There's something equally appealing and dangerous about what I've thought of, for I guess about 25 years now, as Big Ideas. Capital B capital I. It's not a great term of art, but it's my blog here.
What I mean by Big Ideas -- cause like I said, the label is not specific, I know -- are ideas that come in the form of little explanatory narratives about, in some broad sense, human nature.
They have to be something you can express quickly, even if fully articulating the ramifications of the notion takes longer. The implications of the idea have to be non-trivial, and have to leave you feeling that you understand humanity -- or an individual human you know, or human history -- much better. There's a sensawunda sometimes, like with science fiction or religion.
They have to be essentially unprovable. A model of gravity isn't a Big Idea. Even the evolution of species isn't a Big Idea. But just about everything Malcolm Gladwell publishes, for instance, is about a Big Idea. "People are motivated primarily by comfort" is a Big Idea.
Memetics, previously mentioned, is a Big Idea.
When I was a kid, futurism was all the rage. At the earliest end of my childhood you have Alvin Toffler and Hal Lindsey, for instance -- the former a writer of books like Future Shock and Third Wave that not only dwelled on the changes he believed he saw in the immediate future of post-industrial society, but popularized the idea that people and businesses who weren't prepared for the future were going to be, I don't know, forced into being janitors or some fucking thing -- the pressure to make sure your kid studies Japanese because Japan's going to be a big power or Arabic because the Middle East is a player, that style of thinking, Toffler has a lot to do with laying that particular brick; the latter (yeah, this sentence is structured all sorts of flibbety) a "the Rapture's coming, the Tribulations are gonna getcha" type writer, who helped popularize batshit 19th century eschatologies. Though without that batshit, we wouldn't have The Leftovers today, so Mr Lindsey my hat is off to you.
There's a lot of good drama owes its existence to some awful fucking notions, you know?
That's not a Big Idea.
If you weren't there, or paying attention to this especial stratum of the world wasn't your thing, I don't know if I can really get across to you how big a deal the future was. Not in the Gernsbackian Jetsons House of Tomorrow kind of way, a much more anxious kind of way. But not teen dystopias and zombie pocalypses either! Both the Toffler and Lindsey strains basically say:
Get ready for the future, be good enough for the future, or it will fucking run you over.
That's not an always idea. That's not evergreen. It just feels like it sometimes because we're still in the wake of all that. We pretty much redefined adolescence with all that shit in mind, and it'll take a while to spring back into shape. Meanwhile, some things the kids actually had to deal with that no one pointed out while they were worrying about keeping up with Japanese tech geeks: the student loan debt crisis; the ongoing reduced relative value of a college education; degree inflation; an overpopulation of young lawyers even as law school enrollment skyrockets and public universities continue to spin off law schools as guaranteed moneymakers; changes to the privacy landscape that mean drastically different consequences for both public and private behavior than their parents could have possibly foreseen and most likely still don't understand.
At the other end of my childhood you have the obsession with all things cyber, all things dot, all things com. The late 80s, early 90s, you had Omni Magazine, you had Mondo 2000, you had Wired, you had Jaron Lanier, you had virtual reality around the corner, you had that Jesus Jones video, for some reason you had Lawnmower Man, you had the just-ended Cold War and some big questions about the futures of trade, politics, international relations. Shit played out a little weird as it turns out, but in the moment, there was this obsession with the Next Big Thing (VR-goggles! grape-sized watermelons! post-Soviet capitalism!) that I don't think really died down until the Segway reveal. The internet was going to change the way we live, the way we date, the way we do business, the way we vote, it was going to make everything available to everyone, it was going to make a new generation of billionaire capitalists and fuck everybody else over, etc etc.
My childhood was bookended by different flavors of obsession with the future, is what I'm saying, periods when coming up with Big Ideas about the future was big business -- moreso than at most other points in the 20th century.
So the idea of the Big Idea has been on my radar for a long time. And a lot of them are pretty awful. They're a sugar substitute or a Jelly Belly that tastes like the fruit from the tree of knowledge but doesn't have the nutrients.
There is a Big Idea about Big Ideas, about other stuff too, which I guess goes like this: Most of the time when people are reading nonfiction, they're more invested in a compelling narrative and a satisfying feeling of understanding than they are in what they're reading being true or useful.
Most people do not fucking love science. They fucking love science theater: they love pretty photos and sensawunda.
Self-help books are the lowest form of Big Idea, for instance, a low hanging fruit that everyone understands the awfulness of. They have simplified little models of human behavior that have more in common with a roleplaying game's character creation chapter -- and not even GURPS -- than they do with the real world or a psychology text. They're the "which member of the Monkees are you?" quiz taken way too seriously. But that's what those readers want. That's a form they can digest. It leaves them feeling that they understand something or someone better, or leaves them feeling validated, and that's ultimately what they're actually looking for. Actual true shit would challenge you and offer few easy solutions, and you'd have more work on your plate after the book than before it.
