The Power of Ideas

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:

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.