I read a thought provoking article in The New York Times yesterday (August 14th), "The Elusive Big Idea" by Neal Gabler (see the Sunday Review). Gabler points out that "Ideas just aren't what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world." They became part of the culture and made celebrities of thinkers. We don't care as much about big ideas today, he suggests. We treat "observations" as "ideas". And we rely more on "superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy" rather than "rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate". If this is true, why is it? Gabler has all kinds of ..."observations" ... about why: universities have "retreat[ed] from the real world", rewarding narrow specialization rather than "daring"; the public intellectual has been replaced by the outrageous pundit; the increasing importance of a visual culture. The most important development, though, is the vast increase in information available to us and the lack of time to process it, and much of this information is really not very useful or is only useful in the short-term. The way we communicate information is also inimical to generating ideas (or well-developed ideas, perhaps we should say) - blogs (indeed!), tweets and other means of social networking - and the speed with which one comment - observation - replaces another.
It's hard not to disagree with Gabler's main point, but I'm not sure I agree that the reasons he gives for the decline in the "big idea" are all the reasons or even the most important reasons. The problem with universities is not the specialization, but the lack of support for humanities and social sciences, as opposed to business faculties, for example, for the move away from an emphasis on thinking and analysis to the functional and the applied degree. "Thinking" really isn't supported. Gabler mentioned John Rawls as the kind of "big idea" thinker he's talking about and asks where are the Rawlses? A few years ago, when I and a colleague were "benchmarking" our law faculty against the university's expectations, we realized that Rawls would not do well under this regime because he really hadn't done very much. It was a bit of a joke, of course, and hyperbolie, but not that far-fetched. There isn't much time for people to develop sophisticated in-depth ideas if they want to satisfy tenure and promotion requirements. (And before my academic friends and colleagues take umbrage at that, this doesn't mean that other contributions aren't important, don't increase knowledge and don't "add value" to society, it just means that the system is stacked against the development of big ideas in the very place they should occur, the university.)
Taking umbrage is another reason for the lack of "daring", as Gabler phrases it. I want to be clear before making my next point that I don't believe in offending people for the sake of offending people or for being rude to each other, or for abusing the privilege of having a platform for developing ideas, and "big ideas" rarely emerge from bigotry and narrowmindedness. But I do think we need to be more open to debate, to unpopular ideas, to challenging ideas: even if they are "unacceptable", who knows what they may lead to as they are in their turn challenged?
It takes time to develop the "big idea" and we're not keen on taking time, these days, perhaps we feel we don't have time. Even if we don't develop the ideas, we don't want to take the time to think about them, we are too distracted.
And there's the next and last reason I'll mention hidden in my previous observation: it's hard to be "wrong" these days - to test a theory, to throw out an idea, to go out on a limb, to "dare". While social media and the 365/24/7 "news cycle" - better information cycle? - make it easier to disseminate at least bits and pieces of ideas, it is much harder to disseminate well-developed ideas and much, much easier to denigrate them with a glib response. And hard to keep them in circulation, as new information crowds the spectrum, and we move on to the next exciting thing - for a while.
Of course, the ideas of many of thinkers Gabler uses as examples in his article - Marx, Freud, Einstein, Rawls, Keynes, Greer and others - are not actually known by large portions of the population and even if they have become "commonplace", it is in very simplistic and sometimes distorted form. Yet it is fair to say (I think) that it was assumed that at least some portion of the population would have some familiarity with their ideas, their philosphies, their worldviews, and that they have shaped how we approach each other and society, just as at one time in some parts of the world, knowing several languages was an expected skill for certain parts of the population. It is also fair to say (I think) we don't have that expectation of an expanded middle class or anything analogous to it. We tend to be a more functional or instrumentalist-oriented society than one dedicated to the creation of "big ideas".
When it comes down to it, not many people have ever had the big ideas. The difference today is perhaps that too many of us don't have the patience to hear them and to distinguish them from observations, as Gabler says, or from the superficial chatter that fills our airwaves and social media.
