The following might be apocryphal. Long ago I read that a Peace Corps volunteer spent time in a southeast Asian village. Supposedly, the women in the village swept their homes (huts?) with short-handled brooms. Seeing that the sweeping was a back-breaking effort, the volunteer taught the villagers to make and use long-handled brooms. Walla! No more stooping; no more bent and sore backs.
That no one in the village had for generations thought to invent a different kind of broom might be a lesson about what we are and what we do. Think, for example, of the 200 millennia of modern humans repeating their use of stone tools. And if we include our ancient hominin ancestors, we think of “advances” in tool form and use that identifies cultures, distinguishing, for example, between the Oldowan and the Acheulean traditions. Classification schemes like Grahame Clark’s and John Shea’s lithic modes identify “improvements” in stone tool technology that evolved over more than two million years, from Homo habilis to…well, just about every other hominin group that followed. Two and half million years of tool use and no Industrial Revolution until the eighteenth century! Humans and their ilk have long been “short-handled broom users.”
We could easily compile a list of “doing it the same way” without considering “doing it a better way.” Digging sticks instead of plows, plows without wheels and moldboards, for example, or saddles without stirrups: In hindsight some inventions seem obvious and simple, but they were, in fact, revolutionary changes. They were the longer broom handles of their time.
Of course, you’ll ask, “Is there some lesson in this?”
And, of course, I’ll respond, “Yes, there is.”
We’ve been running American cities the same way for almost a century. Has no one thought to change the broom handle?
But the lesson could extend to each of us. No doubt there’s some short-handled broom—or maybe many—in my life. You, also, have some short-handled broom to which you have become so accustomed that you don’t think about changing either its form or use. It’s time for all of us to check the broom closets of our lives.
That no one in the village had for generations thought to invent a different kind of broom might be a lesson about what we are and what we do. Think, for example, of the 200 millennia of modern humans repeating their use of stone tools. And if we include our ancient hominin ancestors, we think of “advances” in tool form and use that identifies cultures, distinguishing, for example, between the Oldowan and the Acheulean traditions. Classification schemes like Grahame Clark’s and John Shea’s lithic modes identify “improvements” in stone tool technology that evolved over more than two million years, from Homo habilis to…well, just about every other hominin group that followed. Two and half million years of tool use and no Industrial Revolution until the eighteenth century! Humans and their ilk have long been “short-handled broom users.”
We could easily compile a list of “doing it the same way” without considering “doing it a better way.” Digging sticks instead of plows, plows without wheels and moldboards, for example, or saddles without stirrups: In hindsight some inventions seem obvious and simple, but they were, in fact, revolutionary changes. They were the longer broom handles of their time.
Of course, you’ll ask, “Is there some lesson in this?”
And, of course, I’ll respond, “Yes, there is.”
We’ve been running American cities the same way for almost a century. Has no one thought to change the broom handle?
But the lesson could extend to each of us. No doubt there’s some short-handled broom—or maybe many—in my life. You, also, have some short-handled broom to which you have become so accustomed that you don’t think about changing either its form or use. It’s time for all of us to check the broom closets of our lives.
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