Big Ideas

July 25, 2004 9:54 AM

Big Ideas."Eating, sleeping, procreating, laughing - and trying to create a world in which we can do these things unmolested - have all been far greater drivers of human ingenuity than time machines or battery-operated scooters." - "We may no longer hold high hopes of the state, but if the study of individuals reminds us of our common humanity and prompts us to reassess the merits of the collective, let’s welcome it."
posted by MintSauce (3 comments total)

I tried to read through this one because the summary said something I strongly disagree with ("The future lies with the individual, not with the collective.") but after a couple of paragraphs I ended up skimming it. I hope the rest aren't so blathering and unfocused.
posted by wobh at 10:53 AM on July 25, 2004

it wants me to give it money before it'll let me read it.
posted by hob at 1:10 PM on July 25, 2004

"The future is the individual"... ah, how clever. As though all of western thought hadn't (appeared to) boil down to that for 3000 years.

"We may no longer hold high hopes of the state, but if the study of individuals reminds us of our common humanity and prompts us to reassess the merits of the collective, let’s welcome it." This reminds me of a less-popular aphorism from Nietzsche that I can never remember the source of -- it goes something like this:

"The abnormal man grows boring very quickly. Those who truly wish to gain insight will study the normal man."

... and the NORMAL man is a fundamentally social animal. Considering a human in isolation from other humans is quite a bit like considering a bouncing ball with no solid surface to bounce off of: Even in isolation, we invent other humans to "talk" to (can we say 'internal monologue'?).

To think of the "individual as the future" in that light seems, then, kind of quaint. Until you remember that this fundamental sociableness occurs in a monadic being. We communicate with one another only (at least, as far as I'm willing to accept) through fairly narrow channels that don't really permit us to communicate subtle things like actual emotions; they only permit us to communicate lossily-compressed versions of these things, as language or scent or posture or facial expression or tone of voice: These are not thoughts. They are signales. They stand in for thought, and they can be faked, and they can be misunderstood.

To say something like "we understand individuals better than we understand groups", and reason from there that we ought then to just concentrate on the individuals, is criminally silly. To the extent that we understand one to the exclusion of the other -- individuals, to the exclusion of groups, or vice-versa -- we do not understand either.

So, in at least that case, these aren't "big" ideas -- rather, they're deficient ideas.
posted by lodurr at 2:49 PM on July 25, 2004