A Look at Change - How and Why? Part 2

                I’ll start with just a quick review of what I said in part 1 in case you don’t want to read the first thousand words (I wouldn’t blame you).

I’m making the assumption that humans need to experience some great amount of change to stop and/or reverse the damage we’ve done to the world. My first post attempted to examine how that change might happen. By splitting “change” up into two large halves (reactive and proactive). I defined “reactive” as a population dealing with some sort of phenomena they’ve been exposed to; I defined “proactive” as a type of change resulting from some sort of intentional advancement. While the categories don’t inherently imply that their change is good/bad, it’s really easy to see how examples of reactive events tend to be bad and examples of proactive events tend to be good. My examples will reflect that, but I don’t want them to necessarily enforce the idea.

As my first example of a reactive event, I looked at the 9/11 attacks on America because it is the best example that my generation of Americans have so far. This event illustrated perfectly my theme here- that some sort of huge event (terrorist attack costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars) is going to be required for us to make any sort of positive change (in the same way airlines and general security changed after 9/11).

               

     My second example of a reactive event is the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I’m going to pull a block quote from the Wiki page because it’s more precise and brief than I could be:

“The United States, with the consent of the United Kingdom as laid down in the Quebec Agreement, dropped nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, during the final stage of World War II. The two bombings, which killed at least 129,000 people, remain the only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in history.”  

                So, it’s impossible to argue that massive change did not occur as a result of this event. Before I talk about big picture stuff, I’ll talk about the immediate effect on the people who lived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. First, there was obviously an immense loss of life, made even worse (by some definitions) by the fact that they were civilian lives. Ninety percent of structures in the two cities were reduced to rubble, and those who survived the initial blast and were not incapacitated or otherwise maimed were left to walk the scorched ruins and rebuild. There was a massive amount of area that had to be surveyed and quarantined, and an even greater need than that was to survive. The affected people had to attempt to grow food in their own gardens or barter with farmers in more rural areas with little more than the rubble the bomb had left them. For these people, change was survival, and in that, a necessity.

                I believe the world experiences hardship and grows from it just as people do, and this may be the best example of that sentiment. War has and will never be the same after the unprecedented destruction following the detonation of the atomic bombs. The immense suffering and loss of life brought about by this event is terrible and tragic, and the minds that allowed it are equally as disturbing in my mind. By August 6, 1945, we had already tested plenty of huge bombs on tiny pacific islands, so we knew full well what to expect when we dropped it on a dense population center, so I won’t hear any defense claiming ignorance. We knew approximately how many people were living in the cities, how much force it takes to knock down their buildings, and the second, third, and fourth order effects. It’s sad to think that a group of people collectively agreed that causing devastation on that scale to a civilian population was in any way at all the correct choice, but it happened, and the world has definitely lived with its choices.

                There are a few bits of this we can salvage and relate to our possible future with climate change. First, very many people were killed in the atomic bombings, but some people still survived, and they rebuilt over time. There is a negative way to view this- if people survived and rebuilt after that tragedy, what’s to stop us from being complacent, losing hundreds of thousands of lives by way of climate change, and simply rebuilding afterwards? However, I prefer the positive outlook, and that is: those people were able to survive and make progress despite their awful circumstances.

                The world certainly learned a valuable lesson from the bombings. There have been meetings and treaties galore following the chaos of World War II in hopes that none of the atrocities will happen again.

                __________

                There are some really great examples of proactive movements creating a huge change in the way people go about their lives. One of my favorite examples is the invention and proliferation of the printing press and printed material in the late 15^th century.

“The printing press was invented in the Holy Roman Empire by the German Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, based on existing screw presses. Gutenberg, a goldsmith by profession, developed a complete printing system, which perfected the printing process through all of its stages by adapting existing technologies to the printing purposes, as well as making groundbreaking inventions of his own. His newly devised hand mould made for the first time possible the precise and rapid creation of metal movable type in large quantities, a key element in the profitability of the whole printing enterprise.”

                The introduction of the printing press and printed material completely changed society- initially in Western Europe, then eventually throughout the entire world. Everyday citizens suddenly had access to information and concepts that simply weren’t readily available to them. The sheer quantity of information that could be produced with a press as opposed to handwriting changed society in that it was much harder to control public opinion.

                Besides creating an entirely new industry, Gutenberg provided Western civilization with an enormously useful tool, and gave a wake-up call to all of those in power who used misinformation (or simply a lack of information at all) as a method of controlling their population.

                It’s not hard to relate this argument to the unfathomable amount of information available to anyone with a smartphone. Especially with this recent election (which I promised myself not to talk about), misinformation is an incredibly serious problem. Perhaps it’s not necessarily the access to information that’s the problem, but so many peoples’ inability to sort through it and find truth. An easy answer to that is increasing quality/availability of education. Somebody said “a democracy is only as good as its educational system” and I don’t find many people defending the public education of the U.S., and I see many reasons to fear for the integrity and strength of our democracy.

                The last example I’ll cover is something a bit broader but still relatable: the invention of the plow and the agricultural revolution. Before the invention of the plow, society was composed of mostly hunters and gatherers. The plow allowed for crops to be planted and harvested on a scale previously unattainable. People suddenly were able to produce way more food than they needed to survive, and they could trade their excess for goods and services. The agricultural revolution is sort of the pretext to how human society is structured today, which means it was a change on an absolutely massive scale.

                It’s a little less straightforward to equivocate the type of total change the agricultural revolution brought about to how we could deal with climate change in the future. I like to view it in a similar way I view the printing press- a single invention caused a great number of people to lead more comfortable lives (I’m aware of the theories that glorify hunter/gatherer societies). People were able to stay more or less in the same areas, build up and expand with their excess, and make great things for humanity that may have otherwise been impossible. The way that we are living and conducting ourselves today by expanding at great cost to the Earth is wrong and a revolution the likes of agricultural revolution may be difficult to imagine in the modern world, but a revolution with the future health of the planet at the forefront is something that we could certainly use.

                Thanks for sticking with this to the end. I wish there was a continuation of this course so I could apply this concept of change on a large scale to speculate at how exactly we might change for the better. After all the things I’ve learned this semester that have given me no reason to hope for improvement, I remain cautiously optimistic that some great event (hopefully positive) will push us in the right direction.

Word count: 1508

Total word count: 2463

Link to my previous comments
Link to part 1