Has your Rolodex disappeared from your desk?
Mine sits -- unused -- back near the wall. It hasn’t been disturbed for years, probably since I retired. That was not before word processors and computers, but way short of the laptop, the tablet and the smartphone.
Now and then a list of stuff out of the past, now artifacts for museums, can be found on one’s email, an offering from a friend of spends time surfing for such profundities. Such lists can reach from here to there. Such things as washers with ringers, rotary phones, curb feelers. Those just popped into mind; that short list may just prove the point that technology is easy to appreciate, but customs and behaviors shouldn’t be forgot either.
Manners and how to interact with others of the community have undergone real change. Perhaps those intangibles are more important than whether you have updated your phone and family plan with T-Mobile or whatever.
Hasn’t there been a nearly endless chain of improvement in things since someone somewhere sometime found that a wheel could move loads? (Did the same genius invent the axle?)
Invention has undoubtedly made the human condition easier. Yet some real things that cannot be noted by one of the senses but can be felt by emotions must be more important, for they cannot have changed greatly over the eons. Philosophy, an intangible of great utility, and similarly mathematics cannot be touched yet are fodder for grey matter. They have existed for millennia. Granted, they have evolved and have been refined and are still evolving to some degree, but basically their roots remain vigorous. Technology depends upon basics as well: fulcrum, inclined plane, screw. Those are similar to intangibles because they were ideas before becoming rudimentary machines.
Philosophy equalled science in ancient Greece. Now, even the engineer, chemist, physicist with the top academic degree is a Doctor of Philosophy.
Things and ideas. Ideas and things. Which came first?
The intangible is the thing.
Abstract. Concrete. They go together.
Early man (maybe a female) had to think through the sharpening of a stick to help loosen soil to plant a whatever. First the need had to be seen, then gauging a sturdy stick to withstand digging the dirt followed. It could have happened no other way, granting that that talented person of that prehistoric period could have stumbled onto such a method. Thought, however, was needed just to recognize and continue using it.
The abstract must have come first.
What kind of employee or boss is most valuable to the entrepreneur? He or she who thinks. He or she may also use his or her hands to type or build a model, but thought precedes words on paper, and the clay, wood or metal mockup. Generally, the person who designs the truck is paid more than the one driving it.
Creative thought is key to enterprise, whether for profit or the common good.
Not too long ago a salesman, a beautician, a reporter, an executive revolved the loaded Rolodex to find the phone number, address or some bit of information about a client or a vendor. Before the entry was made, its value was calculated, its place in the alphabet was ascertained, the information was condensed. Today one clicks or taps on the computer screen or thumbs the apps on a phone and gets the same type of information. The need for the information, its selection and gathering all require thought --- abstract activity. Only the equipment has changed.
Similarly behavior has changed through the ages. Brutishness gave way to cooperation to manners to foppishness to courtesy to polite society. Some commentators would proclaim society has begun to see much selfishness and unconcern or others, a lack of civility, a downward path back to brutishness.
A few old bucks still hold door for ladies, and a few ladies will favorably comment on that behavior. How often has a youth been seen doing that, or stepping aside for an elder?
Some thoughtfulness regarding civility could bring a better public square. But that is an abstraction.
We all need what can be felt and that which can only be visualized.
How to save that thought?
