Whether as genius creator or merely glorious vessel for inspiration, it’s natural to long to be the person possessed by a big new thought. Our world is shaped by big ideas like the internet, wheels, sliced bread, contraception and Jesus. But what actually is an idea and are we right to care so much about new ones?
In what is possibly my most adored piece of writing, Tom Stoppard gently floats the description of genius as the ability to open a door before there is a house. He also gently punctures this idea but I think it remains the best expression of what we like to think genius is. The genius as innovator, the mind that thinks the unthinkable or the unthought. However, as Stoppard also gently suggests (Arcadia is a play that beguiles by refusing to take sides) ideas, like people, are only truly great in context.
Buying Twitter now was clearly not a great idea. The social network has become the monstrous painting in humanity’s attic but there was a time when inventing a micro blogging platform was a big and brilliant idea. That point though was not in 1953 when Ray Bradbury wrote his short story “The Murderer” about a man who destroys mobile communication equipment because…
When it wasn't music, it was interoffice communications, and my horror chamber of a radio wristwatch on which my friends and my wife phoned every five minutes. What is there about such 'conveniences' that makes them so temptingly convenient? The average man thinks, Here I am, time on my hands, and there on my wrist is a wrist telephone, so why not just buzz old Joe up, eh? 'Hello, hello!' I love my friends, my wife, humanity, very much, but when one minute my wife calls to say, 'Where are you now, dear?' and a friend calls and says, 'Got the best off-color joke to tell you. Seems there was a guy-' And a stranger calls and cries out, 'This is the Find-Fax Poll. What gum are you chewing at this very instant?'
Bradbury not only opens the door before the house is built, he peers inside, calls the decor ugly and the inhabitants unhinged. In Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury also invents AirPods “in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios”, though he was beaten to this innovation by Cyrano de Bergerac (the real one not the fictional guy with the nose) who in 1650 envisaged ear “pendants” attached to…
“a Strange and Wonderful Book, that had neither Leaves nor Letters: In fine, it was a Book made wholly for the Ears, and not the Eyes … so that you never want the Company of all the great Men, living and Dead, who entertain you with Living Voices.”
In 1835 Vladimir Odoevsky, known as the Russian Faust, wrote about the year 4338 in which each household would publish a daily journal with news updates for their friends and there was…
“a magnetic telegraph system connecting the houses of people who know each other which allows for unplanned communications. People who live miles apart can use it to speak to each other”
The history of fiction is littered with thinkers who saw innovation far ahead of their day but what links them all is that, unlike Elon Musk, none of them owned stock options. Truly innovative thinking is often less useful than it seems.
Years ago an arrogant drunk cornered my friends and I in a pub garden proudly pitching a pair of fool-proof financial schemes, a shop selling Cornish pasties “like in train stations but not in train stations” and “the internet shopping experience but for real” which, as we pointed out, is just a shop. Whilst his cast iron belief in the originality of these ideas still makes me laugh, he was closer to something useful than Cyrano De Bergerac. Musk did not invent the wheel or electricity. He didn’t even invent the electric car, yet Tesla is currently valued around $600 billion.
Forget good or bad, what are ideas and how do we have them? Inspiration by divine muse feels humble, even whilst making the inspiree some conduit for Greater Powers. It also feels true to the process of having ideas which often is best done by getting yourself out of your own way, not by thinking but by being open to thoughts. The reality of thinking though is that it is the process of forming connections. Ideas do not come from outside. Ideas are built. Innovation is the unexpected connection between existing ideas. We place importance on the surprise, on the new, but too much newness is just as redundant as too little. Not that I am against originality. Our innate bias towards innovation has dressed our species in glory, or at least in clothes. Our ceaseless desire for newness is the intellectual expression of evolution. Whatever you hold to be true, whatever you are thinking, never let it stay still. All must mutate, metamorphose, become new. The bias we must tackle is not originality but greatness.
We wilfully misrepresent evolution by imagining it as some natural process of perfecting. Evolution is just change. Inevitably we are the product of changes that worked, so it’s easy to see our traits as being “selected” or even “designed”, as if becoming the creatures we are now was the point of change rather than its biproduct. Evolution does not build toward a master race, there is no finished thing just more things that will finish.
I don’t discount Great Individuals, the Queens and Presidents whose lives scar the course of history. But whilst the world would be different without Musk, or Trump, Putin or Elizabeth II, it wouldn’t be unrecognisable. Great people have impact because we let them, because they excite us and we encourage them. The same is true of ideas.
Big ideas are glamorous but distracting. Politics is full of them. A good hour scrolling and trolling delivers a dopamine hit that’ll keep you ticking for days. You’ve not done anything and yet your inaction still feels aligned to a purpose. Tackling climate change isn’t a big idea. It’s a series of very boring ordinary ideas that feel underwhelmingly less than enough. There’s no dopamine in not flying, or driving less or not eating meat. That’s part of what drives people to throw soup at paintings and glue themselves to roads. The efficacy of these actions is not important, that this happens at all is a consequence of our collective inability to get interested in the dull well worn thoughts that will actually save us.
However you think society is best organised, when it comes to your own skull, cultivate a Marxism of the mind. Your most impactful ideas may be the big original ones but chase these and you’ll never catch them. Your most important ideas, your most useful ideas, are all quite ordinary. Definitely not new many are even obvious or, I hate to say, clichés, like breathing or lust. But once you nurture your ordinary ideas, innovation happens by itself. It’s just changing the way the mundanity fits together. The 7 Samurai but in space. Bread but already cut up. Telephones but everywhere. A best selling book but a movie. Batman but this time the same. Jesus but throwing soup at a painting. Van Gough but with a better reason to attack his work than just the utter despair of no one else liking it because it was an idea that came far too soon.
On Saturday 26th November I’m running “HOW TO HAVE AN IDEA”, a half day taster for my 9 week screenwriting course which returns in January. Information here.