Ideas alone won’t change the world

While I must confess the fact we are presently having a festival of ideas in York led me to ponder this issue, the event itself is not my target. It’s always good to exchange views and the event appears to have adopted a fairly broad definition of the word “idea”.

So I don’t object to this initiative in the slightest; I just think it would be good to have a “festival of getting the job done” as well.

My concern is with the all-too-often prevailing prejudice which suggests that ideas, in the sense of fundamental, “pure” concepts, are far more important in human development than practical steps to put ideas into effect.

A combination of examining history and personal experience suggests to me that very often the true genius lies in putting ideas into practice rather than the original concept, but that message doesn’t seem to have got through to certain influential groups of people.

I suppose you can see why. If you’re one of society’s leaders faced with particularly knotty problems, it’s much more welcome if an adviser declares: “We just need to do this one thing and our troubles are over,” rather than: “We need a root-and-branch reform of our whole organisation, with long-term changes to training, decision-making at every level (including yours), etc, etc.”

That may explain why politicians so often love “Big Ideas” and try to impose them universally, with little consideration of negative consequences. If the genocidal follies of Stalin and Mao are the most glaring examples, we might also consider Margaret Thatcher trying to use a community charge (or poll tax) to revitalise local government, or neo-con advisers telling George W Bush the Iraqi people would welcome US occupation if it brought US-style democracy.

Winston Churchill was famously described as having ten ideas a day, but only one was good and he didn’t know which it was, thus causing vast amounts of work for aides who had to produce evidence proving the nine bad ideas weren’t practically possible before even trying to put the good one into effect.

But it’s not only politicians; private companies also tend to idealise the idea. One man told me, bitterly, how the “ideas people” in his company were deliberately insulated from any negative impacts of their inspiration, so committed were their employers to preserving the purity of their thinking. Some might wonder whether a little “real-world” feedback might have actually sharpened their ideas up a bit.

Even in the realm of technological advance the idea does not reign alone. Some of the biggest breakthroughs in the Industrial Revolution were not about basic concepts, such as the potential of steam power, but about making new machines that did the job more efficiently and effectively. Probably the most famous quote from the most famous inventor of all time, Thomas Edison, is the one about genius being “99 per cent perspiration and one per cent inspiration”.

The world of invention illustrates another weakness in the view that ideas alone are all-important; Leonardo da Vinci could come up with as many working designs for helicopters as he liked, but none would fly until all the supporting technology needed to put a machine in the air had caught up with Leonardo’s undoubted genius.

It seems to me that if the present view on ideas had prevailed thousands of years ago, then the cave dweller who observed you could keep warm if you stood near a tree which had just been struck by lightning would be much more celebrated than the one who demonstrated you could produce the same effect but in a controlled way if you rubbed two sticks together.

Mind you, I suppose it could be worse. If our current marketing and image obsessions had been in vogue back then, the plaudits would all belong to whoever came up with the snappy and evocative name of “fire”.