The Foam and What Benefits People: Ideas Pushing Back in Society
Societies do not change by decree but through a long contention among customs, ideas and groups. What remains in the end is not the loudest but the most beneficial.
Editorial board
The doctor who told his colleagues to wash their hands
At the Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s, the maternity department had two wards. In the ward staffed by doctors and students, puerperal fever was killing mothers at more than twice the rate of the midwives’ ward, until women begged to be admitted to the other one.
A young Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed what others had not. In 1847 his friend the physician Jakob Kolletschka was cut by a scalpel during an autopsy and died with symptoms resembling the mothers’. Semmelweis concluded that doctors were carrying “cadaverous particles” on their hands from the dissecting room to the delivery room.
In mid-May 1847 he required doctors to wash their hands in a chlorine solution. The death rate, which had been 18.3% that April, fell to 2.2% in June and 1.2% in July.
But senior physicians mocked him, and some resented the suggestion that gentlemen doctors’ hands could be unclean. The medical world turned against him, and he died in 1865 in a mental asylum at the age of forty-seven. A few years later the work of Pasteur and Lister proved him right, and handwashing became one of the basics of medicine.
The foam of ridicule rose for a while and then was gone; what benefits people remained on the earth.
Source: Semmelweis, “The Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever” (1861); Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The Quran gives truth and falsehood a parable from nature: a torrent comes down from the sky and carries on its surface a swelling foam; then the foam is gone and the water remains.
﴿فَأَمَّا الزَّبَدُ فَيَذْهَبُ جُفَاءً ۖ وَأَمَّا مَا يَنْفَعُ النَّاسَ فَيَمْكُثُ فِي الْأَرْضِ﴾[الرعد: 17]
“As for the foam, it goes away as scum; and as for what benefits people, it remains on the earth.” (Al-Raʿd 13:17)
The parable holds two observations that matter to anyone who studies society. The first is that the foam is “swelling”, high and visible: falsehood may, in its moment, be louder and more widespread. The second is that the criterion of survival is benefit, not bare truth and not strength. This is a rule of contention among ideas: an idea that solves no real problem for people goes away however loud it is, and a beneficial idea remains even if it is slow to appear.
Ibn Khaldun: the vanquished imitate the victor
Ibn Khaldun observed in his Muqaddimah that “the vanquished are always fond of imitating the victor in his emblems, dress, creed and all his other conditions and customs”. He explained that the soul believes perfection lies in whoever has overcome it, and so imagines that the victor’s dominance came from his customs rather than his solidarity and strength. This is a remarkably precise observation about social contention: military or economic defeat becomes cultural defeat when the vanquished confuse the causes of strength with its symptoms.
Malek Bennabi developed this observation in “The Conditions of Renaissance” when he spoke of “colonisability”. For him colonialism does not succeed by its strength alone, but through an inner readiness in the colonised society that precedes it and prepares its way. In both cases the conclusion is the same: social contention begins inside before it appears outside, as the verse states: “God does not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves” (Al-Raʿd 13:11).
Challenge and response
In the twentieth century the British historian Arnold Toynbee, in “A Study of History”, explained the rise of civilisations by “challenge and response”: a group rises when it faces a challenge harsh enough to rouse it but not so crushing that it paralyses it. This meets the logic of pushing back at an important point: the absence of challenge does not produce lasting prosperity but stagnation. A society that is not pushed does not move.
Toynbee’s theory, however, drew wide criticism from historians, because the idea of the “right challenge” is so elastic that the theory explains everything after the fact and predicts nothing before it. This is a warning we should apply to ourselves: the law of pushing back becomes knowledge only if we can say in advance when contention will produce reform and when it will produce corruption.
Pushing back in digital space
Contemporary society is living through a contention of ideas with no precedent in history for its speed. Here the parable of the foam becomes more urgent, because platform algorithms reward what grabs attention, and attention is not benefit. The foam may be higher today than in any age, and we do not yet know whether the rule that “what benefits people remains” works at the same speed. This is an open question to which we have no answer, and we welcome research on it in future issues, with numbers rather than impressions.
In sum
Social contention is the slowest and deepest of the fields. Its instruments are persuasion and example, not arms, and its outcome does not appear within a single generation. A society that wants to leave the condition of the vanquished cannot be content with rejecting the victor’s customs or imitating them; it has to understand the real causes of strength and build them within itself.