It’s fun to think back a bit, to the time when there were white areas on a map of the world – places that hadn’t been discovered yet, and which nobody knew anything about.
Then came a discovery journey, often financed by a ruler of a country, or a business enterprise, for the prestige or for the possible gains. The myths about that place where driving some of it, but the “being first” was by itself part of the game.
Of course, a ruler could possibly claim any such new area to be an addition to their territory, and if there would be a lot of gold or other values there, it may be worth the investment in the expedition. A business enterprise could, like the ruler, hope for something sellable to be there, such as precious stones or woods.
Such maps become shared maps for part of humanity. A certain group of people either know or don’t know about the different areas of the world, and that makes up their world. Of course, the people who live in an “undiscovered” area may not feel that same fuzz about being discovered, as they already knew what was there, and perhaps had a map of their own.
In the age of the discovery journeys, back in the middle of the previous millenium, much of this was driven by technologies such as improved map drawing, with mechanisms for projections of the round world on a flat piece of paper, and better ships that could indeed “boldly go where no one had gone before”, like the famous citation from the much later TV series Star Trek.
People at home could hear about strange animals discovered, or encounters with “wild” people who were cannibals, or had their necks made longer by putting more and more neck rings around them as they grew up. Things that people didn’t have a home, in their boring lives where everything was the same as it had always been.
Today, the Earth has been mapped in details, almost everywhere. We even have ultra-precise photos made by satellites of just about every spot on the surface. Some white areas are still left, though, and they are below the surface of the oceans. New maps have rendered old maps valueless, because we can now see and map details that they didn’t contain.
Now, apart from the deep oceans, we look at mapping space. Some big telescopes, big budgets made available by rulers – of countries or business enterprises, or perhaps universities - allow for virtual expeditions to be made. We can’t send people there, yet, as the conditions of the yet undiscovered parts of the world and the universe are difficult for humans to survive in, so we now have virtual discovery trips into space, based on observations that need computer processing and then, the discoveries are made in data rather than with the discoverers on location. Deep oceans are explored by the help of robotic submarines, sending videos to a mother ship on the surface, but otherwise much the same idea as discoveries in space.
The first time of any discovery – seeing a special animal, finding a planet that looks like Earth, or simply being in a place, like the top of Mount Everest, has always fascinated people. After the first time, they could feel that the world had become larger, and that everything was now possible. Today, Mount Everest, tomorrow, who knows? The Moon? Mars? Jupiter?
We feel bigger when our world expands, when white spaces are filled out with the results of the discovery journeys.
For an individual, life is one long discovery journey. A baby naturally does very little else than discovering how their different body parts function, what the world around them looks and sounds and smells like, and how they can interact with it all.
Can it be eaten? Can it be beaten? Does it smile back when smiling at it?
Later, our discoveries are put into a frame that doesn’t exactly come from the nature of the individual, but are a construction made by the nature of the society. Schools, universities, workplace learning – all social constructs, that will teach you math, writing, knitting, or welding. You are partly driven by the natural curiosity, but the society takes over much of the process, so that you, eventually, discover such things only that society wants you to study.
And that’s where it often goes wrong.
Somewhere along the way, most humans have mostly stopped looking at the white areas of their inner maps of they world, and now they study only the already found and described areas. And they expect others to do the same. Any imagination a person might have about the undiscovered, will often be seen as foolish – dreaming about seeing strange creatures in places where no one has gone before becomes a matter of watching a movie, or perhaps reading a book, while the “real” studies should focus on what everybody else already knows, unless you are in a position where you are the one allowed to expand the map.
And I’m not just speaking about geography and planets, I’m speaking about mental maps of mental aspects as well. Because, cartographers and ship builders might have been skilled and inventive in the past millenium, but they were all occupied with the physical world. You do see beatiful and imaginary drawings of dragons and other fantasy things on old maps, but mostly to make them more exciting to look at – and, perhaps, to indicate something that has been rumoured about a place but couldn’t be drawn in as a fact.
Most people see the world for the first time. Not only as babies, but through life. Meaning that very much of what they see, they haven’t seen before. They are mapping the world as they understand it, and perhaps because they are being told what to study, at school and in society in general, and how to interpret most of what they learn, they long for having the freedom to see something with their own eyes, building their own thoughts about it.
