House and revolutions

I was relaxing today before writing again (i need to write more) watching a Dr. House episode. This one was very amusing, it's about a guy that as an infection they need to find, almost any memories of himself and the ability to guess the alfa male in a room and mimic him. That leads to a series of very entertaining scenes. I imagine the point of the series is the amusement of the viewer. Given that, it was a very successful episode.

House is based on one of my favorite characters, Sherlock Holmes. It's all there, the logical method with strange unorthodox implementations of finding the criminal (disease), many times recurring to illegal/unethical actions (breaking and entering, messing with peoples lives without consent), the use of opium (Vicodin), the violin (electric guitar), Watson (Wilson), Lestrade (Cuddy), the reader and other characters (the team). For me what always made the most enduring impression was the method of collecting evidence and reflecting over the facts to arrange them in a logical result. This was obviously a product of the time, the faith in science was great those days.

I do maintain my faith in logic, even if logic as we know apparently as little to do with the strange behaviour of the universe, just look at light and quantum physics. But, of course, those also behave as predicted, so they are logical, even if strange and hard to understand.

There is one major difference though, Holmes is always publishing papers and making experiments to improve is knowledge, House don't. House is an all seeing, all powerful, mythological doctor, he only made one mistake in the series. After he made and autopsy to understand why. Holmes is not god, he even dies at some point. That's why this episode was interesting, it finished with House telling Foreman that we only change if we learn. House doesn't learn, doesn't need. He never changes.

The progress of people is measured by the degree of improvements made over time, by the degree of change. Picking up on House, by the degree of learning. That's why we must learn, not a trade, but knowledge. Learning a trade is nice, it can give you a sense of security, a way to sustain oneself and the family. Knowledge is the trade of nations, the way they can sustain themselves. Knowledge of nations is the knowledge of all people, not just a few illuminated super detectives. Fernado Pessoa, in his description of himself says that his occupation (trade) is "translator, letter writer" and vocation is "writing". One's trade is important for survival, but to achieve fulfillment one must aspire knowledge.

In Japan they also had another layer to the problem. They consider that education is the way of making better citizens. Only those who know can be part of the society in a complete manner. To this moment we have three layers of personal improvement that should be delivered by society to it's components, for the improvement of the collective. The trade, the knowledge and the education. The trade allows survival, the knowledge permits improvement and education a better society.

I'm afraid we are failing in all here, at Portugal. I know what i am talking about. I taught here and abroad, in a former USSR republic. There i meet people willing to learn, not just the way to do things, but also why to do it like that. People willing to accept all i could give them, willing to make the effort of knowledge.

I don't know Russian (yet), so i had a translator, well two really, one in the first day or two and then other. When the first quited and i was a day without any. The people i was teaching hardly spoke any English or Portuguese. The day before that, we started talking about one lab instrument they had. It was a Russian model and i had no idea in which scale the readings where and how to setup the machine. Neither did everyone else. But that day, the day without translator, they helped me, they found somewhere a Russian book on that instrument, so we sat all and tried to talk pointing, experimenting, sketching, writing formulas and sharing knowledge. Eventually we all knew how to operate the machine and read the results.

I never found that anywhere else, specially not here in Portugal. Here the only important thing is the trade. And don't tell me that survival comes first, that only after survival is achieved we can think of knowledge. We live here much better than in other places, much better than in Karl Marx. But we don't seek knowledge, they do. We just copy and repeat operations like trained monkeys.

History shows that all great empires where based on some sort of knowledge, including ours. They where only possible because those nations had more knowledge in a specific field that allowed domination, and they all perished when they neglected knowledge over wealth, luxury, religion and politics. Those are the armies of stability, or better, stability is the foundation of those. Stability is not growth, stability is not improvement. Questioning and experimenting is, revolutions in knowledge are.