Lots of my friends have opinions about the change in baseball rules. I see it as both inevitable and a good sign for the future of all of us. Maybe I join some of you in questioning the value of some of the changes, but I celebrate our willingness to experiment. Changing the rules, in government and society as much in sports, is what we do. It is who we are, one of our most basic attributes. We experiment until we get is right—for the moment.
Evidence for this? New archaeological finds from ancient civilizations suggests that games have always played an important role in human societies, in leadership choice, stabilizing rituals and religious expression. And the lessons and habits developed in sport and art have very likely influenced how we managed to survive in a constantly changing world, making creative adaptations to new circumstances in all areas of life.
Graeber and Wengrow suggest in The Dawn of Everything, that making clay figures for children’s play may have even preceded, and perhaps led to, utilitarian uses of pottery. And experience with adopting and changing rules for games or rituals could well have led to, or accompanied, adaptative change in political and social structures.
This by the way is not just an interesting sidenote. It is about the nature of the human. It is about our immediate future. If we are truly such a rule changing as well as a rule making being, then we have our work cut out for us in this century. And we just may be successful.
Many today are lamenting our seeming imprisonment in economic, social and political structures, a containment that can only get worse as Artificial Intelligence take over more of our lives. We made the rules and we can change the rules. In the rich and long years of human thriving on this planet, we have never been at the mercy of circumstances, nor for very long rigid in our thinking, nor adverse to experimentation and change.