Common Sense, Conventional Wisdom, Standard Practices, Cultural Norms....
They're true until they're not.
Making sexist jokes in the workplace was a cultural norm a few decades ago.
Until recently, it was conventional wisdom that to run a successful company, your employees must commute into the office five days a week.
It was standard practice for farmers to use DDT until the 1970s.
It used to be common sense that small human beings and their activities couldn’t possibly influence a large atmosphere.
When something is no longer working, or there are signs that what’s commonly understood might no longer be true, we have a choice. We can desperately cling to the norms and practices we’re familiar with, or we can re-examine our assumptions. The first is easier….for a while. Then it becomes harder to catch up.
We have to have some solid footing, some standardized approaches. From national curriculum to how much sugar we should eat, and from appropriate building codes, to how we power our vehicles - these all have norms. If they didn’t, teachers, food producers, architects, and car designers would have no way of ensuring that their work would be safe or beneficial or marketable. Conventions allow us to create a system around our practices and assumptions.
But just because something is conventional or normal, doesn’t mean it can’t and won’t and shouldn’t evolve. All of the above examples are evolving in response to things we didn’t know before, but now we do. The systems we use to educate, shop, build, and drive are all changing because we realize that the way we used to do things are no longer working as well as they might. We will have new conventions and practices in the near future. And our new conventions will also evolve into something even better or smarter in the even more distant future.
Sometimes these changes are small tweaks to the system, and sometimes they involve a wholesale transformation to a different system entirely.
Progress is rarely linear or even. It comes in waves and steps; in ourselves and in our culture and in our knowledge. Our biggest human and environmental crises often arrive at the point when we realize our conventional understanding might be wrong, but we haven’t yet embraced a ‘different way’ of thinking or operating. That tension between what we used to do or know, and realizing that we now need to do it differently is always hard, but it is this point of recognition that is the crux of authentic growth and transformation.
Too often we pretend we haven’t noticed that the conventional wisdom is no longer wise.
I am simply reminded of this quote from Maya Angelou:
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
It is in our nature to resist change, until - as Anais Nin says - “the day [comes] when the risk to remain tight in a bud [is] more painful than the risk it [takes] to blossom.”
I like that quote and esp paired with Yoda's 'do or do not, there is no try' .