Origins of Creative Genius

My modest proposal took me largely by surprise. I was trying to write about ‘general creativity,’ but didn’t like any of the results. My failed efforts eventually degenerated into introspective, ironic, circular little jokes; the essay turned into a story about itself – an ‘auto-bibliography’ as I sometimes call it – that had nowhere to go.

Then I accidentally stumbled upon Seth Godin’s post, which became both encouragement and subject matter for the self-deprecating attitude I worked myself into. And a few hours later, I had produced something totally unexpected.

Such accidents are not unusual; they seem to be the source of creativity. A lot of research has focussed on this ‘chance’ element of creative success in art and science. UC Davis psychologist Dean Keith Simonton specializes in this aspect of creativity, most notably in his 1999 book, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives On Creativity. Building on the work of psychologist Donald Campbell, Simonton compares the creative process to the chance variations and natural selection of Darwinian evolution.

Simonton’s most radical claim is that the quality of creative output is directly correlated with quantity: the creators with the most successes are simply those with the highest productivity, or who make the most attempts (so they often produce far more failures as well).

Another characteristic of creative individuals is a peculiar kind of egotism. As Simonton says, characteristics like "ego-strength" and self-discipline "enable creators to exploit the strange ideas that fill their heads without allowing those ideas to take over the organization of their personality." Creative geniuses aren’t afraid of risky and untested ideas, nor are they afraid of the social embarrassment and isolation that might follow their (virtually inevitable) failure.

A perfect example of this is Frank Gehry, the great architect who designed the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, and the Experience Music Project in Seattle. I just watched the 2006 documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, made by his friend and Academy Award winning director, Sidney Pollack. (I highly recommend this movie to anyone interested in creativity.) One clip has the Guggenheim Foundation's Director, Thomas Krens, talking about Gehry’s ego, or rather, "the biggest ego in the business": "Instead of reacting negatively to criticism, he’ll basically say the reverse of what you might expect someone with a big ego to say – ‘Let’s just rip it apart and start again’ – because he knows that when he does it for the second time, he does it from a higher plane of knowledge, it’s a second opportunity to do that. Now that’s real ego."

It is perhaps because of that confidence that creative people are willing to make risky long-term investments in their original projects and ideas. In their 1995 book, Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity, psychologists Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart described creative people as "investors" who know how to "buy low and sell high": "Creators generate ideas that are like undervalued stocks (stocks with a low price-to-earnings ratio), and both the stocks and the ideas are generally rejected by the public."

To put it very succinctly, we can describe creative people as being "open to experience," and having "a disposition that includes a diversity of interests and hobbies, a preference for complexity and novelty, and a tolerance of ambiguity."

What distinguishes Simonton’s work is that he focusses on the importance of chance variations that occur in creative thought processes – those unforseen moments of ‘inspiration’ – which emerge from changing, multiform associations of ideas. One of the book’s strengths is the number of examples of this tendency Simonton provides, mainly in the form of autobiographical reports accounts by scientists like Einstein, Poincare, Helmholtz, and Darwin himself.

Another example of this characteristic is given in the one of the best moments in Sketches of Frank Gehry. Pollack was fortunate to have access to Gehry’s psychoanalyst (!), who suggested that "there's something in there, in that right brain, that allows him to take those free associations, and then make them into practical realities."

Of course, it isn't enough just to generate wild and random ideas. Creative geniuses spend years (usually about ten) gaining enough "domain-relevant knowledge and skills," to be able to recognize and capitalize on their novel ideas. To make this point in another article, Simonton quoted Louis Pasteur, who said, "chance favours the prepared mind." Another expert on creativity, Howard Gruber, has referred to this as generating a "network of enterprise."

I think it’s important (in case you’re inclined to make further reflection of this notion) not to overestimate the novelty of these ideas about "associations"; they’re among the oldest in psychology – arguably older than the field itself. (In case you see this as obvious, and you’re wondering who could be so stupid... me. And I’m a bit miffed that this stuff never came up in the three university psych courses I took.) Philosophers promoted "associationist" doctrines of mind before psychology was even a profession, and William James devoted an entire fifty-five page chapter to association in his monumental Principles of Psychology, published in 1890.

