On the origins of ideas

(against anachronism in ideas)

Where does a river begin?

The Mississippi is an incontrovertible reality. Or is it?

While the central part of the river’s course is easy to define, as we go upriver to its ‘source’, matters become complicated. At every confluence, one needs to decide which is the tributary, and which is the main river. Such decisions depend more patently on conventions: the size of the flow may prevail, or the angle at which the confluence occurs (straight over bend). Length may be another criterion. In some cases, one is stumped: at this point, the river splits into two – we have the White and the Blue Nile, both originating in lakes. The essence dissolves in a thousand contingent rivulets. Modestly, geographers will shrug their shoulders – all map-making is convention.

Ideas without a birthplace

Such pragmatic modesty tends to fail philosophers and historians of ideas. Prof. Samuel Moyn, for instance, discusses at length Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Though Moyn is more cautious than Siedentop, both implicitly endorse the view that ideas have a ‘pure’ origin – an invention that gains strength and, sooner or later, emerges in its final form. (Religion, as a subset of all possible human ideas, asserts its originality by postulating revelation. Platonic forms differ from religious ideas in that they are thought to be perceptible to the rational mind, despite being metaphysical.) In both Moyn’s reading and Siedentop’s argument, the origin of ideas is traced and ascribed to specific authors or traditions – in Siedentop’s case, to Christianity: ‘Secularism is Christianity’s gift to the world,’ he writes, ‘Europe’s noblest achievement’. (In fact, Siedentop begins by arguing for the pre-eminence of history: we should treat modern individualism as a historical product, rather than a natural fact. His ‘tradition’, however, is simply an idea through time.)

Do ideas really have authors?

Both authors argue that the emergence of liberalism can be ‘explained’, though they differ on the causal mechanisms. What unites them is the conviction that there is a ‘theory’ to be found. In the absence of a Popperian experimental test, however, a theory need only be ‘plausible’ – a beauty contest judged by the skill with which one cherry-picks supporting examples. It is – if one may say so – not unlike the parlour game of claiming descent from a famous ancestor while downplaying the contribution of all other progenitors.

Am I being unfair? Not really. Both authors implicitly treat ideas as ‘granular’ – like strands of DNA – passed down essentially unchanged from one generation to the next. Additions and modifications can be isolated and examined. But culture is not genetic – it is plastic.

That plasticity begins with reception. Although we communicate ideas, we do so symbolically – through words. And in doing so, we alter them. Reception distorts any message in fundamental ways, even if it is ‘good enough’ for practical purposes. The written word is particularly vulnerable to this, despite its clear advantages over memory.

A second source of distortion is experience. Experience changes minds. Intellectuals conversing in print may leave traces of their debates, but the mere survival of those texts is no proof that they had much impact on society at the time. My favourite example is the so-called ‘freedom-loving Swiss’ of the 13th century. They were certainly not involved in monastic conversations about individual liberty – they saw monasteries as oppressors. By then, however, they were no longer peasants, but entrepreneurs, exporting livestock, cheese, and soldiers, and importing strategically important salt. ‘Freedom’ meant something immediate and material to them – regardless of what the monks in their cloisters may have theorised.

Third, it ignores emergent phenomena – more on this below.

Unplanned outcomes in political history

Chris Wickham, writer of Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century, shows how the communal experience in Italy ‘successfully prepared Italian power structures for the cultural significance they eventually had’. The process was largely ‘unconscious’ – hence the term sleepwalking in the title – in the sense that these cities developed institutions through trial and error. Over time, workable structures emerged, not from theory, but from practice. Just as a ‘market system’ arises as exchanges intensify, a ‘political system’ may emerge as a by-product of people acting together, without deliberate design.

The absence of a central authority – a king – proved advantageous. A king, as a person, is mortal; the institution is not. That distinction was conceptually difficult to maintain – Muslims, for instance, have continued to struggle with the separation of office and office-holder. Italian city-states, by contrast, were freer to focus on structures rather than personalities, and could refine their institutions accordingly.

Christopher Clark, in his The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, offers a comparable view of the origins of the First World War. He contrasts it with the Cuban Missile Crisis, where rational actors weighed options under clear threat. In 1914, by contrast, events unfolded not through calculated decision-making, but through a blur of reactive exchanges:

It is not a question, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, of reconstructing the ratiocinations of two superpowers sifting through their options, but of understanding sustained rapid-fire interactions between executive structures with a relatively poor understanding of each other’s intentions, operating with low levels of confidence and trust (even within the respective alliances) and with high levels of hostility and paranoia.

What happens when ideas end?

The metaphor of the river is apt also at the ‘end’ of an idea’s history. The uniform structure dissipates into many sluggish channels and lagoons of the estuary, just as epigone ideas replace the genuine. In fact, the ‘monolithic’ view of the river’s course may have been a human artefact from the outset – not a natural phenomenon. Before we invented highways for cars, we transformed a river system of many passages into a straight channel to facilitate navigation and reclaim land from seasonal flooding.

‘History of ideas’ is a valuable tool for understanding how we think – both individually and collectively. But it should carefully avoid positing that the present is ‘history in the making’ – an instance of intellectual, rather than biological, teleology.

The post was first published on DeepDip.

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