Ideas as Predators

The Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in 1919 proposed that the best means available for assessing the truth of an idea is to see how it fares in a marketplace of truly free competition. This was a nice slap on the wrist to the would-be censors in our communities, but has never stopped their yowling.

Would-be censors and their assumptions are the predators in the ecosystem of ideas. I say “predators” because, as tedious as they are, it may be best just to tolerate their yammerings, and here is why:

Somewhere in the rock-bound tidal waters of Washington state, a biologist removed the predators (starfish) from a community of fifteen species of mussels, limpets, chitons and barnacles. Without the predator, the mussels and barnacles increased to abnormally high densities. BUT, they crowded out seven of the other species.

In the words of celebrated biologist E. O. Wilson, “the predator in this case was less dangerous than the competitors.”

We can look to the following examples to prove Wilson’s point. Of course, we are applying it to the world of ideas, where censors and censorship are the predators.

The Romans did their best to censor Christian ideas – just as the Arab world tried to suppress Islam – giving birth to the sturdy creeds which now cover the planet. Of course, Christians and Muslims themselves are now become the new breed predator. Hence the magnificent spread of ideas in the last fifteen hundred years of their reign.

And again, freedom, equality, and even democracy existed only on paper until enlightened voices began to explore their rhetorical power. The new ideas were viciously resisted, of course. Naturally, the attempt to censor such ideas have given them roots everywhere. They flourish despite enemies as widely varied as capitalists, socialists, and communists (not to mention the fundamentalists).

Ideas really do seem to thrive, not from competition for space in the imagination, but from predators who want to keep them out of the mind altogether.

These examples bring to mind an old thesis, that we basically owe all of our progress to ignorance. For, without having had to correct the mistakes of the ignorant we might never have evolved at all.

Of course, it is debatable whether we humans have evolved. It is our ideas which are evolving, too fast for our comfort. One can’t really say which ideas are predatory and which are merely competitors, but we can make that distinction among people. Especially those people who wield ideas like weapons.

Tedious or dangerous as it may be, we have to consciously ritual with these people. We have to make them understand that ideas are living, reproducing, and populating our our brains and communities. They are manifest in a symbolic world, a world of language and stuff – stuff that we produce, like houses and cars and cities and cultures.

Much of the symbolic world has turned out to be polluted, but it is not the ideas themselves which are toxic.