The Importance of Analysis
What is the major failing of modern society…?
I reckon it’s the lack of examination and introspection we apply to it.
In order to progress in any form, we must be able and willing to analyse our current cultures, customs and our civilisation as a whole. But we rarely take time to evaluate ourselves and our own actions, let alone something as colossal as the whole structure of society!
The likelihood is, that criticising someone’s football team, someone’s religion, even someone’s hair will get you into a scuffle of words or perhaps worse. So wide scale criticism of society is usually dismissed as stupid, unrealistic, idealistic or simply futile.
Just like someone supposedly having an outer body experience, looking down upon themselves, it is only with objective analysis of our institutions, beliefs, systems and traditions that we can gain perspective.
But it’s almost as if people don’t want to gain perspective, they’re either afraid of the sheer size of our problems or reduced to apathy through the complicated and intimidating nature of our problems.
The size of the problem should never be off-putting, as Marie Curie once said; “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.”
And one should never be reduced to apathy, as apathy just leads to self delusion and ignorance.
The immediate brick wall that many are quick to put up upon hearing societal criticism needs to be broken down, and the sooner the better.
Sometimes I think we don’t quite understand the amazing and advantageous position our species is in.
We’re pretty much the only species with the ability to collectively analyse itself and improve.
To help us realise the awesomeness of this ability, let us try to appreciate how we came to have it.
We all know about DNA, it’s the molecule that contains information on how to make a living organism.
Now hold onto you seats here comes a science fact; If you took all the DNA out every cell in your body and stretched it end to end it would… kill you.
No but seriously if you did stretch out every helix of DNA in your body it would reach to the moon and back thousands of times.
Thats a lot of information. Imagine having to copy all that information… It’d be like writing out the whole Game Of Thrones book series by hand thousands of times. You would definitely make a little typo or spelling mistake every now and then.
The same thing happens to DNA, when it copies itself roughly once in every billion runs, it makes an error.
This error is what enables the production of slightly different organisms. In effect, the DNA learns adaptations of organisms through it’s imperfect copying process. This is evolution. And this is how every species that we see now from the butterfly to the crocodile has come to be, so there is beauty in imperfection!
Now of course some of these errors end up handicapping an organism’s chance for survival and that strain gets killed off. But some of these errors actually end up being favourable to an organism, enabling it to survive and reproduce. The DNA accumulated information through it’s errors and generated an adapted species.
Now as far as progress goes, this is a somewhat slow process. Well, that’s a understatement. It’s an excruciatingly slow process!
But after millions of years, this process eventually managed to generate a faster way of learning, it produced organisms with brains. These brains could accumulate information, ‘learn’ and to some extent adapt in real time.
All the information accumulated by these organisms unfortunately always died out with the organism though. No matter how many tricks you teach your dog, he has no way of passing on that information to his mates.
It wasn’t until Homo Sapiens developed the skills of higher language and collective learning through communication that we were able to really thrive.
We developed a system of communication so precise, that information individuals learnt could outlast the individual. We were no longer relying purely on darwinian evolution to progress and develop like every species before us, we were now able to record and pass down information, skills and knowledge. Every time a new baby was born it didn’t have to repeat the same rigmarole of dangerous learning processes, it could be taught by it’s elders. We accumulated information and knowledge from generation to generation.
We are the only species on our 4 and a half billion year old planet with the ability of collective learning and therefore the ability to analyse it’s behaviour, its effects and consequently improve itself.
Where darwinian evolution enables species to adapt over hundreds and hundreds of years through genetic mutations or errors, we began to analyse and discard detrimental behaviours in just one generation.
Take for instance the trousers popular in the 1980′s; the flares, we were able to rid ourselves of that disastrous creation in just a decade or so!
But seriously, we managed to rid ourselves of destructive customs like human sacrifices, superstitions, slavery and sexism, these were all once taken as completely normal and healthy, but through scientific thinking and scrutinising we managed to grow out of all of them. We managed to adapt and progress through realising the folly of our ways. This is the kind of fast improvement that our species is now capable of, but only if we continue to apply self-analysis and avoid becoming complacent and blinkered.
We must not let the pressures of modern society impede or disrupt our will to analyse and progress.
Our respect and desperation for short term profit in business has begun to make us overlook its affects on ourselves, our climate, and upon our fellow species.
If we walk through life continuing to treat what is perceived as normality as acceptable and unchangeable we are heading for a dangerous future.
At what point did our future stop being captivating and enchanting and instead become alarming and unsettling?
We used to dream of empty hospital wards and badass hover boards. Now we’re worrying about catastrophic climate change and nuclear missiles with unlimited range. We used to dream of cleaning the oceans and growing new forests of tree’s. Now we’re anxious about parliamentary motions and the extinction of bee’s.
We must all be taught from a young age to never respect conventional thought without reason, to never accept teachings or ideologies without analysis and logic.
The most important factor determining evolutionary success is adaptability. Surely then, we must strive to be as analytical and adaptable as possible.
We must learn to analyse and update our values and behaviours, if we are to bring progression and therefore endurance to our species.
Roughton Reynolds, October 2012.
