The Idea: Ideas
have enormous power, since they form the frame of our understanding of
the world, inform our beliefs and drive our behaviours. Great
ideas are so profound and frame-shaking that they quickly topple many
of the things we believe, and transform our worldviews, our values and
hence our actions. We need more great ideas, and a deeper understanding
of how and when they transform our understanding, our culture, what we
do and who we are.
Last night I went to the
neighbourhood bookstore, list in hand, looking for 18 books on my "to
read" list, most of them suggested by readers, and to do some
serendipitous browsing. I went through the politics, cultural studies,
and science sections, but most of what I bought I found in the 'nature'
section. For some reason I was dissatisfied with all the new books on
political agendas and misdeeds, on Iraq, on the history of
civilization. What I was looking for was new ideas. The most promising book I bought was Bernd Heinrich's new book The Geese of Beaver Bog, which explains how geese make a living together, how their communities work.
And then it hit me. The Power of Ideas.
I've long believed that there are no new ideas out there, just new
articulations, conceptions, models, all based on what we sense and
observe, first-hand, and to a lesser extent what we learn from others.
But I've realized that our framework for understanding our world is
like an inverse pyramid -- each idea built on a simpler foundation, and
that if you can change one of the foundation
ideas in people's heads, shake the windows and rattle the walls of
their understanding, you can cause them to rebuild their entire frame
of thinking on that new foundation idea. And since that frame of
thinking informs our beliefs and cultural values, and those beliefs and
cultural values drive all human behaviours and actions, if you can
change one of those elemental, foundation ideas in people's heads you
can do anything.
The best-known case of this happening was the 'discovery' by Galileo
that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. This discovery, like
everything in science, is nothing more than an idea, a conception, a
model, a representation of the physical world, interesting and
occasionally useful. This model, this representation of reality, was so
offensive, so threatening to the centuries-engrained religious dogma of
the day that the mere act of expounding
this model as a better representation of the physical world than divine
creation would bring lifelong imprisonment or even execution. Such is
the power of ideas.
Likewise, Darwin's model of the evolution of all life so threatened the
orthodoxy of ideas that to this day, centuries later, religious
fanatics remain in denial about its validity, and try to deprive it of
its credibility by calling a 'theory' rather than 'truth'. But all
science, all philosophy, all politics and economics and religion are
just theories, alternative models of varying degrees of correlation
with what we know of reality, from which each of us can choose.
Politics is nothing more than the art of trying to persuade others that
your model, your representation of reality, is more credible than
others. Philosophy and religion are the arts of interpreting what an
accepted model of reality implies for human values and actions, for
those unable to make these connections themselves.
All of the books in my Save the World Reading List present elemental, foundational, frame-toppling ideas. For example:
- Gaia: The idea that all life on Earth is one self-aware, self-sustaining, self-balancing organism. When I first heard it I was put off by the name, and dismissed the theory
as romantic, mystical oversimplification. "You really have to be
desperate to believe to buy this stuff", I wrote to a friend who sent
me Lovelock's book. But the more I learn, the more I study, the more
evidence I see in nature, the more this model makes sense. Over the
last decade it has gradually become one of a handful of essential ideas
that underlie everything I now believe.
- Overpopulation as the root cause of all human problems.
I used to be a technophile, and I was so put off by the embarrassing
failure of Ehrlich's neo-Malthusian population doomsday scenarios for
the 1990s to emerge, that if you had told me I would come to believe
this idea I would have laughed at you. That was until I read Daniel
Quinn's Ishmael and Story of B, recommended to me by a professional colleague, David Jones in Ottawa. Now I buy this idea without reservation, and I am impatient with well-intentioned world-changers who think we can cure the disease by treating the symptoms instead of the cause.
- Civilization as a prison separating us from nature our home: A Language Older Than Words,
Derrick Jensen's polemic on human violence and the horrific
psychological damage that civilization's systemic and hierarchical
abuse of power inflicts on each one of us, desensitizing us, imprisoning us,
brutalizing us into conformity and passivity, is one of the most
depressing books ever written. But it is also brilliantly argued, and,
like the above two books, completely changed my worldview.
- Stories are all we are: Thomas Kings's book The Truth About Stories
transformed my fascination with narrative and story-telling (I
initially saw it as merely an effective way of articulating the need
and opportunity for change in business) into a veneration for the art,
and an appreciation that, as individuals, we create and live our own stories,
and our culture is nothing more than the stories we share. I now doubt
that you can effectively change anyone's mind in any meaningful way, by
replacing one of the foundational ideas on which all their beliefs and
actions are based, without telling them a good story.