James included a brief history of the doctrine, tracing it from Thomas Hobbes through David Hume, up to James’s friend and sometime intellectual sparring partner, Shadworth Hodgson, who was the first to outline a non-atomistic theory of association (or "redintigration") in 1865 – which I’m tempted to think of as a prototype for "quantum" theories of mind.

And the Darwinian approach to association is nothing new either; the notion of natural selection was almost immediately taken up by philosophers like Herbert Spencer (who, incidentally, also coined the term "survival of the fittest") to enlighten or explain cognitive processes. James did the same; in fact he pointed out that Spencer's theory wasn't Darwinian enough. In Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, Chicago historian Robert J. Richards summarizes James’s correction of Spencer, telling us James believed that "the novel ideas produced by men of genius – and ourselves on occasion – were not due to direct adaptations," but rather "sprang up in the mind as spontaneous mental variations..."

Simonton also cites Sarnoff Mednick’s "remote association theory." Simonton says that creative geniuses use "flat associative hierarchies," which he has explained elsewhere as meaning "that for any given stimulus, the creative person has many associations available, all with roughly the equal possibilities of retrieval." This is opposed to the "steep associative hierarchies" of less creative people, in which ideas are more likely to associate with a smaller selection of similar and familiar ideas.

We can find something much like this concept in Hodgson’s work as well. Although from Hodgson we get perhaps a better account of uncreative thought processes: "people who have few or weak interests are decided predominantly in their redintigrations [or associations] by habit; those who have many or powerful interests have redintigrations of more variety and more apparent originality. Interest is the source of what is called character... interests, if at once few and powerful, have a tendency to coincide with habit, for then they both run in the same groove; it becomes a habit to feel certain interests; and the same series of redintigrations revolves day after day, unless the objects of presentation are usually new and various, as for instance in travelling."

Of course, Hodgson and James weren’t talking about "creativity" as we know it today, because the concept was still being formed in their time. Through most of history, creation has been viewed as an act of God. Our notion of the "creative person" is a product of five hundred years of humanizing and democratizing progress (which, I believe, is still in the making): inspired by great artists, writers, and designers; enabled by new technologies, from the printing press to the web; validated by scientific discoveries, notably those in the young field of psychology, not to mention Charles Darwin; facilitated by changes in politics and the emergence of global commerce; and articulated by philosophers from Descartes, Locke, Smith, Kant, and whoever has the courage to tackle these complex and ambiguous notions today.

The world I see now is one in which all of these factors – art, science, technology, commerce, and civics – have become closely integrated, almost unified in some aspects, like communications. The one that seems the most absent now is philosophy. Perhaps this is because philosophy is par excellence the domain which progresses on the backs and in the minds of creative geniuses – autonomous iconoclasts, multi-disciplinary adventurers, and unconventional risk-takers – while our age is structured to promote safe, conventional, normal, and methodical productivity, even when it’s framed and sold as "creativity."

The web, obviously, is a major cause of this; that’s the focus, or "head," where the different faces of creativity are increasingly fused together. The web is a civic domain because it has very quickly become part of the infrastructure of our everyday lives; the web is a scientific domain because it is still in a process of discovery, it’s still evolving through experimental trial and error; the web is an artistic domain because it is created and designed by people; and the web is a commercial domain because corporate organizations seem to be the most effective means of managing these diverse elements.

Despite all of the criticism thrown at large corporations for being slow and stodgy, commercial enterprise in general has an astonishing ability to adapt and grow. Every year, thousands of entrepreneurial startups – think of them as "chance variations" – come into the world, becoming either "selected" to thrive or reabsorbed back into the raw material from which new associations may emerge.

Some of the most successful companies, such as Google (itself a chance variation not too long ago), "recreate" this evolutionary process on a smaller scale within themselves, encouraging employees to suggest original ideas, which are then either selected (or more often, not) by objective tests and trials. (Stanford’s Robert Sutton is one of the best researchers and writers on this kind of organizational creativity. See his recent blog post on 'rewarding failure,' which cites Simonton’s Origins of Genius.)

And with professional schools in business, design, and engineering adapting to this new general-creative attitude, even in just the past decade, our appreciation for how to motivate, manage, and reward creative work has improved greatly. Business people are learning to "think like designers" and more creative-minded people are pursuing careers that were formerly in the traditional domain of business.

