The World Is Changing Right Before Our Eyes
Nicolaus Copernicus surmised that the earth rotated around in sun in about 1514, and no one killed him for thinking that. He lived another twenty-nine years and died at the age of seventy. Throughout those final twenty-nine years, his revolutionary description of outer space mostly seemed an unprovable thought experiment that had the ancillary benefit of making the calendar more accurate, which made it easier to schedule Easter. When Galileo later declared that Copernicus was right (and that the Bible was therefore wrong) in the seventeen century, he was eventually arrested by the Inquisition and forced to recant—but not before the Catholic Church told him (and I am paraphrasing here): “Hey, man. We all know you are probably correct about this. We concede that you’re a wizard, and what you’re saying makes sense. But you gotta let us explain this stuff to the rest of the world very, very slowly. We can’t suddenly tell every pasta-gorged plebeian in rural Italy that we live in a heliocentric universe. It will blow their minds and fuck up our game. Just be cool for a while.” Galileo famously refused to chill and published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems as soon as he possibly could, mocking all those who believed (or claimed to believe) that the Earth was the center of the universe. The pope, predictably, was not stoked to hear this. But the Vatican still did not execute Galileo; he merely spent the rest of his life under house arrest (where he was still allowed to write books about physics) and lived to be seventy-seven.
—excerpt from But What If We’re Wrong by Chuck Klosterman
The point is that change takes time. The Copernican Revolution took over one hundred years. Social justice — inclusive of women’s rights, stopping climate change, resisting racism, taxing the 1%, is a long march. A transformative period is not necessarily transparent to the people actually experiencing it.
Is this how a paradigm shift feels? We are all fifteenth century monks. The old world view is dissolving.
