Our Worship of the New

In modern culture, we worship the new, the young, and the future. We seek out a new theory, the next fashion, or a fresh perspective. This "cult of progress" reaches deep into academia. I was a research assistant for several social science professors at a university where the pressure to publish weighed heavily upon them. To be published, you must come up with something "new" and eye-catching in your research. If your work included a paradigm-shifting idea, your chances of publication dramatically increased. Research is now conducted with the goal of being original. Interview questions are composed, phenomena described, and statistics analyzed in the hope of catching the eye of a prominent research journal.