The Humility To Learn Something New
The average eighth grader knows things about astronomy that puzzled Galileo and Coppernicus, things about physics that puzzled Newton, things about biology that were a mystery to Charles Darwin. This isn’t to make the case that the average eighth grader is in any way smarter than these scientific geniuses, just that after several hundred years of scientific advancement, the deep unanswerable questions of the universe at that time are routinely taught today as boring facts to twelve year olds. The reason that I bring this up is that it is dangerous to assume that we’ve got everything figured out, that we KNOW what’s going on, that we are done learning new things. The reason that pride is so dangerous is because pride assumes that we have everything figured out (we don’t) and that the world will continue on forever in just the way we understand it (it won’t) and we won’t ever have to change our minds or acknowledge our ignorance. If in 1965 you learned everything there was to know about computers and programming (a feat that even then would have been nearly impossible but still plausible), but then at 1965 you decided that you would no longer learn anything new about computers or programming and you doggedly stuck to that decision, then fifty-five years later you would be completely hopeless with computers and would probably not even recognize one and certainly wouldn’t know how to program on one since there’s no place to insert the punch card. If you are aiming for the moon, you don’t actually want to point yourself at the moon. You want to point yourself at where the moon is going to be when you get there. Our world changes at an accelerated pace. Fifty years ago most people got the news the same way people got their news two hundred years ago - through the newspaper. The way most people get their news now didn’t even exist twenty years ago. We can’t afford to be prideful in this day and age. We can’t afford to assume that we’ve got things mostly figured out and there will be no new developments that will require us to learn new things. Pride is damning precisely because we dam up any potential new knowledge that’s headed our way. The more frequently and sincerely we can exercise the humility to say I don’t know about this new thing, but it’s worth knowing because it might be having major effects on my life and the world, and I’m going to do my best to learn the new thing, then the less often we’re going to experience the jolts and culture shocks and the feelings of alienation and overwhelm that come from doggedly clinging to our old notions of how the world works. I’ve been framing this argument mainly through the lens of scientific achievement and technological advancement because it’s an easy way to illustrate things, but that’s not just what I’m talking about. You may have never in your life experienced the loss of a loved one, or getting fired from your job for no reason, or going through a messy divorce, or going to prison or getting into a feud with your neighbor, or disagreeing politically with your parents or your children. You may have been clinging blindly to the belief or the wish that none of these things would ever happen to you and you wouldn’t have to deal with them. But we’ve got two choices. We can attempt to live in the past, or rather, to live in an alternate universe where this thing didn’t happen to us, and we can compound our misery because our real life isn’t nearly as good as this imaginary life we’ve conjured up. Or, we can have the humility and practicality to learn to live within this new version of reality and figure out which parts of our old knowledge and skill set still work and which parts need to be chucked out as being useless or irrelevant, which parts need to be updated, and which parts we’re going to just have to make up as we go along. We live in a different world than we did ten years ago or even two years ago. Why would we keep trying to play by the rules of that other, different world, when we can have the humility and the courage to learn the new rules for the new world so that we can thrive?
