It Always took a Village
In the either/or dichotomous culture that we’ve actively created, young persons are caught in the crosshairs especially as they try to figure out the skills they will need to live, earn, and thrive. They are told “do STEM courses because AI is the future”, or, “let music be an interest but major in biology”, or, “forget carpentry, learn about EV vehicles”.
The message here is: THIS is BETTER than THAT.
This message is insidious. It teaches us to compare, judge, and (silently) scorn. It encourages Knowledge to be placed in impenetrable silos…a travesty at best. As if there is no mathematics in music or no art in botany or no statistics in sociology or no ethics in business. On a lighter but serious note, if your plastic surgeon has no sense of aesthetics then you’re not going to look too good at the end of the procedure! The point is that creating silos, or absolute differences is falsification of what actually exists and an intellectually lazy understanding of what humans are capable of creating/doing.
Consider the story of the Fibonacci Sequence.
It has influenced numerous areas of science and mathematics. It’s a series of elements/numbers whereby each element/number is the sum of the two preceding it. It goes 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89…etcetera. This particular mathematical “discovery” is attributed to an Italian mathematician, Leonardo of Pisa (aka Fibonacci) in his 1202 book Liber Abaci. Here’s the kicker. This series of numbers was first recorded circa 200 BCE by Pingala, a mathematician from modern day India. He in turn discovered this series of numerics after observing and studying the prosody of Sanskrit poetry.
Incidentally, his learning of Sanskrit poetry also contributed to the creation of binary representation in mathematics, use of shunya (zero) as a numeric, and the use of decimals. How did Fibonacci get ahold of the sequence of numbers, zero, or the decimal usage that was finessed centuries ago? The answer lies in cultural transmission.
The Arab traders and travelers of circa 8th and 9th centuries carried this knowledge to Persian and Arab regions where they advanced their mathematical skills and thereafter traded with the Mediterranean peoples (mainly in North Africa and Spain) who adopted the Hindu-Arabic numeral systems and usages. The very name of the Persian mathematician and geographer Al Khwarizmi’s (“the father of algebra”) has coined the very commonly used word these days: algorithm! Because the Arabs introduced these numerical systems to Europeans, the digits came to be called Arabic numbers, even though these are actually from India.
Now consider what that paragraph has done:
It has reminded us of our mathematics classes, made us think about cultural transmission as a thing, possibly made us consider the huge span of time it took for information to travel in the centuries gone by, and note the connections and intersections between people, knowledge, science, mathematics, trade, economics, and poetry. Using today’s language of academic disciplines and specializations we have used Mathematics, History, Anthropology, Poetry, Commerce, and Economics while reading the above paragraph. If we remove any one discipline, the story of the Fibonacci Sequence would be incomplete and, frankly, not too terribly interesting either. No discipline has taken center stage here. They are all needed to tell the story of the well-known Fibonacci Sequence, or dare I say, Pingala-Fibonacci Series!
This blue-green planet, the third rock from the sun inhabited by millions of species was ALWAYS a Village. Among humans, it took so many of us to work on 0 and 1 from 2200 years ago so that I could write this on a laptop and you could read it on yours. We’ve never been strangers.
Let’s consider jettisoning the notions of hierarchy of knowledge, “better than/less than” thinking, superiority of certain types of learning and jobs, and instead teach our coming generations to access their talent and then work like hell to chisel it. Each of us has been given a life, a talent, a being that is neither better than nor less than anyone else’s. No color, class, gender, creed, social standing, national border, passport, or linguistic ability is “better than/less than” any other. So, the real question before our youth ought to be: in what ways will you work hard, and I mean bust your rear end, to reach your fullest potential of being a mathematician/historian/sociologist/physician/coder/construction worker/writer/filmmaker/facilities worker/oncologist/poet/painter/truck driver/surgeon/dancer…etcetera.
Let’s put to rest this widely accepted cultural trope of “better than/less than”; it is destroying our communities, country, and, most importantly, our children’s self-confidence. “Better than” leads to entitlement and “Less than” causes anxiety; neither one generates self-confidence.
