Monday, 16 March 2009
What does Jante Law have to do with the Inventor of the Internet?
I actually wrote this entry at 4 am when I couldn't sleep. You gotta hate those system freezes that occur for very vague reasons, or so say the logs. On to my post topic.
I was reading about Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web as we know it. Just so happens that Berners-Lee submitted his seminal paper laying out the processes by which the web would work in March of 1989, thus making March 2009 the 20 year anniversary of this technology which would go on to make such a profound change in the way we learn, buy, live and communicate.
It was while reading his bio over on the wikipedia that I noticed he is a practitioner of the Unitarian religion. Unitarian Universalists believe in complete but responsible freedom of speech, thought, belief, faith, and disposition. They believe that each person is free to search for his or her own personal truth on issues, such as the existence, nature, and meaning of life, deities, creation, and afterlife. UUs can come from any heritage, have any sexual orientation or gender identity, and hold beliefs from a variety of cultures or religions.
The wiki entry went on to say that Unitarianism and Quakers share many principals. This caught my attention because some of my descendants were quakers back in the U.S. slavery era and were active in the underground railroad which spirited away slaves from the south to freedom in the north. So naturally, I had to wiki quakers to reacquaint myself with what the quakers were all about.
Seems that Quakers are an egalitarian bunch. Quakers hold a strong sense of spiritual egalitarianism, including a belief in the spiritual equality of the sexes. From the beginning both women and men were granted equal authority to speak in meetings for worship. So I popped on over to the wiki entry for egalitarianism to refresh my understanding of this concept from a religious point of view and noticed a reference to something I had never read about before, Jante Law.
It just so happens that under political ideologies related to egalitarianism there was a reference to a concept called Jante Law. Hmm, what is this I thought, so being the curious discipulus of vita that I am, I clicked over to the wiki on this subject and found that Jante Law is a conceptual non-existant law created by the Norwegian/Danish author Aksel Sandemose in his novel A fugitive crosses his tracks for the citizens of the town wherein this novel takes place. Though Jante Law can be summed up as, "Don't think you're anyone special or that you're better than us", there are ten different rules in the law as follows:
Don't think that you are special.
Don't think that you are of the same standing as us.
Don't think that you are smarter than us.
Don't fancy yourself as being better than us.
Don't think that you know more than us.
Don't think that you are more important than us.
Don't think that you are good at anything.
Don't laugh at us.
Don't think that anyone cares about you.
Don't think that you can teach us anything.
Seems to me these folks would be lots of fun at a saturday evening bowl-a-thon or better yet they sound like a bar brawl waiting to happen. Most certainly if such a place existed it would be a psychologist's dream come true. Anyway, that's how reading about the inventor of the internet led me to learn about Jante Law.
Technorati Tags: Jante Law Tim Berners-Lee Inventor of the Internet egalitarianism unitarianism quakers
Posted by at 12:21 AM in Mike's Weekly In-Digest-Ion