Some Big Ideas I've noticed along the road:
Stupid Big Ideas in Bad Books
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel was enormously popular with college kids and engineer types for a while, and might still be for all I know. It won a Pulitzer and it's not hard to find historians who will praise it for offering an analysis of world history that refuses to entertain the idea of inherent European superiority. But Diamond is a non-historian trying to hack history by introducing a kind of environmental determinism that no one familiar with history on a more granular level can actually take seriously, unless they are an English aristocrat drinking brandy in a 19th century gentleman's club and telling stories about their last safari. Although I have argued with history profs who enjoy the fact that the book interests some kids in history -- Big Ideas bring people to the table, because there's always someone who doesn't want to do the work unless they're going to be there when we solve the fucking world -- it's not a coincidence that almost 20 years later, the book has changed nothing about the way we teach world history except that some departments now offer a course on the book itself. This is not because history departments are set in their ways -- they've gone through a hell of a lot of other changes in those two decades -- but simply because Diamond's ideas are not very good, and once you put the book down, you can't do much with them.
But people like the big explanatory narrative, and it's a form of history that doesn't require learning a lot of detail. Engineer types love it, because it's basically a history of humanity uncomplicated by the involvement of people.
Pretty much everything Malcolm Gladwell publishes, like I said, is about Big Ideas. He comes up with a cutesy explanatory narrative that sheds light on some aspect of the human condition, you read the review in the New Yorker, you go "whoaa, of course," and you either forget about it or become one of those annoying people who can never forget about it and never shuts up about it.
And none of it is very good. He takes an oversimplified narrative and peppers it with anecdotal evidence -- for which he has, no doubt, a keen eye and an adept hand -- and it never really adds up to much. But it leaves you feeling like you've learned something, the same way a jelly bean can leave you with the aftertaste of Juicy Pear.
Actually Totally Reasonable Big Ideas
Thankfully there's some real stuff out there too.
Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions isn't perfect or without its critics, but I think it remains the best framework for looking at the history of scientific work and scientific progress. Kuhn popularized the idea of "paradigms," the frames of reference and sets of assumptions that necessarily shift when sufficient anomalies accumulate to challenge them, but don't give him too much shit for how the management consulting biz ran with that ball.
Hans Kung took Kuhn's ideas and analyzed the history of Christian theology through this lens. I confess I haven't come to terms with whether I agree with all of Kung's thinking yet, but it's a valuable contribution even if some of it proves to be misleading.
Jeffrey Kottler's Compleat Therapist examines surveys of patient satisfaction and therapeutic results and, finding no significant difference in the success rates of different approaches or schools of thought, determines that it is the relationship between the patient and the therapist that has the biggest influence on therapeutic success, not the therapist's beliefs about mind, personality, behavior, etc. This may sound smaller than some of the above Big Ideas, but you can actually do something with it.
[ETA 9/14: I left out two of the biggest Totally Reasonable Big Ideas, from the perspective of this former history grad student:
Robert Wiebe's organizational hypothesis, which states that the Progressive Era -- roughly the 1880s to the 1920s -- in American history is marked by the shift in focus from regional or state identity to national identity -- not only in politics, but in labor unions, professional guilds like the national bar association, nationwide standards for professions like law/medicine/engineering/teaching, nationwide educational standards. There are many many conclusions you can draw, going on from there -- how this has impacted our politics and informs our present-day life, how it impacted our foreign policy, how American identity plays with intersectionality -- but the basic hypothesis is an incredibly important way to look at American history.
And of course, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, which I wrote my first grad school paper on, as did so many other history students.]
But all in all, I'm less interested in separating out the good Big Ideas from the bad ones, and more interested in the phenomenon of Big Ideas in general -- and the related phenomenon I keep bringing up, the junk food intellectual stimulus, the illusion of learning, the feeling of getting smarter and the way that satisfies, well, most people.
It's like slacktivism, I guess, something I wish we didn't have a word for, because once the word got popular, it sort of put a bow on the whole thing and people stopped talking about why it's a problem. If changing your Facebook status or profile photo in order to "show support" for a particular cause scratches your get-up-and-do-something-about-this itch, you're going to leave it at that. If you get enough likes or praise or pats on the back for doing nothing except kind of implying that you care, you're not going to do anything to bring about actual change, because the effort-to-reward ratio doesn't scale enough to motivate you.
So too with learning shit about stuff. If a little Gladwell at your lunch hour, a little History Channel on a Saturday night, makes you feel like you know more, it can be really hard to put that feeling aside and actually eat an apple instead of a clever apple-licious jelly bean.
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