But is all of this draining the creativeness out of "creativity"? What are the implications for genuinely unconventional and autonomous creators? How might deeply creative people distinguish themselves, when so many others claim and aspire to be creative, aping the rhetoric and manner of creativity as a way to conform with the current attitude of business, making such notions quite conventional and unoriginal?

Art, science, commerce, and civics have become so regulated and methodical that there is little space for genuine creativity to stretch out and thrive in original ways. The one domain that remains open is, oddly, philosophy: the one that's also the most "absent" (remember what Sternberg said about creative people "buying low and selling high"). I’m not talking about professional philosophy, but philosophy in the sense of living through an open-ended love of learning. I usually call this "creative generalism," "general creativity," "radical creativity," "radical generalism," or whatever I feel like at the time. The name doesn't really matter, as long as I don't fall in love with it and lose sight of the important thing, which is to keep learning, creating, developing, growing... It may not bring any immediate material or social rewards, but who’s asking for them?

Combined progress in other domains has generated a breathtaking supply of material for organizing original "networks of enterprise," through which to generate radically new associations and insights. Meanwhile, the emerging technologies – like the web – that are largely responsible for proliferating the supply of information (and increasing its overall complexity), also provide the tools for reorganizing it more creatively and effectively.

I think that very soon someone will figure out how to put it all together, creating a whole new way of looking at life, to understand it intuitively, and to develop a "new common sense." All this will require is a love of adventure, and a willingness to work hard and invest over the long term. I can’t prove it yet; it’s just a feeling I have...

Education and Creation for 'Web 3.0'

Back before the bubble-bust of 2000, there was a guy at my university -- let's call him Gordie -- who tried convincing a couple of my business student friends that the future of the web would be less about e-commerce and more about entertainment.

Our business friends didn't buy the argument. They insisted rather that the increasing productivity and diminishing costs provided by e-commerce would something something something something... I don't know, I'm not an economist, and I wasn't in class when their professor taught them to say that.

Gordie didn't really disagree with what the business students said; what he was trying to tell them was that the real importance of e-commerce was behind the scenes (automating processes, managing information and transactions, etc), and the efficiencies created by e-commerce would make it possible for new, previously unimagined activities to emerge and flourish.

Gordie saw that the web possessed a new kind of character -- new strengths, new opportunities -- that would make it possible (or inevitable) to invent and engage in radically new ways of working and living. Combined with the fact that it was becoming much easier and more affordable to do things like make your own music and movies at home, well, who was really to say what kinds of web-driven entertainment people might be enjoying in, say, 2007.

But the business students still didn't get it. In fact, they seemed to think that Gordie was being a bit ridiculous: "You don't understand how it works. Higher productivity and a declining cost of doing business leads to lower prices which leads to higher sales which generates more revenue and a higher stock value which means to more capital to invest in productivity and efficiency which leads to..."

By then everyone was just getting frustrated. It was apparent that they weren't having a real discussion. Gordie didn't possess the sophisticated technical grasp of second-year economics necessary to signal to his business friends that he understood and agreed with them; and his business friends didn't have the creatively pessimistic, 'open conceptual' attitude necessary to see Gordie's dream-like vision -- perhaps their professors hadn't taught them how to "think outside the box" yet.

It wouldn't have made a difference anyways. In a few months the stock market crashed and reassured Gordie that his insights were pretty good (unlike his mutual funds) --
maybe he was better as a philosopher than as a business man.

But that's all in the past now. A new wave of entrepreneurs and investors understands that doing business on the web is about providing new forms of value that wouldn't be possible offline, using information and interactivity to provide a richer user experience.

(I know everybody knows all this, but bear with me; I'm building up to something else.)

The great value of the web is not just that it helps us organize information, activities, and content, but that it organizes those things in a way that becomes a whole new form of entertainment, an end-in-itself -- as in, "the medium is the message."

But now some people talk as if there may now be a 'Bubble 2.0.' I've had some concerns about this myself, but I don't think that these 'bubbles' are merely stock market phenomena: the Web 2.0 bubble has more to do with ambiguous commodities like knowledge and attention. The overvaluations this time are not being made by businesspeople and investors, but consumers and users.

