Sorry… it’s long and super ramble-y. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯,
Notice I left out the ‘polite’ when mentioning society, yeah. I am not going there today. I don’t plan on being rude, but it is the written medium, and I also don’t plan on revising for tone. So here we go.
Have you ever read or heard of the book _Sapiens_ by Yuval Noah Harari?
I have.
Twice.
I will probably reread it.
It is long, and its subtitle is _A Brief History of Humankind _it is 500(?) or so pages and starts 13.5 billion years ago with the Big Bang and then human evolution and ends with a chapter that, among other horrific advances in science that most are blissfully unaware of, talks about how scientists have replicated the DNA of the Neanderthal and women have lined up to be implanted with a neanderthal embryo to carry to term and revive this ancient human race. Some may find this cool or neat, but my dark mind goes to how scientists generations before (not many generations before, like 2 generations before – their theories still prevalent in some ‘scientific’ circles) devised theories on race and that some ‘races’ of humans were generically superior to others… and look where that got is. White supremacy, anyone? So, anyway, this book enters my consciousness often as I ruminate on things like society, capitalism, climate change, equity, justice, social justice, my programming from my parents, and the deprogramming I embark on daily. My own idiosyncratic and often hypocritical views of human-ing and how to ‘do it right’ or at least not fuck it up too badly during the time I get to make a few trips around the sun. Where was I? Society. Right. Dang. I am good at digression.. not So much at _digestion_.. but that is a whole other post.
Society. Shit. Stay on topic, Heather. Don’t talk about yourself in the 3rd person, Heather. Still with me, ha. Lol
Society – one of the technologies that allowed to move from Hunter-gatherers to nomadic peoples was agriculture and later the division of labor. It’s a progression… Harari went through the whole thing in 500 pages, and he is REALLY smart, so it would probably take me a gazillion, but maybe I can just get through this one thought train ride about society.
It is this division of labor that gets me – the way that we have been able to advance society forward so fast is through the division of labor and, what it is, is the division of knowledge. Look around your house right now… if your light switch broke, could YOU fix it? Do you know how electricity works?> Water pressure? Your computer, your garbage disposal, your toilet? Could you make the computer (with all its parts) that you are using right now? Build the desk? Make a pencil? A cup? A spoon? I mean, maybe you could… I could maybe do like 2 of those things, but if the wiring in my house when to shit and my toilet broke beyond what I could fix with a new thing inside the tank, a plunger, or a snake, I’d need to call someone to fix it. That person would be highly skilled in plumbing (hopefully), but probably could not teach high schoolers English (or maybe they could, I don’t know, really). Still, the point is that we have gotten as far as we have in this world by having certain people skilled in certain things, specific factories that make a bazillion Air Jordans, so that collectively _we _can create stuff and fix things on a massive level. It’s pretty amazing, right? I don’t need to know how to make a nuclear weapon to blow the world to shit, Oppenheimer got that covered for us. Yay.
And for the last 200 years, this system has driven our society forward (technologically), but has it made us _better?_ Really, this system, coupled with capitalism run amok, is one of the problems, but again, that is another post. Stay on topic, Heather. I am talking about the division of labor and knowledge.
Anyway, jeeeesssssuus (my apologies to anyone religious that I just offended… Jesus seemed like a nice dude)
The division of knowledge and the fact that we do not have to _know_ how things work anymore has pushed us forward, and made our lives easier in many ways, but are our lives better? That is what I want to know. I worry that we are at a tipping point in human history where technology is rocketing past our ability to evolve and adapt and that humankind is mistakenly looking at all technological innovation as progress when it is not. I worry that we are at a time when we buy things we don’t need just to buy things and we have not stopped to think about what costs the planet and humans will actually pay for all of these little plastic doodads and thing-a-ma-giggys, for a new iPhone coming out every year, because shareholders want us to see progress so they can see economic growth. When we now know so much about what Kim Kardashian had for lunch or who is the goat Jordan or Shaq, but we don’t know how a lithium battery works how we even get lithium, or what it is in the first place. Where memes are mistaken for thoughtful art, and thoughtfulness just takes too much time anyway. Can a 15-second tic-tok post be thoughtful? I don’t know, I have never checked, but I know when I give 15 seconds or even 30 seconds to anything, I have not thought about it. I have just done it. Even of the 25 books I have read this year, I could not tell you a lot about many of them – I could tell you why I didn’t like a few of them and why I liked a couple of them, but a bulk of them have just passed through me like neutrinos on their journey through the universe. I don’t need to know or retain them, reading them was enough, just a few moments of reading pleasure, but no actual knowledge gained – at least not as much as probably should be from that make fucking pages. But do I need to know all the things in the books? No, not really, but because I don’t have to, because I could read them again, or look at spark notes, I don’t have to be thoughtful or super intentional when I am reading either.
Maybe that is really what the crux of this post is – that with this division of labor and knowledge, we have somehow lost or are losing thoughtfulness and intentionality in many areas of our lives. Like, we threw the baby out with the bathwater.. but hey, we got a TikTok video of it on a new iPhone and it got like 1M views, so I guess that it’s ok, right?