A brief history of reinvention

I pretty much grew up within the grand echoing halls of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. I loved riding on (then) brand new contraptions, like moving sidewalks, through halls touting the revolutionary benefits of things like plastic and rubber. The rubber exhibit came complete with a mini-recreation of a rainforest, and its promise of unlimited utilization of the earth’s abundant resources on behalf of progress.

Until the Enlightenment (think Martin Luther, Napoleon, liberation of the Jews from the medieval Ghettos and the eclipse of divine authority by rational thinking) the message of inevitable forward movement was everywhere. Whatever problems we hadn’t solved yet would soon succumb before the superior powers of the men in white lab coats.

When we were kids, we didn’t need a fancy word like “reinvention” because we were so busy just plain inventing things. Our parents’ “greatest” generation, were all about protecting a way of life. They didn’t question the norms of what it meant to be a success. Whatever it was, the mainstream just wanted more of it.

Conservative by nature, their creativity, diligence and ambition took place inside the box. They didn’t feel they needed to worry about things like racism, sexism, or the environment because they were personally in this robust moment of apparent abundance. Utopia for all (if ever and when they thought beyond their own wants and needs) was just a matter of time and progress.

By the time we vibrant women were teenagers, we knew that the Enlightenment was gasping its last breaths. Progress had given us rubber tires for jumbo-jets, yes, but it also gave us AIDS and the destruction of the rain forests. When we “dropped” out in the 60′s and 70′s, we weren’t just rebelling against our parents. We were questioning the societal, environmental and personal costs that came hand-in-hand with the very way of life our parents had worked so hard to provide for us.

Unlike the Beatnik movement, whose creativity was fueled by a critical howl against the status quo, the Hippie movement was the first serious modern attempt at reinvention. Women’s liberation on a grand scale was not just a protest against nor the call for more of anything old: it was something brand new. Racial equality, gay rights, the simplicity and green movements: these were not inventions. These were reinventions: taking the machine apart and then putting the pieces together in new, revolutionary ways.

Today, you rarely hear the word “progress” any more and it is all everywhere, appropriately, rather about reinvention. Don’t get me wrong. We who grew up in the grand halls of the Museum of Science and Industry still have our optimism intact: the belief that we can solve our problems. But we no longer believe we will achieve Utopia by doing more of what worked in the past: protecting a way of life that was based on both adulation of and illusions about rational thinking. Global warming, coupled with the Great Recession and the technology revolution, have pulled the lynch pins out of the last bits of the machine representing the world we thought we were born into.

We are now definitively in a new era: one that our generation foresaw in the 60′s and have been incubating for forty years. Welcome to the dawning of the Age of Reinvention.