Please go and have a dangerous idea
I like dangerous ideas. But why do I get the feeling that somehow just writing that sentence already courts danger? And to think I was once told by a man “…but you only write” as he seemingly puzzled over why I could do other things like walk, talk, and think. It must have been a dangerous idea to him that writing necessarily involved thinking. But then again, multi-tasking was never one of the highlights of being male so he has probably not tried it.
But what is a dangerous idea? Dangerous to whom?
Every age has its own established set of beliefs, whether economic, social, political or religious. But always, there would be people who would dare ask why certain things are so and offer explanations other than something being simply “miraculous.” The people who took this rational route usually found out (often too late) that they had a very high acceptance of and resignation to being imprisoned in dungeons, for being barbequed in front of a crowd or for being banished without iPods to the hinterlands. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon, himself a friar, became very curious on what made a rainbow and with water, demonstrated how rainbows could be formed. This terribly annoyed the religious institution which maintained that a rainbow was a miracle. End of discussion. For this curiosity over how rainbows were formed and offering an explanation, Bacon was imprisoned for two decades, probably never ever seeing the rainbow with which he was so fascinated. He died two years after he was released from prison.
Roger Bacon chose the wrong time to be born and to be dangerous. These days, many leading thinkers of this now supposedly golden age of information often come together in order to jolt us all from our comfortable worldviews. Recently, 110 of them have come together to give us What is Your Dangerous Idea? (Pocket Books,
What is Your Dangerous Idea? reconfigures your sense of what is a “dangerous” — even pondering the question on why an idea — any idea — could even be dangerous. It contains 110 “dangerous ideas” in science and technology, including the Introduction by neuroscientist Steven Pinker and the Afterword by biologist Richard Dawkins. Each “dangerous idea” is expressed in only about one to three pages. They are gloriously annoying not only to the ones historically and habitually irritated by science, like the politicians and the religious, but also to science itself — to what we know so far in the sciences. Some of these ideas include: We Have No Souls, Science May Be Running Out of Control, The Idea That Ideas Can Be Dangerous, The Fight Against Global Warming is Lost, The Human Brain Will Never Understand the Universe, What Are People Well-informed About in the Information Age?, The End of Insight, We Are All Virtual and so many more deeply intriguing ones.
The idea entitled What Are People Well-informed About in the Information Age? is especially injurious to our complacency that we belong to the Information Age and therefore, must be well-informed. Well-informed about what? Hoax e-mails and text messages? Those that predict the exact time of earthquakes, of Pluto being visible, of practically everything causing cancer etc.? If we could predict the exact time of earthquakes, then we should blame the timekeepers who were supposed to warn people in earthquake areas?
I personally reflected on what I really am so well-informed about now, based on the number of e-mails I get. Based on that, then I know more than I care to about the different kinds of accidents one can fabricate in order to embezzle money out of the coffers of entire countries that happen to have GNPs close to the number that is being proposed to be embezzled. I am one of the millions who get e-mails asking me for help to smuggle a gazillion dollars from some African country. And all these e-mail senders say that they have “come to know of my trustworthy character.” How did they know that from hotmail? But the persistence of e-mails like these as well as other e-mail hoaxes that make the round-the-world tours of people’s inboxes I think, is beginning to convince me that maybe writer Peter Millar summed it up right when he wrote an article recently on The Times of London characterizing this age as “The Age of Gullibility.”
Ideas like those in the book I mentioned challenge us to stretch our minds to simply consider new ideas — all the time. None of them is a call to belief. All of them are calls to think — to think again. You are free to think back to your old idea if you want but watch how your mind grows after that. You have ventured to a territory of the mind unknown to you before and the only thing you have now become dangerous to is your old ignorance. You have created a larger inner life of understanding and if that is dangerous, then we would have to consider the civilizations to which we all belong, built upon newer and newer understanding, as dangerous. To not be dangerous would throw us back to the dark ages, the time when thinking about how a rainbow forms earns you almost a lifetime in the dungeons.
If dangerous means I would risk an understanding for myself and not taking things simply because generations before me say so; if dangerous means that I refuse to think this is all we could be or that we have understood it all; if dangerous means I should not stop reading and digesting for myself the wanderings of other minds to territories I have never been to nor will ever be; if dangerous means thinking that hope lies in how clearly we can understand how the world works; if dangerous means I could have my rainbow at hand; if dangerous means to stretch my nature to all that it could possibly be, then pardon the inconvenience, but I would like to go ahead and have a dangerous idea.
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