The most intriguing best-sellers of the past few years, books like The Tipping Point and The Wisdom of Crowds,
also feature foundational, profound, essential ideas that change the
way we see the world. Each threatens and undermines orthodoxy: The
Tipping Point shows us that ideas propagate virally
in a way that can be used for brilliant, inexpensive marketing or
abused by propagandists, and that great ideas don't need the backing of
wealth and power to infect millions any more than pandemics need a
perfect breeding ground of ignorance, bureaucracy and poor hygiene. The
Wisdom of Crowds shows us that the best answers come from the masses, not from expensive experts, executives or consultants.
These are powerful ideas that could potentially transform the way
business is conducted and important information communicated.
Rob Paterson has just written a blog post that suggests that social
networking tools could free the people from all the world's agents,
corporations, and bureaucracies, and let us re-communitize our culture,
peer-to-peer. I'll be writing about this idea later this week,
but it's another potentially foundational, frame-shattering,
transformative idea. Here are 15 more such ideas, laid out as 'laws'. This one, by Stephen J. Gould, has become another of my foundational ideas, upon reading his book Full House: If one could rewind the tape of life
and let events play out again, the results would almost certainly
differ dramatically. Had the major extinction of the dinosaurs occurred
earlier or later, for example, or had dinosaurs never evolved,
subsequent biotas would have been wholly different, and we almost
certainly wouldn't be here to contemplate nature and meaning.
And these two are specially pertinent, because they are, like this article, ideas about ideas:
Daniel Dennett's
Law of Needy Readers: On any important topic, we tend to have a rough
idea of what we believe to be true, and when an author writes the words
we want to read, we tend to fall for it, no matter how shoddy the
arguments.
George Lakoff:
Frames trump facts. All of our concepts are organized into conceptual
structures called "frames" (which may include images and metaphors) and
all words are defined relative to those frames. Conventional frames are
pretty much fixed in the neural structures of our brains. In order for
a fact to be comprehended, it must fit the relevant frames. If the
facts contradict the frames, the frames, being fixed in the brain, will
be kept and the facts ignored.
What are the implications of all this? If we really want to change someone's mind, we need to understand not only the frame of the other person, but the foundational ideas
that underlie that frame and the way in which that person internalizes
information (how they process ideas and 'learn'). For a new profound
idea to supplant an old one, it has to get deep enough to displace
another foundational idea, and cause everything on top of it to come
crashing to the ground so it can be rebuilt in the listener's mind. If
it merely scratches the surface, the top layers, it will simply not
penetrate, not 'stick'. You can't convince a conservative that freedom
of reproductive choice for women trumps the rights of the unborn by
arguing at that high level. You have to get down to the core beliefs
and rattle them, the way the founders of civilization did thirty
millennia ago when they suggested that people could live better by
staying in one place and cultivating crops instead of hunting and
gathering; the way the founders of Christianity, Judaism and Islam did
two millennia ago when they challenged animist and pantheistic beliefs;
the way Galileo and the scientists of the middle ages did in turn; the
way the industrial revolutionists did when they suggested that since
energy and work were the same thing, maybe it made sense to have
machines do things instead of people.
I've concluded two things as a result of my own thoughts about ideas:
First, I'm going to try to put forth more foundational, profound,
essential ideas in this blog. I've always prided myself on idea transfer,
the ability to take an idea from one domain of knowledge or human
endeavor and transplant it effectively into a completely new domain
where it can take root and flourish. I don't exercise that skill nearly
enough on this blog, and I will undertake to provide more 'original'
(transplanted) ideas and fewer regurgitations of others' ideas on the
pages of How to Save the World. Secondly, I am going to start each article with one or two sentences that convey its essential idea.
Is it possible that ideas are
the elements of the much-sought-after universal taxonomy of the
blogosphere and of all human knowledge? Are ideas, and not subjects,
domains of information, the fundamental building blocks of human
thought? If so, why not index everything we write and share according
to its idea rather than its subject (now there's an idea).
We need more profound, foundational, worldview-shaking,
transformational ideas, and we need them now. But just as important, we
need better mechanisms to understand how people come to accept, and
sometimes change, the idea frameworks that inform our beliefs and
values, and hence drive our behaviours and actions. And we need to
understand what it is that causes us to supplant one idea with another,
in a way that fundamentally changes the way we see the world -- in
other words, how we learn, and why we don't.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
