The Pakistani Spectator

It is an old truism that the pen is mightier than the sword, but what, exactly, lies behind the “power of the pen”? Ideas are the key, and they are as powerful as any force on Earth.

Consider how humans change the world. Using our own bodies and muscles, our power is no greater than any other animal. Using common tools, we can multiply our powers by tens-fold, maybe by hundreds-fold. Still, the effect each person has as an individual on this huge planet is paltry. Imagine, though, that you could create a tool that made two copies of itself, and each of those copies made two copies, and so forth, until after 30 short generations there were over a billion copies (a thousand million, in the British notation), and then imagine that each of those billion copies could do some modest task, for example, plow the land on a small farm; now, that would be real power to accomplish something enormous from a very small beginning! In science fiction, there is the concept of a “self-replicating machine” (also known as a “Von Neumann (sp?) machine”) that a small group of humans might use, for example, to transform Mars into a comfortable, earthlike planet using just this sort of strategy. Well, that’s science fiction, for now, something perhaps for the future to enjoy, but we actually have tools with this sort of power, today!

The oldest example of a self-replicating tool is life, itself. Consider the impact of the domestication of wheat, for example – a handful of useful seeds, expanded over generations into a tool to provide a large fraction of humanity’s food. A few hundred years ago, the Spaniards brought the potato from South America, and something like a barrel or two of potatoes brought over on a sailing ship soon lead to a major new food crop in the old world that expanded old-world agriculture’s productivity to feed millions more than it formerly could. The old world returned the favor, too, lending productive new crops to the new world, as well, with the result that the new combination of old-world and new-world crops enormously increased world agricultural output, simply by exchanging a few barrels-full of seeds between the continents, then letting the natural course of agriculture work its “self-replicating magic” for a few generations. (I do not mean to imply by this that the exchange benefited the indigenous Americans, however, who were horribly harmed by European contact, only that the result was the North and South American agriculture was far more productive than it could have been with only native crops.) Much more recently, using more modern breeding methods (many of them good ideas of his own invention!), beginning in the 1950s, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Professor Norman Borlaug created dwarf wheat, which doesn’t collapse under a heavy lode of grain, as taller varieties do, vastly improving wheat yield per hectare, enormously helping millions of poor farmers to feed themselves – a huge world impact from what must initially have been a very few seeds.

The second-oldest example of a self-replicating tool is the idea. Some unknown ancient genius works out the idea of creating fire by spinning the point of a stick in a hole in another stick, and like wildfire, the idea spreads – the inventor passes the idea to a few tribes-people, they each pass it to a few more, and an idea inside one person’s head is soon known by almost every human on the planet, sterilizing previously unsafe food, leeching poisons from acorns, making them a newly-usable dietary staple, making it possible to populate almost the entire Earth’s land surface, where pre-fire humans could never survive cold climates, ultimately leading to pottery, metallurgy, and almost all of technology. The wheel, the plow, the steam engine – each invention was first an idea, an idea that was useless to humanity while it resided in just one brain, but which utterly changed human life on this planet, once it copied itself to enough brains to change daily life. Domestication of animals and plants combines the two self-replicators – a self-replicating idea to use animals and plants in a new way, enabled by the self-replication of the animals and plants, themselves.

If you or I should think of some invention as important as fire or the wheel, I’d be rather surprised – such utterly world-changing breakthroughs are incredibly rare, and call not only for intelligence and hard work, but a generous dose of luck, besides. Does that make almost all of us mere spectators to the world-changing power of ideas? Certainly not!

An idea as useful as fire or the wheel will spread well purely by virtue of how useful it is, but not all ideas propagate by their benefit to humankind! History is full of lousy ideas that caused incalculable harm that were nevertheless extremely popular in their day! The ideas behind Nazism held seductive appeal for a large piece of Europe, spreading like wildfire and leading to vast suffering. Earlier, Christian Europe found the idea of Christian control of Jerusalem and the Middle East to be highly appealing, leading to the Crusades, with vast harm to those who were invaded, and, in most cases, little good to the invaders, either, although Europe as a whole benefited greatly from the better ideas the crusaders brought back from the Islamic world. Today, ideas of racial and religiously-based prejudice continue to appeal to most of the world, causing vast, continued harm. The idea that the Earth is an infinite resource, incapable of being permanently damaged or used up, continues to appeal to far too many people, and this idea may destroy the environment that keeps us alive.

So, there are good ideas that spread well, and also bad ideas that spread all too well, and the fate of each nation and of the whole planet depends on the good ideas prevailing, over all, over the bad ones. As I see it, there is a multi-front, endless war ongoing between the good and bad ideas. Very few people contribute to this war by creating major, truly new, good ideas, but almost everyone plays a part in the war by helping to spread ideas, good and bad. (A fair number of people also can contribute by refining good ideas, even a little bit, adding something here and there to make the basic good ideas work better!) Most people play the part of common soldiers in the war of ideas, helping pass on and strengthen their favorite ideas in conversation with their friends and family, especially playing a role in passing their ideas to their own children. The war has its more important players, too, the equivalents of captains and generals, in the form of influential journalists, authors, religious and national leaders, for example, influential people whose opinions influence many others’ views. We bloggers, who write and who comment on others’ blogs, perhaps mainly play roles like corporals and sergeants, in this ongoing war of ideas, although a very rare few bloggers wield influence comparable to major traditional journalists.

