Here is something that no one has ever heard, ever. . .ever: “As soon as I put this hot poker in my ass, I’m going to chop my dick off.” Do you know why you never heard that? Right! No one ever said that! Which to me is a more amazing thing, no one ever thought to say that before tonight. I’m the first person in the world to put those words together in that particular order. – George Carlin
Sometimes I wonder how big the universe of original ideas really is. It does not seem inconceivable that someday the sum total of all the individual thought bubbles of every human being who has ever lived will fill most of, if not all of, that universe. How many truly novel thoughts can be triggered by the whisperings of the Muses, falling upon the ears of the roughly 100 billion human beings who have ever existed? Let's start with a look at movies.
The trend over the past decade or so seems to be to
Moviemakers are not the only victims of these creative lapses. The television networks weathered the storm of the 2007-08 WGA Writers' Strike by relying even more heavily on a barrage of unscripted—and uninteresting—reality television shows. Newspapers and magazines push the same tired narratives, oblivious to their dwindling circulations as they scurry about, busily fitting their square pegs into round holes. Internet surfers hoping to find a famous scene from one of their favorite movies on YouTube will quickly find themselves wading through pages of posers dutifully re-enacting the scene.
The political sphere is no stranger to a lack of truly innovative ideas. The hottest and most contentious pieces of legislation in the current Congress are, in large part, a series of visits from the Ghost of Policy Past. The infamous health care reform bill is based on broad principles of universal health insurance tracing back to Bismarck’s German Empire in the 1880s. Such principles have been lurking in the United States at least since their inclusion in the 1912 platform of Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party; strong pushes for universal health care were made in the late 1940s, the 1970s, and the early 1990s. Even the “socialized medicine” label used to attack universal health care dates back to the 1920s in an obvious attempt to stir up the resentments fostered during the then-recent Red Scare. The much-vilified Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill to fight climate change and curb growing carbon emissions relies on ideas first fleshed out in the late 1960s. The Employee Free Choice Act, an effort to empower workers by making it more difficult for employers to delay or otherwise impede unionization, seeks to restore the so-called Joy Silk Doctrine, which dominated between 1949 and 1966.
Even physics suffers from a stifling lack of fresh ideas. Thinkers on the edge of the field have been chasing the same dragon since 1968. While the prudent scientist would be wise to put wax in his ears and affix himself firmly to the mast of falsifiability, these pioneers have allowed themselves to be lured by the sweet siren song of superstrings onto the rocks of not-even-wrongery. Some of the ideas they have employed along the way are quite old indeed. Competitors to string theory, like loop quantum gravity, do exist but they have been less successful both at assimilating large numbers of university faculty members and at soaking into the popular consciousness.
I don’t mean to give the impression that I object to revisiting existing ideas. These sorts of reevaluation can help weaken the intellectual constraints of path dependence, the simple yet profound fact that where we go from here often depends on how we got here. Certainly the fact that expanded access to health care is a very old policy idea does not mean it should not (finally) be implemented in the United States. Despite my affection for Tim Burton’s two Batman films—but not the two atrocious sequels—I believe that the reboots, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, are simply much, much better. But this whole trend is becoming more than a mere dalliance with the ideas of yesteryear. I don’t know if a surge in movie remakes of ‘70s and ‘80s television series indicates a growing laziness spreading through the creative class or whether the wells of inspiration are starting to dry up.
Historically, all suggestions that the horizons of some corner of human knowledge or experience were finally within reach proved incorrect: the horizons always continued to retreat and the illusion quickly dissolved. Books like The End of Science and The End of History seem premature even if they do raise good questions about how far we can go as scientists or as capitalist democrats (or as artists or writers, for that matter). When do our homages and artful adherence to archetypes become the pseudo-plagiaristic fumblings of mentally exhausted thinkers? I recognize that there is a give-and-take that must occur with the existing body of creative works--this post is probably 85% references to other things! But will we eventually reach a point where we just run of steam? Where every thought we have, every piece of writing we produce, every story we tell has, in essence, already been done by somebody else? Or, in South Park shorthand, "Simpsons Did It!"
The development of writing over six millenia ago ensured that, barring sloppy record-keeping, ideas, once thought, would never disappear. And so the stories, the poems, the philosophies of generation after generation piled up, never so fast as over the last century. The vast amount of material makes it impossible to be familiar with anything but a sliver of the total body of work of humanity, though tools like Google and Wikipedia make it marginally easier. Who hasn't suffered the disappointment of finding that an original insight or idea he's had is already in the books somewhere?* It may be that at some point in the future (perhaps not too far off) everything that can be thought will have been thought, at least under the paradigms that currently provide conceptual guidance to us. Maybe when that day comes it will be time to tear it all down and start again.
*I once found, tucked away in the original paper on the topic, what I thought was a potentially wonderful physical insight I'd had --the author had beat me to it by about thirty-five years.
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