WHY I WROTE "A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD!"

WHY I WROTE “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 2007

“Revelation is a telescope kindly given us, through which reason should look up to the heavens. Good reasons must, of force, give place to better.”

Shakespeare

An email correspondent wrote, taking exception to my premise, that we are stuck with the justification, "We have always been stuck. We've been stuck for thousands of years.”

Obviously, I don't agree with his point. “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD” concerns itself with the past thirty or so years, but I see us essentially stuck in the twentieth century.

My emailer continues, "What it was like thirty years ago or three thousand years ago, it is all the same."

Well, is it?

Man got unstuck when he discovered fire.

Man got unstuck when he discovered the wheel.

Man got unstuck when he discovered religion.

Man got unstuck when he discovered agriculture and formed communities.

Man got unstuck when he developed laws and leadership to control and guide communities.Man got unstuck when he discovered America.

Man got unstuck when the Pilgrims came to Plymouth.Man got unstuck when he invented movable type and the printing press.

Man got unstuck when he challenged the authority of a corrupt and self-indulgent church with the Protestant Reformation, which, in turn, used the new printing press to disseminate the word.

Man got unstuck when he used the translation of the bible into his native tongue so that nations could form around a common culture and language.Man got unstuck when The Protestant Reformation led to the celebration of the individual and individual achievement, giving rise to a new economic system to replace feudalism called "capitalism."

Man got unstuck when he formed guilds and developed craftsmen and craftsmanship on a grand scale producing such artifacts that exist as quality antiques to this day.

Man got unstuck when America declared its independence and wrote a constitution and a bill of rights that represented a blueprint for democracy.

Man got unstuck when he developed the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, which led to steamships and international trade on a grand scale, forging the Industrial Revolution.

Man got unstuck when he developed the tools of communication such as the telegraph and telephone, radio and motion picture forming a network of tools to connect people to common interests.

Man got unstuck when he created the automobile and airplane.And then the twentieth century rolled around.

Nearly all of the inventions of the twentieth century were invented during the first decade of that new century or before. In 1905, for example, a German named Einstein came up with four short scientific papers that unstuck science from its 300-year dependence on Newton.

But stuckness started to become engrained in the twentieth century: WWI followed that first decade, which was then continued with the "Roaring Twenties" and the "Great Depression," which in turn was followed by WWII, and then the Korean War followed by the Viet Nam War followed by the First and then Second Iraq War and the Afghanistan War.

Sure, we have the nuclear energy, the computer, the Internet and microprocessors of all descriptions, but none of this is actually "new" in the sense that it wasn't previously conceived and perceived before the twentieth century.

We celebrate progress now but progress is not considered in terms of man being unstuck and reaching a new iteration of himself.

Progress is seen in faster cars, faster computers, faster lifestyles, smaller handheld devices, cell phones and on and on, all of which isolate man personally by imposing electronic wonders in the mix as surrogates to the personal touch. We have become strangers to each other, but more importantly, strangers to ourselves.

Stuckness is shown in the sickness of society, in the flabbiness of society, in the lack of stimulating music and literature, in the lack of breakthrough art, in the lack of leadership, indeed, in the lack of anything resembling a breakthrough in originality.

Instead we have anger in music and literature, anger in art, anger in leadership, and anger with life itself. It is "in" to reduce everything down not raise anything up. We have become a competitive society, worldwide, with bigger GDPs and more pollution leading to an increasingly unstable environment.

Nations imitate each other to the point that they all rest on the stuckness of the dime. They all look alike, speak alike, think alike, behave alike, and build towers across their skies as they rape their environments alike. The monsters of the time are inanimate skyscrapers dwarfing and smothering people in their shadows.

Stuckness is shown in that we cannot control crime; we cannot control drug abuse; we cannot control obesity; we cannot control terrorism; we cannot control violence, we cannot control disease; we cannot control pollution; we cannot control global warming; we cannot control immigration; we cannot control spending; we cannot control immorality; we cannot control poverty; we cannot control ourselves.

We want to take comfort in the fact that it has always been that way throughout history and therefore it will always be that way into the future.

We don't consider ourselves pessimists. We consider ourselves realists. We give both words the emptiness of meaning that stuckness generates.

We are not doers anymore but reactors to crises. We manage these crises and then congratulate ourselves on our management and leadership skills in managing them failing to see that they never should have occurred in the first place.

We congratulate medical science on all its wonderful work when much of what it does is compensate for what it didn't do in the first place. The largest contributor to longer life and quality of life is not modern medicine, but public health.

And public health was a result of people that were not medical professionals but men who could see that safe drinking water and sewage treatment as well as sanitary working and living conditions provided such advantages.

You don't hear about these heroes today, but they are the ones that have created public health.A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is written for thinking people, college age students, professionals, mothers and fathers, everyone that has a stake in the future. We are in trouble and to minimize the fact is not the answer. The answer is embracing our resistance to stuckness. That is why the book was written.

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