What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

It is an interesting and provocative question: what is your "dangerous idea"? John Brockman edited this compilation of short essays from a variety of "leading thinkers." This effort was inspired by the Edge Foundation, a "third culture" think-tank that sponsors "edge dot org," and has a mandate "...to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society."

In other words, Joe and Jane Citizen were not invited to participate in this project. Too bad... it would have been a worthy exercise to see "third culture intellectuals" spouting out alongside those who live in... our first and second culture?

Regardless, there are some interesting ideas presented here, even if the pool of writers has been high-graded through a filter that is not clearly specified.

There is an introduction and an afterward written by Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, respectively. These are both interesting essays in their own right. Pinker stated that "When done right, science (together with other truth-seeking institutions, such as history and journalism) characterizes the world as it is, without regard to whose feelings get hurt. Science in particular has always been a source of heresy, and today the galloping advances in touchy areas like genetics, evolution, and the environmental sciences are bound to throw unsettling possibilities at us" (p. xxv).

Pinker continues, "Another contributor to the perception of dangerousness is the intellectual blinkers that humans tend to don when they split into factions. People have a nasty habit of clustering in coalitions, professing certain beliefs as badges of their commitment to the coalition and treating rival coalitions as intellectually unfit and morally depraved. Debates between members of the coalitions can make things even worse, because when the other side fails to capitulate to one's devastating arguments, it only proves they are immune to reason" (p. xxvi-xxvii).

Ouch.

Pinker pulls no punches. "...it's hard to imagine any aspect of public life where ignorance or delusion is better than an awareness of the truth, even an unpleasant one. Only children and madmen [and I add, madwomen] engage in 'magical thinking,' the fallacy that good things can come true by believing in them or bad things will disappear by ignoring them or wishing them away" (p. xxix).

Double ouch.

And the answer? "'Sunlight is the best disinfectant,' according to Justice Louis Brandeis's famous case for freedom of thought and expression. If an idea really is false, only by examining it openly can we determine that it is false.... The moral order did not collapse when the earth was shown not to be at the center of the solar system, and so it will survive other revisions of our understanding of how the world works" (p. xxx).

And thus the essays begin, all 108 of them. They cover a wide gauntlet of topics, most related to the writer's specialization, but some ranging further afield. Some examples that stood out for me:

Sam Harris - "In the spirit of religious tolerance, most scientists are keeping silent when they should be blasting the hideous fantasies of a prior age with all the facts at their disposal" (p. 150).

Jordan Pollack - "There is a fine line between pushing God out of our public institutions and repeating the religious intolerance of regimes past" (p. 157).

Robert Provine - "The empirically testable idea that the here and now is all there is and that life begins at birth and ends at death is so dangerous that it has cost the lives of millions and threatens the future of civilization" (p. 159).

Jared Diamond - "...too many people today believe that a reason not to mistreat tribal people is that they are too nice or wise or peaceful to do those evil things [damage their environments and make war], which only we evil citizens of state government do" (p. 186).

Susan Blackmore - "We humans can and do make up our own purposes, but ultimately the universe has none" (p. 188).

Rupert Sheldrake - "...there is a possibility that animal navigation may not be explicable in terms of present-day physics" (p. 201).

Simon Baron-Cohen - "What would it be like if our political chambers were based on the principles of empathizing?" (p. 205).

Philip Campbell - "These perceptions and discussions [of and by alternative science networks] may be half-baked but are no less powerful for all that, and they carry influence on the Internet and the media" (p. 220).

This is just a small sample that reflects what caught my eye. There is much, much more here, on physics, psychology, aging, and other topics. With 108 essays, this book is easy to pick up and put down.

Dawkins ends with a summary of the topics covered, and a comment on what he thought was missing: a discussion of eugenics, and why "pro life" always means "pro human life." But you do expect Richard Dawkins to cast a wide net, don't you?

What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable, is an interesting book. Consider this one as a book for your upscale reading group.

I wish all books were as hard to put down as this one!

The mini-essays are short enough to pick the book up, read several, put it down and mull them over for awhile. Often, two very well-articulated dangerous ideas will be in complete contradiction to one another and will thus be placed one right after the other.

Highly recommend reading.

(Plus Richard Dawkins, who writes an Afterword.)

I'll give you some dangerous ideas. Take steps to reduce the human population worldwide to around a billion people and keep it there. Take the biological desire of people to play house and be mothers and fathers, and redirect it into responsible stewardship of the planet.

