters out reality. One of the first jobs of a paradigm is to defend itself from attack.
Kuhn points to various examples of paradigm filters throughout history. Scientists expecting planetary orbits to be perfectly circular threw out data that deviated from that, seeing it as an error or anomaly. Their failure to clearly see the data meant that they missed the elliptical nature of orbits which meant that they missed the opportunity to develop a theory of gravity. The way that they made sense of the world kept them from sensing the world.
Radically new theories generally get accepted only by later generations. The Copernican Revolution actually took a century to be accepted. The germ theory was discarded by Pasteur's contemporaries and only accepted by the next generation, provoking the quip, "Science proceeds by the death of scientists."
A great deal of the progress of the 20th century came from solving problems of information. From semiotics and algorithms to the transmission and storage of information, we've made amazing progress in information technology. Yet new information does not automatically create a new paradigm.
There is a difference between information that streams in to be sorted and filtered to support our existing paradigms and the acquisition of knowledge, understanding, or wisdom that might transform our paradigms. We've mastered the first and have, as near as I can tell, not even bothered to define the latter as a challenge worth pursuing.
I'm sure that the medieval masses didn't think any more about changing underwear than today's masses think about changing paradigms. Yet fluency with paradigms might do as much for our quality of life as information technology did for the last century or textile manufacturing did for the 18th century.
If history teaches us nothing else, it is that paradigms are like underwear; no matter how comfortable they first seem, they eventually need changing. Maybe it's time to make paradigm shifts fashionable.
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About Me
- Ron Davison
- Working in the basement on the Escher Expressway (every direction down hill for fuel savings) and Mobius Strip DNA (for immortality).
6 comments:
I am sorry, but the way you frame this argument- it's just twisted. It feels as though you are assuming I was saying that not changing our underwear is a good thing because I like furniture that lasts longer than three years?! Because I loathe garbage landfills and waste?
There has been very little change since the Medieval period in our thinking habits- we are still sheep. We do what is fashionable. Since gadgets are fashionable, and they change every week, we've become accustomed to rapid change in our superficial culture.
But that doesn't mean we are any less ignorant, or the information any more enlightened than it was in Medieval times. Nor is the lack of cleanliness of a small fraction of the World population of dumbed down European peasants in Medieval times, suitably indicative of the history of human culture.
If anything, it is as testament to the dangers of largely subtractive leadership ploys, such as those used by marketing executives who keep your corporations afloat. When the Great Fire of London occurred after the Black Death took it's toll, the clergy shut them in and made haste.
Knowledge has always been the prized possession of the elite. And I believe there will always be leaders and followers. I believe this is the will of the universe.
All I am proposing, is that leaders ought to consist of those who have a capacity for it, instead of those who are born into it. If leadership is doing a good job raising it's offspring, then it should also run in blood lines. But blood lines need replenishing.
We need to remember that cleanliness comes naturally even to animals. We are naturally clean, but the Medieval culture compromised our instincts because cultural knowledge was guarded, and not enabled to find it's natural level.
This is why I do so much work on creating an awareness of health culture, and of the latest scientific data. Because I believe this is an innate knowledge, and that, provided people are not capitalizing from the illness of others, we can employ doctors to disseminate this information so I can focus on other issues. And so far, it seems to be a highly effective strategy.
(Sure- I get a lot of people who didn't know squat six months back talking down at me, and they were not the ones with the balls to speak up when absolutely everybody was in a drooling consumerist thrall, but that will all even out in a matter of months when people get over themselves, and realize it took a lot of courage and sacrifice for me to speak up.)
Chrlane finds underwear argument twisted! You have to admit that's actually kind of funny.
I'm sure it's true that we have whatever gene it is that causes sheep and birds to flock and perhaps this is the will of the universe. And if what you say about consumer culture and mounting landfills is true (and I think we're in agreement on this), then all the more reason for us to become adept at changing the paradigms that define our behavior at the level of individual or flock.
LOL! :P I can't help noticing you don't mention _whose_ underwear are twisted… or have you shifted into a paradigm where underwear are no longer necessary? Perhaps you sport self-cleaning nano-wear?
As for the flock/paradigm shift- go right ahead- who is stopping you? Shift away! You seem like a shifty enough feller! :D
One of the best things about blogging is that I don't have to dress up for it but I can. Working from home, I have a great deal of latitude. (The weekly schedule varies but might, for example, look like this: Mondays - pajamas; Tuesdays - Renaissance Faire attire; Wednesdays - a zoot suit; Thursdays - Scottish kilt; Fridays - casual day with shorts and t-shirt.) The underwear I may or may not be wearing? Let's just say that's not something I'm ready to reveal.
Hey-- you brought the whole underwear thing up- not me. I need that topic like I need a hole in the head, Ron.
The facts here need to be addressed before any other commnets can be made. To be sure, Great Fire of London did not occur after the Black Death. These two events are separated by 300 years: the Black Death was an outbreak of plague in 1347 and killed some 25 million people in Europe alone. In contrast, London burned down following the Great Plague in 1665, which was also an outbreak of bubonic and pneumonic plague. get your history right first . . . Great Plague was not in the Medieval Period either.
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