Several years ago when I was really knee deep in Hegal, the notion that extremists are necessary for–or at least intriniscally part of– social/cultural progress began to solidify in my mind. Meaning, it takes all kinds.

In any sphere where real progress or evolution has taken place, it has been the result of a dialectic between extremes, the moderates in the middle are typically just the unwitting recipients of the progress achieved by extremists. It pains me to say such things in today’s enviornment, but the truth is that we will eventually move on to some sort of (hopefully, better off) stasis somewhere between the world envisioned by the nutjobs who crafted the Patriot Act and the world envisioned by Islamic Fundamentalists.

What’s also painful is that reaching this dialectic is so insanely slow. For example, we’re still arguing about gay marriage. Decades from now gay marriage will not be an issue and history will lump those who opposed it in the same backwoods, hillbilly chapter as those who argued in favor of slavery or those who argued that women shouldn’t have the right to vote.

Two announcements today gave rise to my voicing of this. The first is that the US Navy has abandoned using ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) Communications. A while back whales started turning up dead on beaches because the Navy was making pudding out of their nervous systems with ELF. At first it was just the loony Greenpeace types who were freaking out over this and many people ignored the problem and wished these extremists would just get a life. Today, we moved closer to an agreeable stasis. It seems like a moderate position now, but to support this position years’ ago would have taken serious cojones or at least not being afraid of looking like a nutjob extremist.

Also, and on a slightly different note, General Mills is switching to all whole-grain in their cereals. This means a just-slightly lower risk of getting diabetes from eating Lucky Charms. It’s a good thing. But could you imagine positing to GM 20 years ago that refined grains could be a life threatening ingredient. No, you would have had to have been an extremist to do that.

[UPDATED]
Two things:
1.) With a blazing streak of serendipity, I just read that the House voted down the Gay Marriage Ban as I was writing the above entry.
2.) As I was corresponding with a colleague of mine after I wrote the above piece, I realized that I too have extremist tendencies. In a few days we’ll be putting MySQL on the State of Rhode Island’s mainframe computer. Would that have happened without me? Maybe. Would it be happening before 2010 without me? Not likely.