Invention: Pro, Con, or Maybe

The universal test for invention is the measure of acceptance-rejection-indifference. Each invention has its own validation argument–based on experiment, faith, consensus, authority, legislation, intuition, beauty, utility and so on.

Some of the neuz are trivial or private or transitory and like gentle breezes causing no stir pass by hardly noticed. Call them the petite neuz. Others engage attention, however modestly, and become a social issue. The inventor and one other is enough–the famous folie a deux. More generally the receiving group or society divides along the measure of acceptance–pro, con, or indifferent. But before this choice we have to be alerted to the new fact, and this notification, the news of the neuz, is segmented; some of the people hear of it others not. The difference could be random but more likely it will be socially patterned. For example: systems of rapid and restricted notification of market events offer those in the know a business advantage. Any limit on knowledge and right to use invention can be a source of economic and political power. Patent and copyright rules, secrecy or blocks to access, limits on media of information assist in setting the pattern.

So an invention that would be expected to conceptually clarify the reality in and around our human condition could instead add complexity and mystification for those not in the know. The contrary experience: a new way is imposed by force and fraud. Given a free choice some of the people might prefer to not know and not accept.

Now we come back to the issue of acceptance. Invariably there is refusal, denial, rejection and suppression of a particular neuz. Each invention sets a potential front of disagreement and conflict. Historically dictatorial religious and political regimes have shown little tolerance for other tendencies: jihad, crusade, inquisition, show trials, expulsion and all that. More generally the new way threatens the old and those displaced resist. A moral principle supported by a strong consensus of a social segment can raise a fundamental concern. Freedom from torture by police against any prisoner is a recently earned right most of us would not want to give up.

Invention, as a general process we have been calling neuz, is an on-going social energetic always in play. If you find a rigid unchanging social setting you should suspect that invention has been stopped. Taboo blacks out the neuz.

Invention is socially divisive. Knowledge of the neuz can be incomplete, and deliberately so. And acceptance of the neuz is segmented as well. Invention is a social process generating constant change. It is not the only agent of change but recognition that it exists should convince us that change is as ordinary, maybe even more so, as staying the same.

The rigid social system ideal of sociology-past made the error of not recognizing the constant generation of the neuz as a standard value of personality. We invent as a natural consequence of our being. It is our way of confronting insistent reality-mystery.