It doesn’t get here before it does

When our daughter was two years old, she encouraged my husband to listen for a sound she heard outside her bedroom window.  He listened for a moment, and then told her that he could not hear it.  Our daughter rolled her eyes and said “Daddy, sounds don’t get here before they do.”  We’ve recounted this wisdom many times.  Knowledge and understanding just don’t get here before they do.

In science, they say scientific discovery advances one funeral at a time.  Naturally, new research building on old research makes sense, but it also points to how long it takes to appreciate a revolutionary shift in our cemented views.  We can look back to see major shifts that were rejected when they were first presented, that seem inconceivable to refute now.

In 1633 Galileo was tried by the Inquisition for proposing a theory that the earth rotated on its own axis around the sun, rather than the sun around the earth.  For this discovery, Galileo was locked up in a tower and forced to recant, in order to be released.  Isaac Newton, who was born on the day of Galileo’s death in 1642, used Galileo’s work to develop his own theory of a universe that worked through physical forces and without divine intervention.  Newton’s work was accepted and eventually so was Galileo’s work which opened the way to new vistas in science, religion and intellectual and cultural history.  In 1992, three-hundred and fifty years after his funeral, Galileo was exonerated by the Church for his ‘heresy’.

Despite increasing scientific research in the 1940s and 1950s affirming their value in saving lives, car companies fought hard against installing seat-belts in cars.  They generated negative consumer response by highlighting the increased expense that they would be passing along.  Other arguments put forth against seatbelts suggested that they could cause internal injuries, that they prevented easy escapes from cars submerged in water, and that they frequently failed.  All were disputed by researchers, but opposition remained fierce.  Some opponents argued the decision to use a seatbelt should be personal rather than legal, or that having a safety device made riskier driving more appealing.  Surprising, the debate lasted decades with the Canadian provinces and territories adopting seat-belt laws over a fourteen year period starting in 1976.  It’s hard to imagine not strapping your child into a car seat, let alone, into a seatbelt.  Science prevailed but only after many funerals.

And the most inconceivable today is the notion that disinfecting hands to prevent spread of disease was a foreign concept until 1846, when a young Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis started a job at the General Hospital in Vienna, where many women in their maternity wards were dying from puerperal fever.  The ward presided over by all male doctors and medical students had three times the mortality rate of the ward which was staffed by female midwives.  Since the difference between the doctors’ ward and the midwives’ ward was that the doctors were doing autopsies and the midwives weren’t, Semmelweis hypothesized that cadaverous particles were being transferred to the women during childbirth.  Semmelweis ordered the medical staff to clean their hands and instruments with a chlorine solution and the rate of childbed fever fell dramatically.  Since the scientific community had not yet discovered germs, they didn’t believe there was significant science behind Semmelweis’ theory.  And the doctors were upset because Semmelweis’ hypothesis made it look like they were the ones giving puerperal fever to the women.  Eventually the doctors gave up the chlorine hand-washing, Semmelweis was dismissed from his job, was ridiculed for his theory, and died in an insane asylum.  Semmelweis’s practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, and he was vindicated in 1881 when Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease, as it offered a theoretical explanation for Semmelweis’ findings.

Whether it messes with our belief systems, our bank accounts, or forces us to admit mistakes, our first instinct is to reject radical new ideas.  This worldwide pandemic has shaken humanity by its shoulders and called us to wake up.  Our treatment of the elderly, of animals and working and playing in close proximity, will be challenged.  Many who propose radical change will be ridiculed and vilified.  Let’s hope it doesn’t take too many funerals to bring about the change we need to live in harmony with this earth and each other.