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How To Change the World

 

How To Change the World

 

Physicist Max Planck noted in his 1949 memoir, A Scientific Autobiography, that, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” 

 

This observation also helps explain how the world changes in general. It changes not by the conversion of opponents, by the winning of their hearts and minds, but by finding new adherents whose minds aren’t already made up, whose minds are free from the weight of tradition. 

 

Thomas Kuhn, who gave us the phrase and concept of “paradigm shifts” in his influential 1962 book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” agreed with this model of change. If any man can be said to have changed the world, surely it was Nicholas Copernicus, who replaced the geocentric Ptolemaic view of the heavens with a heliocentric view, arguing that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the “Solar” System. And yet, noted Kuhn, “Copernicanism made few converts for almost a century after Copernicus’ death. Newton’s work was not generally accepted, particularly on the Continent, for more than half a century after the ‘Principia’ appeared. Priestly never accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the electromagnetic theory, and so on. The difficulties of conversion have often been noted by scientists themselves. Darwin, in a particularly perceptive passage at the end of his ‘Origin of Species,’ wrote, ‘I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine…. But I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.’” As Kuhn notes, “These facts and others like them are too commonly known to need further emphasis.”

 

But the world does not change only through the succession of generations. It also changes by reaching new audiences, those not already committed to an opposing point of view. This was something even Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, realized. Many Christians sometimes forget that Jesus was born a Jew, lived and taught among Jews, thought of himself as a Jew, and died a Jew. However, he taught that he was a special Jew. He was the Messiah, the long-prophesized Savior of Jewish tradition bringing salvation to the Jewish people. 

 

Unfortunately, those who knew him best, the people of Nazareth, among whom he was born and raised, did not believe this about him. When he returned to his boyhood home to preach, a mob rejected him and drove him away. This moved him to remark bitterly upon how a prophet went unrecognized and unhonored among his own people. 

 

Therefore, he went elsewhere seeking followers, among those not already doubting his destiny. In the Sea of Galilee port village of Magdala he found Mary (the) Magdalene, his most faithful convert, who followed him even to the Cross and the tomb. In the nearby village of Bethsaida, also overlooking the Sea of Galilee, Jesus found more who knew him not, and therefore were receptive to his message. It was in Bethsaida that many testified to the miracles that Jesus was said to have performed. It was in Bethsaida that he healed a blind man and multiplied the loaves and fishes to feed the thousands who came to hear him preach. Many, watching from Bethsaida, saw him walk on the water of Galilee and calm the stormy waters with a word. And it was from among the fishermen of the tiny village of Bethsaida, where people knew him not, that Jesus found five of his most devoted disciples: James, John, Andrew, Philip, and, most devout of all, Peter, “the father of the church.” 

 

This is not to say that hearts and minds are never won. Sometimes dramatic conversions do occur, but perhaps their very rarity is what makes them so memorable. One of the most notable, so much so that it became a metaphor for dramatic conversion, was the transformation Saul of Tarsus underwent on the Road to Damascus. Saul was a Jew born in the Cilician city of Tarsus. He received his final religious education in Jerusalem, where he rose to a position of eminence as a Pharisee, a Jewish sect the New Testament portrays as opposed to Jesus and the early Christian movement.  He may also have become a member of the Sanhedrin, the judicial and administrative court responsible for collecting Roman taxes and enforcing Roman laws. 

 

As the followers of Jesus multiplied in Jerusalem following his death, Saul took personal responsibility for exterminating them. But, on the Road to Damascus, Syria, chasing Jewish Christians who had fled there, he experienced a remarkable vision which he compared to the appearance of Jesus to the disciples following his Resurrection. From a persecutor of Christians Saul, who now called himself “Paul”, became their principal champion. 

 

However, the vast majority of his fellow Jews was no more willing to accept Jesus as the Messiah than Paul had been previously. Therefore, Paul took his good news, his “gospel”, outside Israel to the gentiles beyond, to those who had not already made up their minds about Jesus. He established and led many Christian churches in Asia Minor and Greece and the followers of Jesus spread throughout the Roman Empire. 

 

The world is changed by the passage of time, as younger generations come of age in the midst of the debate, and whose minds are not already made up. And the world is changed by finding a new audience and gaining their adherence to your worldview. 

 

So, forget about changing hearts and minds. Find a new audience. Take your message to the gentiles.

 

1919 - The Year of Hope and Fear

 1919 - The Year of Hope and Fear ---- My new book on the tumultuous events of that year. 

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/eric-leif-davin/the-year-of-hope-and-fear/paperback/product-4gznz9.html?page=1&pageSize=4

 

The Twilight of Democracy-Thoughts on January 6th Insurrection

 THE TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY

THOUGHTS ON THE JANUARY 6TH INSURRECTION

What was the next stage following a successful Insurrection?

Imagine the Trumpists occupying the Capitol, with security forces stymied from removing them because they held the entire Congress hostage... including the three next in line to the presidential succession, Pence, Pelosi, and the President Pro Tem of the Senate. Threatening execution of all, and tossing their bodies out the windows one by one, should any attempt be made to remove them by force. What a scenario! Who would have accepted such a crazy fictional scenario before January 6th?

Meanwhile, Trump, sitting in the Oval Office, would go on TV and declare a State of Emergency, declaring (upon no legal authority) that he continued as Acting President (for life?), and ordering the armed forces, as the Commander in Chief, to stand down. More than a constitutional crisis..... the end of American democracy.

This was how Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany. In response to the Reichstag Fire (we still don't truly know the origins of that), the Reichstag declared a state of emergency, giving the Chancellor (Hitler) extraordinary powers until the end of the emergency. All other political parties were "temporarily" suppressed. Security forces rounded up Socialists, Commies, any other suspected terrorists, and sent them off to prison. Hitler ruled via these temporary emergency powers until his death in the bunker in 1945.
It could happen here....