I think that we can observe users making the same general mistake that businesspeople made before 2000: they are going online simply because it's something new, and because they can; and because so many of their peers are going online (in 2000 it was e-commerce, in 2007 it's social networking), people feel compelled to be online -- though they may not understand why.

Of course, skeptics might be surprised to find that once they get over their initial hesitation, most people really do enjoy online social networking, and there really is something to gain (not to mention the opportunity cost they would have had to pay by putting it off); and before they realize it, they're reconnecting with old forgotten friends, meeting new people, and sharing information they would have otherwise not known.

But here's where I'm going to make the same controversial argument that Gordie made in 2000:

The real value of social networking software is that it automates and organizes many of the 'behind the scenes' elements of life. People who use this as a starting place from which to seek and develop new kinds of activity will thrive; users who think it's merely enough to do online what may just as easily be done offline (chatting and gossiping about news and events, sending pictures...) will go bankrupt. Bankrupt?!

I don't mean financially bankrupt; I mean bankrupt in terms of those more ambiguous commodities, like attention and expertise -- social capital and knowledge capital.

That probably seems counterintuitive: "aren't sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn all about increasing social capital?" Yes but, like the capital in stock markets, it has a kind of virtual value: you can't just go out and spend it, and it depends on the value other people believe it may have -- based on its potential to grow and give more value in return -- which makes it subject to market forces beyond anyone's control.

To illustrate, say that MySpace's Tom Anderson is worth a million dollars in stock (I'm sure it's quite a bit more than that). If investors lose faith in the potential for his company to grow and add value to their portfolio, if they sell and invest their money elsewhere, then the real value of all of his stock might drop dramatically -- as we saw happen to a few web gazillionaires back in 2000.

Now I see that (as of the time of writing) Tom also has 203,647,567 friends on MySpace: that's a lot of 'social capital' -- on paper. But if users begin to invest their time and attention elsewhere, if they lose faith in MySpace's (or Facebook's, or LinkedIn's, or Twitter's...) ability to add real value to their social lives (they don't have to do it skeptically or intelligently either, something better might just come along), then all of that social capital could be destroyed very quickly, leaving Tom with hundreds of thousands of worthless 'friends,' or rather, a bunch of unupdaded profiles containing out-of-date information -- which, in the information age, could be worse than worthless.

The continued success of these social networking sites depends on a continuing (and preferably, an increasing) stream of attention, which means providing a continuous stream of new experiences, interactions, and information for users. There are roughly two ways for social networking sites to get this: from users themselves, and by providing new ways of interacting and using information.

For this to continue generating growth, I think both users and providers will have to become more knowledgeable and sophisticated. We need to learn to approach our online activities as investments -- towards more effective, creative, generative kinds of activity -- or else the time and attention we spend online (both as users and providers) will simply be lost in the past, with nothing concretely gained to show for it.

The mistake back in 2000 was to conceive the web in limited terms of commerce by consumers. By now we've learned to think in terms of experience by users. But now that isn't enough either. To continue growing we need to conceive the web in terms of education by creators.

It's difficult to say what this will really look like seven years from now. We can hardly begin to imagine what tools and capacities will become available. Almost any guess is pretty good at this point. The only mistake would be to believe we really know.

Like Gordie's business friends from seven years ago, what we know about the web now is what prevents us from seeing the web of the future.

Jacques Barzun and the Use of History

There are a few reasons I find it difficult to write about Jacques Barzun. The first reason is that he is something like my imaginary mentor and critic. When I write, I continually ask myself, "What would Barzun say about this?" Writing about him seems to double the pressure: now he isn’t just reading over my shoulder, I have to actually look at him while I write – watching as he picks up on every questionable wording or phrase. (What would Barzun say about "wording"? What would he say about these parenthesized sentences?)

The second reason is that there are so many aspects of Jacques Barzun’s work, as a writer, historian, critic, and teacher, that there’s no good place to begin. Or rather, there are too many good places to begin: so many of his own statements are perfect introductory hooks or organizing themes – statements about the best way to write and compose ideas.

