The parentage of invention...

Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something > Robert Heinlein

 

This rather drôle quotation made me think back to some essays I wrote in my first year of Uni, specifically about some of the apparent great leaps forward in medieval agricultural techniques. 

 

As ever the issue in historical analysis is usually whether necessity is the mother of all invention. Heinlein seemed to say “yeah”, with a bit of a yawn. 

 

At some point since Heinlein's era, there seems to me to have been a fairly subtle adjustment to the meaning of the term ‘easier’ and a further complication in our understanding of the ‘something’ needing to be addressed. 

 

Innovation in contemporary capitalist societies is often driven by a need to create additional ‘value’ or ‘augmentation’ over firm solutions. Indeed, problem solving is generally avoided, as it generates a potential profit dead end. 

 

So perhaps we have seen a switch back towards the early risers, people who spend at least half their days configuring new problems that might need fixing during the rest of their waking hours. 

 

And it does seem that the outcome of this is more like ‘peculiarly driven men trying to find more complicated ways to do something’, i.e. acquire money and status, whilst almost tangentially, adding novelty to everyone else’s lives. 

 

Novelty was not such a big thing in the lives of medieval people.