There are many similarities between these wars of ideas and conventional war. Just as a general is powerless without his army of common soldiers, an influential idea-leader can become powerless if his or her followers cease to believe that the leader is worth their attention and respect. With technology, the power of individual weapons has increased, and the powers of weapons in the wars of ideas have increased, too – books, television, and movies, for example, enable far more “generals” in the war of ideas to reach a wide audience than was possible hundreds of years ago, although a very few books influenced vast numbers even before the printing press. Occasionally, the outcome of a war swings on the death of a general, usually at the hands of an opposing common soldier. In the war of ideas, we may be thankful, the opposing generals need not be killed to win the war. Instead, they may simply be persuaded to join the other side, and this victory, too, is likely to come from a lowly soldier, some humble individual who helps the “general” to see wisdom on the other side, or better still who influences the future general, perhaps as a child, to choose the right side from the beginning!

The similarities between conventional war and the wars of ideas are all too easy to overstate, however! A general, or a common soldier, who abandoned one side and joined another would be viewed as the worst kind of traitor, but what does it mean to abandon one side of the war of ideas and join the other? It simply means that you changed your mind, and saw superior wisdom in a view you formerly opposed! If a person is too loyal to an idea, this, too, might seem like a betrayal, but such thinking is itself a bad idea! Ideas, after all, should serve humanity, not the other way around, and all too many ideas harm humanity, however seductive and appealing they might seem at first, so loyalty to these bad ideas is in fact disloyalty to humanity!

It is a very unfortunate feature in American politics that “flip-flopping” (favoring one idea at one point in a politician’s career, then favoring another idea, later) is seen as a great sin in American politics. In our American presidential campaigns, especially, there is an ugly game played where each candidate points out cases where the opposing candidates have apparently favored inconsistent views. (Often, I should note, these supposedly inconsistent ideas are not inconsistent, just subtle, like opposing one, subtly bad form of a new law, and later favoring another, better form!) If good and bad ideas were easy to distinguish, consistently holding good ideas over a lifetime might be both possible and admirable, but here lies the key: Good and bad ideas are terribly hard to distinguish (both sorts usually appearing good to those who hold them!), and the chances are vanishingly small that you, or I, or anyone else on the planet, holds only good ideas! Instead, the wiser ones among us, I believe, clearly recognize their own fallibility, and constantly search for an improved set of ideas, cheerfully abandoning their mistaken ideas as reason or new facts show them their mistakes, acting as generals who willingly switch sides in the wars of ideas, and acting as human beings who do not suddenly stop learning and acquiring wisdom at some particular age. Do we Americans imagine that we can find a candidate so perfectly wise at a young age that he or she has nothing further to learn once he or she has entered politics? If not, we should prize a candidate who frankly changes views in a direction of greater wisdom! (Of course, if the change of views was in the wrong direction, and appears to have taken place simply to appeal to unwise voters, or appears otherwise expedient and insincere, we should never reward such crass lack of principle!)

I believe that the biggest difference most human beings can make in their lives boils down to choosing ideas well and carefully, and remaining flexible to new, better ideas, and of course using those ideas to guide their actions. Even the common soldiers in the wars of ideas make a major positive difference if they fight on the right side! Should a common soldier say, “Why should I fight; I am only a common soldier?” What would you think of such a soldier and of his patriotism? It makes no more sense, and is no better to say “Why should I think, and reason, and try to teach what wisdom I learn; I am only a common citizen?”! Even the humblest citizen might for example be the parent of a future leader, or of a persuasive friend of a future leader, and may thereby change history, though history will likely never know that citizen’s crucial role!

I have come to be a fan of blogs, in general, and of The Pakistani Spectator, specifically, because here I see a type of discussion that tends to sort the better ideas from the bad ones, over time. The key is the two-way nature of blogs; they may have as much nonsense as any form of journalism, perhaps more, since it is easier to become a blogger than a journalist, but when a blog holds nonsense, those who comment to the blog will happily point it out! The two-way nature of the blog favors reason in the end, and reason favors the better ideas. In particular, I’ve been very favorably impressed with the comments to my own blogs, here – plenty of disagreement, as their should be, but mainly disagreement of a calm, reasoned sort, the sort that helps the readers (and me!) consider the issues rationally, instead of making the sort of irrational appeal to the unconscious emotions that sells Coca Cola, for example, by showing some celebrity-type idea-general in feigned ecstasy over a glassful.

Ideas are powerful in themselves, for example, helping a person face misfortune calmly and philosophically, even where the idea lacks power to change that misfortune. Political ideas, though, have enormous power in the physical world, as well, even where a government is less than democratic! The tyrant’s friend and ally is the common citizen who abandons the battlefield of political ideas. If, instead, the citizenry engages in the battle, and finds a fairly consistent view of what it wants, I firmly believe that country’s citizens will find their way, in time, to their uniform desires, even without a physical battle. (Yes, achieving this consistent view is no easy matter, and the tyrant will do his or her best to dis-unify the population, assuming the tyrant can’t manage unity in favor of himself or herself!)

Like most Americans, I am an optimist, perhaps, but I see enormous hope in the Internet revolution: It is a powerful tool for the common soldiers of the wars of ideas, a tool that enables reasoned debate even in oppressed societies, a tool that opens up even oppressed societies to consider alternative ideas that might not be so visible at home, owing to the tyrant’s efforts at suppressing the truth. I believe this tool can help nations find consensus in what the common citizenry wants, and in crystallizing that consensus, it can make positive, peaceful change inevitable, even in the face of resistance by oppressive governments.