Such a device seems a bit gimmicky, but may be especially necessary when trying to represent Barzun because his work is about active truth-seeking, not absolute truth; he is the consummate pragmatist; he never promoted many identifiable ideas – unless you count the practice of continually challenging and reforming ideas. The most succinct phrase we could use to summarize his position might be "a reader of history does not read a history... he reads history," or perhaps "writing means rewriting." His active, non-reductive approach – along with a productive breadth that makes it impossible for anyone to fairly assess all of his work – poses a challenge to anyone who attempts a summary.

Actually, once you’ve engaged and understood Barzun’s attitude, it seems quite simple. The difficulty comes much earlier; the biggest obstacle before understanding any notion of pragmatism – or any pragmatic idea – is getting the sense of why we should care. People don’t just question the content of pragmatic claims, they tend to question why anyone would be inclined ask such questions or make such claims at all.

I had to overcome this obstacle myself, more than once. I tried reading John Dewey when I was in university, but he just seemed to prattle on about things that everybody already knew. The truth was that I unconsciously skimmed over the parts that didn’t make sense, or that weren't immediately interesting (which was most of it), assuming that it was mere padding for the few statements I already found congenial. I preferred Nietzsche instead, with his more bombastic style. Only after following the Nietzschean threads to their ungenerative ends did I return to Dewey – along with William James and Charles S. Peirce – to discover that the pragmatists handled the same general notions in a more sensible, concrete, and perhaps even more radical way. It was only after I looked into every other conceivable ideology, finding them all inadequate and flawed, that I realized why the pragmatists made such a fuss over such seemingly obvious concepts.

Now it’s difficult to produce a clear general statement or description of pragmatism without contradiction. That’s why I’m beginning to practice philosophy and history as one discipline rather than two. In Barzun’s words: "The very weakness of history, its uncertainty and inability to put things into neat bundles, is its great advantage over ready-made systems. It’s difficulties force the student’s gaze to discern in each event and person its unique character," because "no one idea, no one explanation, is omnicompetent."

Counter to this attitude, some people need to believe that life can be defined by an absolute, static framework. For such people, certainty isn’t just an abstract possibility, it seems to be an immanent reality with which they are firmly in touch. Being in contact with such certainty allows them to take it for granted and get down to the business of doing, building, conquering, winning. This Napoleonic drive has obvious advantages in terms of cultural evolution. People who are able to put doubt aside (or who never had any doubt to begin with) might make a lot of mistakes, but in the overall run of things, they are more likely to leave behind a legacy than those who never make any attempts. [See my more recent post about Dean Keith Simonton's work on creativity.]

On the other side of the spectrum, there are people who can’t help doubting and criticizing everything – people who can’t help noticing things from multiple perspectives – considering a larger range of factors and effects, who are naturally disinclined to take anything for granted. This type of person finds it almost impossible to commit to any form of certainty, and thus find it difficult to commit to any specific course of action. They would rather continue speculating and searching for new possibilities, in the hope that some unforseen event might provide the insight needed to make sense of things and guide them on their way.

This Hamlet-like disposition has obvious short-term disadvantages in the sphere of cultural evolution. These people might have a more thorough understanding of life, but their lack of production and concrete accomplishment means they will leave little behind to be remembered by – which means no foundation and few landmarks to help guide future doubters and seekers. In contrast, Napoleons leave behind territory and fortunes, so their descendants (or overthrowers) can simply step right into their shoes and continue to build on the same foundation. But each generation of Hamlets has to find their own way; their forerunners leave nothing behind: to leave behind something concrete would have meant being certain, which would have meant being wrong.

It's important to note that the vast majority of people could probably go either way. However, without any directly compelling reason or reward for adopting the pragmatic, open attitude, the closed, Napoleonic attitude is over-represented among people's working attitudes and assumptions. Our institutions and conventions are a manifestation of this advantage; and they in turn perpetuate the conditions through which Napoleonic confidence and false certainty flourish.

But people with the Hamlet predisposition continue to be born, and continue to struggle to create pockets of creative openness in the system. I am unquestionably on the Hamlet end of the spectrum. (That is one of the few things I’ll claim with any confidence.) This is why I find Jacques Barzun to be such an important source of encouragement, insight, and disciplinary guidance.

