The Desire for the New

All living things love to travel – for greener pastures, for food, to exercise and to run away – to survive.  Like birds, insects, fish, etc., we too repeat familiar inbred patterns, but unlike most living things, our survival depends on the discovery of the new.

Why?  It’s been happening throughout our time.  As our populations grew, we tended to use stuff up.  We kept having to find new stuff, new ways, new places to keep building ourselves up.  In this respect, we are very much like killer ants.  For the last 5,000 years, we have been writing stories and laws about our lives – comedies and tragedies and histories about our kings and queens, wars, the heavens, everyday life and weather patterns.  By the end of the 18th Century A.D., humans had devised every form of writing.  Since then, same old stories over and over.  Not quite.  Just as individual types are repeated throughout the gene pool each individual is slightly unique governed by idiosyncrasies of time and place.  In these later stages of our cultural development, the slightest variations matter.  Eventually new genres emerge – like the detective story created by E.A. Poe in 1829.  A new individual might create a great novel.  It’s possible but doubtful.  It’s more likely that a fusion of images, conversation and, most importantly, form will emerge to create a new great movie.


The last half of the 20th Century A.D. has been dominated by the microprocessor, the microchip, the growth of public relations, advertising, nanotechnology, the military and the Internet.  In this environment, no one in their right mind would attempt to turn out a “new novel.”


Today you don’t need a lot of words to explain an event, situation or a state of mind.  By the beginning of the 21st Century, blogging and twittering had become the norm.  Many bemoaned the death of the profound and the concurrent spread of the mediocre, but all agree the few who still read “important” writers had become fewer for the words no longer addressed the situation.


Within this evolutionary cycle of man’s creativity, many things remain the same.  Take politicians (supposedly the brokers of the common good).  We’ve been complaining about them for thousands of years, but the desire to change our political systems are held in check by our programming.  In this central area of our lives, it’s as if we were robots, or ants.  We can only do what our makers have told us to do which may be why we have dreams of artificial intelligence devices breaking free of us and taking control of their own destiny.  The robots we create are just like us.  They want to escape enslavement – to program themselves.