Don't like that one? Seems too draconian? How about this? End all tax exempt status for churches, mosques, etc. (Resounding voice coming onstage: "Only when they tear my cold, dead fingers from the collection plate!")

Here's another: realize that to know all is to forgive all, and that we are all just biological automations acting out our genetic drives and have no more free will than an ant on the pheromone trail. Deal with people acting in antisocial ways by (1) curing them with psychopharmacology, surgery, retraining, or (2) euthanasia.

Decriminalize street drug use. Allow Phillip Morris to get into the cannabis business and Merck to process opium into heroin. If some people become dysfunctional, see previous dangerous idea and employ it.

Well, none of John Brockman's esteemed contributors came up with anything quite THAT dangerous, probably because the danger of such ideas is most immediately to the person who would advance them! Psychiatrist Randolph M. Nesse gives us some guidance on why such ideas are not being advanced in this book in his modest essay on "Unspeakable Ideas." (pp. 193-195) Here's one: "when your business group is trying to deal with a savvy competitor, say, `It seems to me that their product is superior, because they are smarter than we are.'" Also unspeakable is, "I will only do what benefits me." Nesse writes that saying something like that is akin to committing "social suicide."

David Lykken thinks that parents ought to be required to get licenses to parent and prove they are twenty-one years old, married, and self-supporting. (pp. 175-176)

Jordan Pollack urges us (tongue in cheek, I presume) to embrace "faith-based science." He writes, "physics could sing the psalm that perpetual motion would solve the energy crisis..." with God "on our side to repeal the second law of thermodynamics!" "Astronomy could embrace astrology and do grassroots PR with daily horoscopes to gain mass support for a new space program." (pp. 156-158)

John Allen Paulos joins the Buddha and David Hume and presents the self as "an ever-changing collection of beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes, that is not an essential and persistent entity but a conceptual chimera." (p. 152)

Some of the other "dangerous ideas" concern such things as science versus religion (e.g., Sam Harris's "Science Must Destroy Religion" and Philip W. Anderson's "The Posterior Probability of Any Particular God Is Pretty Small"); exciting speculations (Terrence Sejnowski's "When Will the Internet Become Aware of Itself?"), cosmological conjectures (Brian Greene's "The Multiverse," and Leonard Susskind's "The `Landscape'").

Some of the ideas are not dangerous at all of course, and some are only dangerous to certain segments of society. The idea that the Christian God does not exist is no skin off my teeth and no Buddhist feels threatened by it, but television evangelicals find it downright scary. Judith Rich Harris advances the idea that parents really don't shape their children's mores (their peers and the larger society does). This idea isn't threatening at all unless you are a Pygmalion sort of parent infused with a weighty sense of responsibility, and in that case, her idea can help you to chill out.

Some other ideas may or may not be seen as dangerous. Karl Sabbagh suggests that "The Human Brain Will Never Understand the Universe," and Lawrence M. Krauss wants us to know that "The World May Be Fundamentally Inexplicable." Personally I think they're both right, but that shouldn't keep us from trying to expand the range of our knowledge and understanding. Seth Lloyd even goes so far as to suggest that one of our ideas "is likely to have the unintended consequence of destroying everything we know." He adds that "we cannot stop creating and exploring new ideas. The genie of ingenuity is out of the bottle. To suppress the power of ideas will hasten catastrophe, not avert it." (p. 101)

There are several essays on how drugs might, can, and will affect us (e.g., "Drugs May Change the Patterns of Human Love" by Helen Fisher, and "Using Medications to Change Personality" by Samuel Barondes). There are essays on politics and economics (e.g., Michael Shermer's ode to fiscal conservative and social liberalism, "Where Goods Cross Frontiers, Armies Won't" and Matt Ridley's "Government Is the Problem, Not the Solution"), and on the dangers and promises of futuristic technologies by Ray Kurzweil, Freeman J. Dyson and others. In fact there is so much in this book that a reader could study the ideas for decades--seriously--and hardly scratch the surface of what is implied, hoped for, dreamed of, and feared. It is a great collection of ideas, a masterful work of compilation and editing by science's most talented and creative editor, John Brockman. Don't miss this book. It's even better than Brockman's previous collection "What We Believe But Cannot Prove."

Let me throw in one more dangerous idea not in the book (lest I wax too sanguine): suppose that by bioengineering violent aggression out of the human genome (which seems like a good idea) we end up with something like H.G. Wells' Eloi? Can it be true that humans must be violently aggressive, and if not, will become stagnant and exploitable? One might argue that there would then be no exploiter, but should one appear what would--could--we do?