Until a few days ago, I took the common interpretation of Hamlet for granted: "he thinks too much." Then I re-read Barzun’s personal essay, "Toward a Fateful Serenity." In it, Barzun claims that reading Hamlet actually reinvigorated and comforted him through the "emotional darkness" of his youth in First World War France. For him, as it is for me now, Hamlet is not a warning against the dangers of thinking too much, but a heroic demonstration of the value of intelligence – "in warding off menaces from all sides." In Harold Bloom’s word’s, "Hamlet thinks not too much but too well... His tragedy is not the tragedy of thought, but the Nietzschean tragedy of truth." Barzun distills from this an important lesson:

"In any age, life confronts all but the most obtuse with a set of impossible demands: it is an action to be performed without rehearsal or respite; it is a confused spectacle to be sorted out and charted; it is a mystery, not indeed to be solved, but to be restated according to some vision, however imperfect."

I feel like I live in a different world from everyone else. My world consists of ideas – or at least I recognize the world is made malleable by ideas; we can make sense of life through thinking – whereas most people obstinately refuse to recognize this. I feel like I’m watching one of those ridiculous staged wrestling matches, when the referee becomes distracted and misses the real action – the flagrant cheating happening behind his back – because he’s too occupied with some technical infraction. Like the rules of professional wrestling, our moral and ideological rules are frequently overlooked and abused, and are seldom very clear to begin with.

Life is too massive to see or grasp in its entirety; in order to remain aware of the general action, we need general ideas. But life doesn’t just play out in a spatial ring, it also occurs over time – it changes – so our general ideas must actively develop and grow; ideas are not to be taken as settled facts. To concern ourselves with this or that particular idea, which we mistake as an established truth, is like becoming distracted in one corner by some technicality, thus losing sight of the most important action – and our ability to influence it. My aim is to help people recognize the ongoing spectacle of ideas that I see so clearly – an intercourse that has the potential for more effective and meaningfully modes of living.

It might seem kind of arrogant for me to say that people need my help in this; but it's perhaps more accurately a backhanded way of asking for help. I need some support in this. Besides, it’s absurdly difficult to persuade people simply to turn around and look!

Some people seem to resent my intentions; they assume I'm just a kid who "thinks too much." But here is the frustrating paradox of the thinking life. Like anything else, the more you think, the better at it you should become; but unlike other activities (that are more easily quantified), good thinking can only be recognized by more good thinking. Nevertheless, people tend to make up for impoverished thinking by fortifying it with false esteem; the quality of one’s ideas seems to be inversely proportional with one’s devotion to them. While I resolve to think even more, the other side resolves to think less, and the farther apart we become.

But it isn’t just that I see something – call it Xyz – that they don’t. There’s an active process of discovery, consideration, doubt, and verification. First I see Xyz; then when they tell me that they don’t see it, I question my initial vision: "If others don’t see it, then maybe it isn’t really there." So I look from a different perspective. But Xyz is still there – and they still fail to see it. So I move over to their perspective, trying to see what they see (or rather, don’t see). From there, I find the obstacle in front of them: "Abc is in the way. Xyz is behind that. You need to look around the corner." But they don’t accept this explanation: "How dare you tell me that Abc obstructs my vision! Abc is not in the way; on the contrary, Abc is the whole truth. Look for yourself, do you see anything else besides Abc? Don’t talk to me about Xyz anymore. Your problem is you think too much, your imagination conjures up things that don’t exist."

Not only does thinking help people see things like the hypothetical Xyz, thinking is Xyz: its value is hidden behind obstacles (conventions, assumptions, material aims, emotional attachments) that people just aren’t inclined to look past. (I don’t mean to deny the value of material aims and emotional attachments; I only want to illustrate that other things are a part of that landscape as well, and these things are best mapped and articulated through intellect.)

This is to reframe the paradox of thinking life: the reason to look around corners is itself what is hidden around the corner; nobody bothers to look unless they already know what’s there, but without looking, they assume that nothing is there at all, and since they already believe they know what’s there (nothing), why bother looking? You might argue that my demonstration is a gross oversimplification – that there’s no way anyone could be so stupid – but people are so stupid, that’s what is so frustrating. (Stupidity in this sense is not a lack of brains but a refusal to use the brains one has.)

