Dave Pollard's essays and reviews of literature, the arts, and science.

trust your instincts

< £ Salon Bloggers & >

	January 4, 2006

Blinded by Science: What's Your Dangerous Idea? Each year, the Edge Foundation asks its members a challenging question, and posts the answers. A couple of years ago, the question "What is Your Law?" provoked some memorable principles and ideas that have since spread. So when I learned, thanks to bloggers Jeremy Heigh and Carroll McNeill, that the 2006 question was "What is Your Dangerous Idea?" I immediately pored through the 12 long pages of ideas proffered by 107 of Edge's invitation-only luminary members, mostly from the sciences and academia (the site is closed to comments from non-members), looking for danger. I was stunned by the blandness of the responses and the utter disconnectedness of respondents from the critical issues of our world today. From the social scientists, who are overwhelmingly from the so-called 'cognitive sciences', we get navel-gazing speculations on consciousness that are neither dangerous nor useful. From the technologists we get technophilia, muddle-headed blather about technology as religion and as the saver of the universe, dangerous only its naivety. From the real scientists we get shopworn retreads about the compatibility or incompatibility of science and religion. From philosophers we get starry-eyed dreaming about a new political order, a world where people suddenly stop behaving the way they do and start behaving responsibly. What planet do these people live on? Only four of the 107 ideas, in my opinion, are vaguely dangerous: Howard Gardner, a Harvard psychology professor, dares to think that "the pessimists [who warn of our apparent willingness to destroy the world] may be right" and that we may be destined "to follow Sisyphus, not Pandora". Richard Dawkins says it's time to stop looking for causes of problems and perpetrators to blame, and accept that we can't change who we are. Andy Clark, a University of Edinburgh philosophy professor, goes further, suggesting that what we do is driven by our unconscious, the "quick-thinking zombies inside us", and our conscious thought is all after-thought to rationalize what we've already decided. Clay Shirky tells us that, if we ever had it in the first place, "free will is going away", and we need to decide what kind of economic and political systems we need in a world where free will is absent. As for the rest, no dangerous ideas here, folks, please move along. Perhaps if Edge proprietor John Brockman could get past the idea that his beloved "Third Culture", the blending of elite intellectuals from both the scientific and literary world, doesn't need the collective intelligence of the great unwashed rest of the world to inform, provoke, qualify, amplify and act on its ideas, and, as Einstein expounded and exemplified, to keep us all self-critical and humble, Edge might stand a chance of once again becoming relevant to the real world. In the meantime, the most dangerous idea that emerges from this self-referential group is the propensity of elites to groupthink and to exaggerate their own awareness, knowledge, importance, power, authority, and relevance. I'm not usually one to criticize without offering some alternatives, so here are ten really dangerous ideas, none of them mine: Our civilization is in its final century [John Gray]. No civilization lasts forever, and there is no political, economic, social, educational, religious or other 'solution' that will make the members of any civilization suddenly and radically change their behaviour. We do what we must do, and nature will do what she must to compensate for our excesses, and, since... Nature always bats last [Kenny Ausubel], the world will go on just fine after we are gone. The crowd is always wiser than the experts [James Surowieki]. No elite, no godlike president or junta, no priest or CEO, no crack team of managers or consultants or global thought leaders can make better decisions, or predict the future better, than all of us together in our collective wisdom. Leadership of all kinds is a dysfunctional vestige of an era in which that collective wisdom could not readily be tapped. The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred [George Bernard Shaw]. If you really think that anybody really understands what another person has said, do an experiment after the next presentation you attend and ask attendees one-on-one immediately afterwards what they got out of it. You'll be astonished. You never change things by fighting the existing reality [Bucky Fuller]. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Show, don't tell [Derrick Jensen]. This is a key answer to the malaise of our education system, and to the ineffectiveness of 'knowledge management'. We learn much more from observing than from listening or reading, and we learn even more by trying it ourselves, hands on. Human beings will be happier only when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again [Kurt Vonnegut]. The way we live today isn't the way human beings were meant to live, and deep inside we know it. That doesn't mean throwing away technology, it means interacting with those in your community (human and non-human) in deep, authentic, synaesthetic ways we have forgotten. People will listen when they're ready to listen and not before [Daniel Quinn]. Probably, once upon a time, you weren't ready to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them. Don't preach. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new. No one is in control. This is two dangerous ideas in one, though I'm not sure if anyone has realized this explicitly. The first idea is that because no one is in control, the appearance of control that governments and corporations and their handmaidens in the media try to convey is all illusion: This world is far too complex for even the most powerful and complicitous elite to be able to steer or direct. That is the liberating idea: Don't worry about fighting the 'bad guys', because they're just caught up in the flow like all the rest of us. The second idea is that because no one is in control, everything is out of control. That is the terrifying, personal responsibility-burdening idea: No one can stop global warming, biochemical warfare, [your worst nightmare scenario here]. So now what do you do? Why are these ten ideas 'dangerous'? Because they threaten deeply-entrenched ideas and strongly-held, widely-held beliefs. Because those who they threaten will do almost anything to prevent them becoming widely accepted. And because they're actionable. Take them as your own and they will change what you think, believe and do. What's your dangerous idea? Photo: Thomas Dolby 3:54:24 PM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2006 Dave Pollard. Last update: 10/02/2006; 4:16:36 PM.