Keep Moving Forward
OK, so I’m a little behind the times, but I just watched “Meet the Robinsons” on TV last night. Those of you more up-to-date with movies probably remember the motto of Cornelius Robinson, “Keep Moving Forward,” drawn from a quote from Walt Disney.
And so I got to wonder, what if we did not keep moving forward, as some members of our society would prefer? Where would be today?
The concept is the stuff of a myriad of science fiction novels, but let’s focus on just a few possibilities.
Nicolaus Copernicus, a Catholic cleric, on his own poked his nose into the organizations of the solar system. At the time, the prevailing belief (and church dogma) was that the Earth stood at the center of everything — Moon, Sun, planets, stars. This paradigm (there, I used Thomas Kuhn’s terminology) dictated that astrologers/astronomers had to undertake a frightening number of calculations to predict the locations of celestial objects in the sky.
By Copernicus’ time, those calculations were not all that accurate. Copernicus painstakingly measured the positions of celestial objects, and undertook to recalculate their motions. In the process, he apparently realized that life would be so much easier if the Sun was at the center, and not the Earth. While it did not make the calculations easier, at least it made them less exhausting.
Historians disagree whether Copernicus believed the traditional position of the Earth was wrong. He was reluctant to publish his findings, since there was that whole dogma problem, enforced by something called the Holy Inquisition. As it turned out, he died the same day as his work was published (according to legend), so he eluded the Inquisitors. Nice trick.
He needn’t have feared. Since Copernicus wrote in a very obtuse version of Latin, only scholars grasped his ideas. The Church was pleased — Copernicus’ work enabled it to reform the calendar. Getting Catholics into church on major feast days at the same time everywhere was part of the whole Counter-Reformation plan, after all.
Suppose Nicky had decided to leave things alone, and not spend all his time out in the dark with his cross-staff, measuring the positions of the planets, etc. He could have just gone with the flow, agreed with his religion’s dogma, and lived an otherwise obscure life.
The “great man” theory of history suggests that someone else would have come to the same conclusions as Copernicus, but when? His work was published in 1543, just as the Renaissance was building up a head of steam, in time for Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei (and others) to read and study it. If Copernicus’ hypothesis had come later, say around 1600, both Kepler and Galileo might have missed it entirely. Then where would we be? As Kuhn suggests, the Copernican Revolution was not just a scientific revolution, but a major change in how humans conceived of their place in the universe. That new humility and new understanding that reason — not dogma — could enable us to answer some very important Big Questions.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Western civilisation (and science) have this underlying impatience with the status quo. We want to keep moving forward. Witness the Revolutionary War and the Industrial Revolution. It is a painful process, this moving forward, but it continues nonetheless.
Contrast this cinematic message with that of the Religious Right (and by extension, an apparent majority of Republicans), who would just as soon have our society based solely on their narrow interpretations of an ancient text commonly called the Bible.
One doubts if they have thought through their proposals very carefully, since to take their proposals to their logical ends would require us to not move forward, to be stuck in some nether-world of stagnant thought, a new Dark Ages. If Europeans had not cut their slavish ties to Biblical laws, monarchs would still rule European nations (and potentially the American colonies), free speech and free assembly would be restricted, and scientific progress would be practically non-existent.
How many Religious Rightists would be willing to live in a country where there was one state church, no electricity, no decent medical care, no Internet and no TV to spread their antediluvian messages? None, I would bet. Even the Amish admit that using the telephone once in a blue moon can be advantageous.
Sure, in a fairy tale world, everything is cut and dried. Everyone has a place in it and they stay there. So simple. So … feudal. It would be so much easier to assume God made Heaven and Earth (and us), since that would relieve us of the problem of explaining how it all got here. Politics would be a piece of cake — observe strict Biblical laws and dissension would be non-existent. No more Congress! (Now there’s a mixed blessing …)
And it would never work. Unless someone came up with a method to turn us all into automatons (like the robotic bowler hats in the movie do), the fairy-tale world of the Christianists would fall apart (messily, I’ll bet) in short order. Humans are too contentious, too resistant to top-down authoritarianism, to live in that kind of world.
Like it or not, we have to keep moving forward.