And this is how "thinking too much" has come to be considered a fault. Even people who recognize obstacles as obstacles refuse to look past them: at least by not looking, they can plea ignorance when something goes wrong. Plea ignorance to whom? To themselves: it helps maintain a clear conscience – "I couldn’t have done anything about that. I didn't know; I couldn't see it coming..." – though it doesn’t necessarily help make life any better, or living any more effective. It’s self-consignment to a mere spectator role, which is the least of its faults. The greater loss is social: it enables and encourages everyone else to be just as ignorant and ineffective, which seems to work fine until something changes, or until something goes wrong...

I will grant that looking around conceptual and ideological corners is not such an easy thing to do. It is literally disorienting. We take for granted our intuitive ability to maintain a sense of physical orientation as we move; it doesn’t disturb us that physical objects seem to change their size, shape, and position as we move in three dimensions. We can walk out the front door towards a tree that quickly appears larger as we approach; it was once a speck and yet soon looms over us. Then as we climb an adjacent hill, looking back we see the same tree now below, and our house has become the speck, minutely visible through the upper foliage of the tree. Our original perspective has reversed, and it makes us wonder, but it doesn’t frighten or confuse. Cognitive scientists and computer programmers alike will tell you that the cognitive processes behind the apparent simplicity are really far from simple.

With ideas it is different. The mind’s eye doesn’t have the same kind of hard-wired apparatus to maintain a coherent orientation as it moves around the ideological landscape. If people stray too far from their home position, they can’t make sense of all the new views and vistas; as if continually have to ask, "Is that tree still the same tree that I saw from my front door? Is that house still the same house as the one I just left?" Of course ideas are still the same, no matter how their apparent size, shape, and position seems to change; but our problem is that we tend to identify and situate ideas in absolute terms – we know our ideas as having a definite size, shape, and position – so when these terms change, even slightly, they become unfamiliar, they actually do become different in the limited sense by which we know them. Unless we are properly educated (probably from childhood) to 'move around' our ideological landscape and maintain relative appreciations of ideas, the burden of working out all of these changes and variations tends to be too great; the confusion of multiple changing perspectives forces people to stay at home, making up reasons not to venture out: "I don't need to venture out; I can see the truth perfectly from here. People who move around [think] too much only lose sight of it, becoming confused relativists."

But we seem to be approaching a whole new phase of cultural evolution. Before now, there has been little need to venture away from one’s ideological birthplace; that’s changing, because the landscape is changing: new vistas come to us. It has already become a cliché in business to talk about the importance of openness, empathy, professional adaptability, and personal growth. These aren’t just idealistic platitudes coming from humanist psychologists and romantic poets; these "soft" notions are promoted by hard-headed commonsense executives; the effectiveness of these ideas is demonstrated by rigorous, quantitative research. Ignore these recommendations at your own risk; in this age of global mobility and communications, total integration, and proliferating diversity – not to mention efficiency, capacity, and speed – no corner is safe from disruption.

So where do we look for guidance? How do we learn to make effective decisions in a complex ideological landscape? How do we overcome doubt in order to act? Fortunately, intelligent people have been asking (and answering) these questions for thousands of years – including characters like Socrates and Hamlet, and historians like Jacques Barzun, who remind us that "experience is neither fixed nor finished; it grows as we make it by our restless search for truth," which isn’t something to lament or condemn, but "should only strengthen tolerance and lessen our pretensions."

Sources:

• Of Human Freedom (1939; revised ed. 1976)
• Clio and the Doctors (1974)
• From Dawn to Decadence (2000)
• "Toward a Fateful Serenity," in A Jacques Barzun Reader (Michael Murray ed., 2002)
• Barzun & Graff The Modern Researcher (1977; 5th ed. 1992)
• Harold Bloom, Hamlet (from the Major Literary Characters series, 1990)

... and a small selection of further reading:

• Science: The Glorious Entertainment (1964)
• Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers (1975)
• A Stroll with William James (1983)
• The Culture We Deserve (1989)
• Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (1991)

... but first see:

• An interview with Barzun here, including some short but representative passages from his work.
• A blog dedicated to Barzun's upcoming 100th birthday, with links.