Change

Good lord, it's been a while since I've written anything here! I lacked Internet for two weeks, was poisoned for a couple days, and simply didn't have motivation for however much time the previous two excuses don't account for. Today I will remedy this dry spell. Inspired in part by recent events in my life and in part by my developing capacity to generate my own philosophies on life, I want to talk about the concept of change.

"Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living."

-Henry David Thoreau, "Walden"

Thoreau suggests that irrelevant wisdom is the only thing our elders can offer and that adopting said wisdom retards the progress of society. Things inevitably change and for old people to teach the young is for them to prepare new generations to deal with old problems. We've all heard older people say things like, "You kids have it so easy these days with your cell phones and your Internet" as if we of the new generation are spoiled because we don't have to walk twelve miles to school every day in the snow or fetch our water from a well or carry home the mammoth we tracked for a week and then killed with pointy rocks at the ends of sticks. Old people have experienced and learned to deal with problems that are not likely inherited by their children because of how rapidly human society has begun to evolve from one generation to the next. Old people demonstrate resistance to (or perhaps ignorance of) change when they fail to realize that new generations have as many problems and labors as the old ones did - the problems are just different. While it's true that we don't have to chop firewood every day or wash our clothes by hand in the local stream, we have to deal with things like competitive job markets, complex computer software, and diagnoses for medical ailments that were either totally unaddressed or simply did not exist a hundred years ago. Worst of all we have to deal with the shit those same old people left for us to resolve, like racial and gender discrimination and homophobia. I think it's worth respecting our elders for the energy they've invested in creating a good life for themselves and others, but the pleasantness of society and life in general will never increase further if we blindly adopt the antiquated ways they think we're missing out on. Improvement and invention are very often the stimuli for change so to resist change is to resist beneficial development. To put it bluntly:

"Tradition is the enemy of progress."

-Sign on a Native American boarding school.

You may ask then, am I anti-religion because of its emphasis on tradition? No. Religion does good things for many people. It strengthens the people who might otherwise be weak, unmotivated, or feel like their life has no purpose. Religion can enable them to do other things that benefit themselves and others. The unfortunate side-effect of religion is that it often inhibits the presently prosperous person from developing new ideas, values, and reasons. This prevents change from occurring by forcing young people to make decisions based on the values passed down from old people - values which Thoreau and I have already said may or may not be relevant or even rational in our modern age. My strong preference to make decisions based on my own rational thought over faith in the thoughts of others is why I personally am an atheist (for all intents and purposes) and a subscriber to the endless importance of change.

I will not, however, denounce stagnation like Thoreau so tersely does. I realize that a person's opinion on change depends on a deep-rooted (and perhaps even unconscious) philosophy about what the purpose of life is and therefore change carries with it no objective moral value. If you think the purpose of life is to improve the world as much as possible to make the experience of life a happier one, change is your friend because it represents progress. If you think the purpose of your life is to breed happiness by cherishing and spreading the ideas and bounty with which you and the rest of the world have already been blessed, then to you change represents digression. The world needs those anti-change "maintainers" just as much as it needs those pro-change "innovators." We can't all be artists and inventors because then there will be no one left to farm our vegetables or teach math to our children. But if we were all teachers or farmers or priests, we wouldn't have the luxuries or efficiency of 21st century life.

My advice to you this entry is to invest some thought into which philosophy of life most strongly influences the decisions you make and whether those decisions are the products of your own thinking or the result of trust in the thinking of others. Then realize that people who behave or think oppositely are not necessarily wrong or evil - the most likely explanation is that their goals for the future and for change are simply different than yours but no less righteous. Because of the symbiosis between "maintainers" and "innovators," I guarantee you that the philosophies you reject will at some (or many) point(s) benefit the ones you accept, so as long as a person's goals do not outwardly harm society or its people, don't judge or guilt the person for the philosophy they choose. You may find the wisdom of your elders to be either priceless treasure or anachronistic garbage but regardless of whether you tend to resist change or embrace it, at the very least, do not fear it.