Something has been bothering me for a while now, and while I usually try and steer clear of diary type entries on this thing I thought it sufficiently related to my last post to warrant mentioning. It’s basically that I often get the impression that most of the good ideas have been done already. I frequently have ideas that I think are good and then shortly afterwards I come across a book or a journal article or even an entire oeuvre in which someone has explicated that exact idea in significantly greater detail and often with deeper insight. For example, most of the themes I explore in the article here called “There’s No Point Having Money If You Don’t Know How to Spend It” are handled with much greater rigor by Clive Hamilton and Richard Dennis in Affluenza. Another moment that struck me a deep blow came a little differently. In first year I read Karl Popper’s The Myth of the Framework, which grew into my general political philosophy. In very general terms, The Myth of the Framework argues that no matter how divergent two people’s positions or paradigms may be, they can always learn and grow by having a rational, polite conversation with each other. Whether or not consensus is reached is not as important as the discussion itself. From this original idea I arrived at a whole range of other positions, all of which I thought substantial and largely original, at least in their formulation. Lately though, I’ve done and read all of Popper’s stuff, and discovered that he covered all my ideas, which is understandable given that he germinated them.
It’s quite frightful for a would-be academic when all your ideas turn out to be old ideas. Now there are two thoughts that I arrived at having deliberated this situation. The first was that the things I had lamented in the previous article on interpretation vs. inspiration in academia may very well be the result of people simply being unable to come up with a new idea of their own and thus recycling old ideas to sustain their job prospects. I’d always been suspicious that this was the case, at least in arts (though I have heard that much effort in pure mathematics goes into re-proving things that have already been proven), but this produced another piece of the jigsaw. The second, which is a bit more interesting, is that it is very difficult to decide what to do with one’s life when you feel like a lot of things have already been done. Where can you make an original contribution? Where can you make a unique and personal contribution? Obviously some people are quite happy being cogs in the machine, but what if you want to be the hand that turns the main crank? I’ve always encouraged people to define themselves and try to be unique, but that seems difficult to follow through in your work life most of the initial idea space has been filled. I suppose that is where an ability to judiciously apply current knowledge becomes important. In any case, I will have to think more on these themes in order to get at the really good stuff, but I thought the initial notion was worth posting about. I acknowledge that this is a weak post, so I will have something a bit better up in a few days.
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