Often, these “own thoughts” are of a collective nature. Discovering the same as everybody else, at the same time, seems safe and new at the same time, so it fits well into a convenience-seeking person’s wants in life.
After all, most people weren’t taking part in the discovery journeys in the previous millenium either – they were reading about them in the newspapers, or hearing about them as gossip or in school. They were at a comfortable distance, and yet, they could enjoy the news that would enhance their world.
When something happens in the world, there will be older people who have tried something similar before1, but the younger ones don’t want the older ones to spoil the feeling of learning something new together with the collective, so, they won’t listen to the old experiences told. You know the clichée of the old person talking about the past – often something like “we had ten meters of snow each winter”, or similar, that can’t be trusted, and which isn’t interesting because it’s their own experience, not yours. Your own experience, your discovery and filling out a white area on your map, may include just half a meter of snow, or perhaps just the concept of snow in general, not any particular amount, but that’s your world, and your world is more important than the one told about.
I guess this is partly why you can’t bring old skills from one job to the next. The “not invented here” idea basically embraces the above thoughts, and you are not expected to bring your already drawn maps to an organization that works on drawing its own. When entering, you’ll have to step into the worldviews and the sets of knowings and non-knowings, to become one of that collective, learning things anew, togehter with your pack.
It’s a bit of the same in academic circles. No matter what you know and where you know it from – if you enter the circles of historians, for instance, you need a very solid evidence for your knowledge in any other area to be allowed to ever mention it. And if your knowledge is mostly on a thought level, not so much of a proven kind, nobody will ever want to hear about it.
You can, however, discover it “for the first time” in your new society, with your new pack, on the conditions they work under.
The first time in science and other learning spheres isn’t really about the first time, strictly speaking – it’s about the time when this particular bit of knowledge is allowed into the sphere you are in.
Strange animals that were “discovered”, even recently, may have been known by the local people who live in the are where these animals live. And yet, the animals are seen for the first time, by definition, when a real researcher from your culture, not the local one, sees the animal. Until then, the knowledge about it was non-existent, any talk about it was unwanted.
Mountains, rivers, and other geographical elements were of course well known by the Aztecs and other local people before Europeans came, but they were nontheless considered to be discovered for the first time when European explorers arrived, even given new names, despite that the locals already had names for them.
In a sense, this division of knowledge in accepted and unaccepted knowledge, depending on whether an accepted person has seen it for the first time or it is simply common knowledge by everybody there, is very similar to the division of knowledge between young people and old people.
Things to now don’t exist in your world until you have seen them for the first time. Your world. Your first time – or the first time of your pack.
That makes me think about how often we reinvent the world, redrawing the maps. Like we find old maps of the world a bit funny, pointing out the errors and omissions in them, the maps we, ourselves, draw now, will also be found funny by the next generation.
People often talk about science and the emergence of knowledge as something ever-evolving, building on top of each other to reach ever-increasing levels – but the reality is that each generation more or less resets the knowledge level and starts drawing new maps, based on their own discoveries.
Civilization reborn every generation, you could say. Or everything always being at its first time, never letting it become solidly known.
Everything always being questioned, old knowledge always looked at as funny rather than interesting.
All talk about the need to live in the now, not in the past or the future, sounds a bit hollow in that context. We seem to be a species that can only live in the now, not really being able to carry any past experience with us from generation to generation – everything being up to the new ones seing it with their own eyes for the first time.
I was thinking about this during our recent heat wave in the are where I live, where the news media were very eacher to tell about everything that was “the first time” – sometimes qualified with a “since measurements started” or similar, but often now even that. Just “the first time” that temperature had reached that level, in this month of the year, in this particular location.
News media want to tell the stories about the extraordinary, so any first time becomes most interesting for them, and they will often go a long distance to find something that, indeed, is the first time. If nothing else seems to work, they can be a local who on their garden thermometer saw a record temperature – which will then not be presented as a fact, but still mentioned as part of that big soup of info about the event, to underline how sensational everything is.
Words like “record” and “first time” where used all the time during those says. And nobody seemed to take older people seriously, when they could speak about times they had lived through, that also had very hot weather. Because, statistics says that they are wrong, and what does their old knowledge matter anyway? We, the new generation, we want to have this together, this feeling of experiencing something for the first time. Something we can talk about to the next generations when we get old. Of only anybody will want to listen at that time, of course.