We'd like to think that money wasn't a part of many things. It takes the aura out of many otherwise noteworthy events and accomplishments. I was just thinking about this last night as I was on my way home from work, where I had previously spent a couple hours working on a school project. I had lost track of time, and by the time I was ready to wrap things up it was past 9:30, and the security officer had already made her rounds to turn off most of the lights. I wondered whether the majority of accomplishments we hear about today were accomplished in the same manner in which I worked, where I simply enjoyed sitting at my desk, happily laying out circuits, or were they accomplished under the motivation of money.
As I considered the accomplishments in the past, I was convinced that things today aren't really all that new. Just as today, people do many things for money, in the field of technology, so in the past, people also did many things for money. However, just as today, there are also people who do what they like, regardless of money, so in the past, there were also people who also disregarded money when it came to what they did. Specific examples that crossed my mind included various things that ranged from the beautiful paintings by Michelangelo and the inspiring pieces composed by Bach which were sadly the products of involuntary service for patrons who sponsored them, to the mathematical theorems and formulas by Pythagoras, Newton, and Fourier, which were thought up, apparently, independently of any source of income.
Then I considered the field related to the church. Unfortunately, just as there were Spanish missionaries in Mexico, and British missionaries in the Far East, who went there, sacrificing the comfort and luxuries they had in their native countries, so there were also corruption prevalent in the church, from the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, until the present-day Mega churches, where running a church is treated in the same way as running a business.
It seemed that regardless where I looked, there was not a particular field which was truly altruistic. I could not find such a field, neither in the past, nor in the present. However, there are many people scattered in a variety of fields, whose work are not motivated by money.
There is an old Chinese saying that goes something like this: Even people who read books have to eat. This is the pragmatic Chinese humorously stating that they have to make money, even if they are educated, which was a trait considered by the Chinese culture as one belonging to a higher class of people.
As Solomon put it in Ecclesiastes, "There is nothing new under the sun." I have to agree.
When I got to this point, I wondered, how will history remember this era that I live in. Historians tend to leave the factor of money out wherever possible, which causes history, in general, to give a puzzling and illogical impression. Will this era be remembered and taught as the era in which much scientific progress was made, in many fields, which transformed the way people lived, while neglecting to also note that much of this scientific progress was made in a competitive environment in which companies strove with each other to undercut costs, to innovate, and ultimately, to provide people with yet another product which would be marketed as something indispensable in people's lives?
Of course, what historians ultimately teach will not be wrong, because there are people out there who do leave money out of the picture.
Written on June 26, 2010