Have you had any good ideas lately? Maybe not a big one, but how about a small little gem? What is an idea, anyway? How is an idea any different from a whim, a guess or just another boring opinion?
Aren’t you amazed how ideas have shaped our world way beyond just our physical sphere and biological limitations? Ideas are the energy source of humanity. Just think about that. What we want to know is, where do ideas come from? How are they created and how do they get all their power?
Ideas have shaped our civilizations and all of our life’s circumstances, from having electricity to understanding gravity and infinity and to all of our troubling politics. Even religion and science started out as somebody’s ideas. Am I not right about that?
Somebody once had an idea about what to do with fire. Somebody else sat around looking at his environs and figured out his life would go much smoother with a round object we now call a wheel. Even Edison and Einstein would have been impressed. An idea doesn’t have to be a physical invention. It could be a concept or a theory or a plan.
The birth of ideas
Maybe it’s not love that makes the world go around after all — maybe it’s ideas. They are the generator of our future and the foundation of our here and now. But we don’t seem to know much about how ideas are manufactured or hatched or make light bulbs light up in our heads — or whatever they do.
I don’t think we give lessons in school about how to make ideas or what to do with them when we have them. (Maybe I was absent from school that day.)
The word “idea” comes from the ancient Greek language for “form” or “pattern” or “to see.” Ideas are certainly the product of thinking and our capacity to create and comprehend. It’s probably true that the study of philosophy is really the study of ideas.
What’s you definition of “idea?” Webster’s Dictionary says an idea is “a plan, a purpose or a goal.” Other formal definitions say an idea can be a design (plan for action) or a standard of perfection (an ideal.) But other definitions have it that an idea can be “an indefinite or uninformed concept.” Go figure.
Did you just think of some of your recent ideas? We bet you can remember your bad ideas easier than you can any good ones. Like, how is it ever a good idea to answer your phone from an “unknown caller?” Trying a new recipe for dinner guests: how many times was that ever a good idea? Blind dates? We’ll let you keep your own score on that one.
Some historically bad ideas we can think of include The Titanic, Disco era leisure suits for men, New Coke and bungee jumping. Do you think marriage is a good or bad idea? (We’ll let you keep your answer to yourself.)
But we’re more interested in the world’s big ideas and not just our personal ponderings.
Socrates and Plato were the first to put ideas in the realm of the metaphysical, a discipline and study that scholars and philosophers still follow today. But even before their time, the Buddha said: “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”
So how does that work?
Some philosophers believe in “innate ideas,” that all humans are born with a set of basic beliefs that come from a god or supernatural force. But there are other great philosophers who believe we were all born with a “blank slate” (tabula rasa) and can only gain ideas from experiences. Which do you believe?
Either way, an idea is worthless until it is shared or put to action like the Golden Rule, the right to vote, highway speed limits or Einstein’s theory of relativity. Our world is full of infinite ideas. And not all of them are considered virtuous or good. The Bible is full of very good ideas but it also includes some evil ideas from the Devil himself.
Even before Biblical times, one of the foundational purposes of civilizations or organized societies (even primitive tribes) was to establish a forum for sharing ideas and sorting out the good ones from the bad ones. Often a ruler, religious leader, a chief or a king’s court would judge all ideas by a “thumb’s up” or a “thumb’s down.” Ideas that might upset the rule of law or the status quo could get someone’s head cut off in those early times.
When Copernicus wrote down his idea that the Sun was the center of the universe and not the Earth it got him in lots of trouble and his disciple Galileo was put under house arrest for the final decades of his life by the Catholic Pope. Plenty of religious and radical thinkers like Joan of Arc, Martin Luther, Voltaire, Charles Darwin and many others were branded as heretics, persecuted and even burned at the stake.
Marketplace of Ideas
In more modern times, a concept called the “marketplace of ideas” has been adopted. Such a forum has supported “open town squares” where free speech and an independent press now thrive in more open and democratic countries. (For an opposite view of a marketplace of ideas, read George Orwell’s novel, “1984.”)
In his strenuous U.S. Supreme Court dissent in 1919, Oliver Wendell Holmes argued for a “free trade in ideas” which was later endorsed by subsequent court decisions about free speech and the rights of dissidents.
From our nation’s very beginning, our U.S. Constitution empowered Congress to make laws to promote science and the arts and created a United States Patent Office to protect inventions, trademarks, copyrights and intellectual property.
And you thought coming up with an original idea was a simple proposition, huh? Well, sometimes it is, if all you want to do is a little brainstorming, or just play with your own imagination. Who among us has not shared a silent bragging moment with ourselves when we fixed a problem with a bent paperclip, some duct tape or baling wire? Not exactly world-changing but these kinds of ideas are the very best because they are free.
The world of politics is probably the most fertile and fraught territory for ideas to propagate. Isn’t politics just a bunch of competing ideas? Freedom or feudalism? Free speech or censorship? One vote, one man? Majority rule or a monarch? Liberty or death? Anything that ends with –ism is a political idea, isn’t it? Anarchism, communism, populism, nationalism, fascism, socialism, libertarianism and so many others are examples that we can quickly list. Maybe someone else wants to add Trumpism or Bidenomics, but we won’t.
Moving forward
What are the coolest and newest ideas you’ve heard of? Surely, there must be some news making or history making ideas that are beginning to define this 21st century.
The COVID-19 pandemic got everything off to a very slow start after the first two decades of the 2000’s of continued international strife, terrorism plots, a Great Recession and the United States’ neck-jerking changeover from an Obama presidency to a Trump ascendancy into what he called a “carnage of America.”
Along the way, we’ve advanced such new ideas as self-driving cars, electronic cigarettes, bitcoin, ZOOM video conferencing, 3-D printing and home appliances that can spy on us. All that, plus the rapid development on all fronts of Artificial Intelligence.
By the sounds of all this, does it seem to you like we’re running out of really good ideas while we’ve been chasing only the ideas that make money or consolidate corporate and big government power?
Geez.
— Rollie Atkinson
9-6-2024
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The following comment was submitted to me by Rev. Bob Jones of Guerneville. I am sharing it with other readers here:
I don’t feel you go as far as you might on this subject. I think ideas arise from needs, from feelings, from experiences, from problems, from all that is part of being a creature of the cosmos. They don’t just pop into our heads on their own, though it may seem like that. And they find form in language of some kind, and so they are part and parcel of evolving traditions about whatever they are about. Years ago, I read that humans are about 90% motivated by feelings and 10% by thought. Even that puts it crassly, I think, for thinking is a mixture of a universe of inner and outer phenomena that hardly anyone hardly understands. Furthermore, the big ideas arise from group-mind over decades or centuries it seems to me, including one of your examples, marriage. By the time humans got to solemnizing and following commandments about marriage, there were several millennia of experience. Sadly, you are right to mention the possibility of bad ideas. The long evolving process has not been foolproof. I read years ago how people in the Caribbean had the idea that a canoe should have a huge mast in the middle of it, a mast so heavy it caused the boat to tip over and sink. A lot of good people were lost at sea before that idea was abandoned. So we’re capable of harboring ideas that are directly opposed to our best interests. I might put the idea of the internet in that category and lets not mention AI.