The GOP is already rewriting the history of the Insurrection via the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election and that Biden is an illegitimate president. A New Lost Cause Myth is taking shape saying those who stormed the Capitol were true patriots protecting American democracy from an illegal takeover by Dems. False history works. The South lost the Civil War, but won the peace, by rewriting the history of what the South fought for (it was all about states' rights!) and the history of Reconstruction (a shameful period of misrule by ignorant former slaves!).

People should read my obscure book, "Radicals in Power," about how some of the New Left focused on taking power at the local level.... the origin of Bernie, among others. That's what the Radical Right is now in the process of doing....

.... while America sleep walks toward the death of democracy....

https://lnkd.in/dk-KjKas

Soylent Green -- What It Got Right

 SOYLENT GREEN:

A half century ago, the 1973 movie, "Soylent Green," looked at what life would be like in the far off future of the year 2022.

We have now arrived at that far off future. What did the movie get right about us today?

Most of all, it got the devastation of climate change right. Here's what was said about 2022 in the movie's press release book:

In the 1973 press book, the film’s technical consultant, Frank R. Bowerman, president of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers, said, “I am of the firm conviction that uncontrolled population expansion and its concomitant pollution of the air and the seas is the gravest problem facing mankind. A polluted, overpopulated world must result in a physical deterioration of life as we know it. I believe that our sources of food are waning, that our seas are dying, that our air is being poisoned, that our mineral resources are being exploited far beyond the natural replacement process. There is still time to reverse the trend. With action. The alternative is that ‘Soylent Green’ will be more than a warning. It could become the epitaph for mankind’s gravestone.”

Fifty years later........ more true than ever!

Remembering Wounded Knee

 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON REMEMBERS WOUNDED KNEE: 

On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon; it was the only thing standing between his family and starvation. As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.

Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.

As the men fought hand-to-hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. The soldiers on a slight rise above the camp turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.

But it is not December 29 that haunts me. It is the night of December 28, the night before the killing.

On December 28, there was still time to avert the Wounded Knee Massacre.

In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Big Foot—Sitanka—had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There, they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota's Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.

For the soldiers, the surrender of Sitanka's band marked the end of the Ghost Dance Uprising. It had been a tense month. Troops had pushed into the South Dakota reservations in November, prompting a band of terrified men who had embraced the Ghost Dance religion to gather their wives and children and ride out to the Badlands. But, at long last, army officers and negotiators had convinced those Ghost Dancers to go back to Pine Ridge and turn themselves in to authorities before winter hit in earnest.

Sitanka’s people were not part of the Badlands group and, for the most part, were not Ghost Dancers. They had fled from their own northern reservation two weeks before when they learned that officers had murdered the great leader Sitting Bull in his own home. Army officers were anxious to find and corral Sitanka’s missing Lakotas before they carried the news that Sitting Bull had been killed to those who had taken refuge in the Badlands. Army leaders were certain the information would spook the Ghost Dancers and send them flying back to the Badlands. They were determined to make sure the two bands did not meet.

But South Dakota is a big state, and it was not until late in the afternoon of December 28 that the soldiers finally made contact with Sitanka's band, and it didn’t go quite as the officers planned: a group of soldiers were watering their horses in a stream when some of the traveling Lakotas surprised them. The Lakotas let the soldiers go, and the men promptly reported to their officers, who marched on the Lakotas as if they were going to war. Sitanka, who had always gotten along well with army officers, assured the commander that his band was on its way to Pine Ridge anyway, and asked his men to surrender unconditionally. They did.

By this time, Sitanka was so ill he couldn't sit up and his nose was dripping blood. Soldiers lifted him into an army ambulance—an old wagon—for the trip to the Wounded Knee camp. His ragtag band followed behind. Once there, the soldiers gave the Lakotas an evening ration, and lent army tents to those who wanted them. Then the soldiers settled into guarding the camp.

And they celebrated, for they were heroes of a great war, and it had been bloodless, and now, with the Lakotas’ surrender, they would be demobilized back to their home bases before the South Dakota winter closed in. As they celebrated, more and more troops poured in. It had been a long hunt across South Dakota for Sitanka and his band, and officers were determined the group would not escape them again. In came the Seventh Cavalry, whose men had not forgotten that their former leader George Armstrong Custer had been killed by a band of Lakota in 1876. In came three mountain guns, which the soldiers trained on the Lakota encampment from a slight rise above the camp.

For their part, the Lakotas were frightened. If their surrender was welcome and they were going to go with the soldiers to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge, as they had planned all along, why were there so many soldiers, with so many guns?

On this day and hour in 1890, in the cold and dark of a South Dakota December night, there were soldiers drinking, singing and visiting with each other, and anxious Lakotas either talking to each other in low voices or trying to sleep. No one knew what the next day would bring, but no one expected what was going to happen.

One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.

But it is never too late to change the future.

St. Stephen's Day

 

TODAY IS ST. STEPHEN'S DAY:

 

GOOD KING WENCESLAS

 

"Good King Wen-ces-las looked out

On the Feast of Stephen,

Where the snow lay round about,

Deep and crisp and even;

Brightly shown the moon that night,

Tho' the frost was cruel,

When a poor man came in sight,

Gath'ring winter fuel......

 

(Good King Wenceslas and his page gather food, drink, and pine logs for fuel and take them to the peasant's home...)

 

Therefore, everyone, be sure,

Wealth or rank possessing,

Ye who now shall bless the poor,

Shall yourselves find blessing."

 

In Great Britain, this tradition of sharing the wealth has been secularized into Boxing Day, which this is. People prepare boxes of goodies for the less fortunate and pass them out.

 

It is a good tradition.