A serendipitous blog thread took me to Thoughts Arguments and Rants, where I stumbled over a lengthy critique of Paul Berman’s NY Times piece about the so-called “philosopher of Al Qaeda”, Sayyid Qutb. Now I’m not particularly concerned about the Berman piece, nor about Sayyid Qutb; moreover all of this was published in the winter of 2003. No, what seized my attention was this insight (my emphases):
“Some, and I suspect Berman is among them, suggest that life is not meaningful without some deep idea to guide it. And this is meant to be a bad thing. But lives are, in the most important sense, not meaningful, and this is a good thing. Things that are meaningful, street signs, sentences in blogs, etc are not intrinsically valuable – their value consists in their utility. If lives are to be justified in terms of their meaning, that is to say that they have instrumental value only. And that is the first step on the road to ruin, or at least calamitous war.
I thought the primary lesson of the 20th century was that deep ideas are dangerous. Small ideas are the lifeblood of the world, and they are safe to boot. Someone who has a new idea for representing the relationship between thought and world, or for curing a particular kind of cancer, or for describing the history of the Jews through the Dublin traipsings of an ad salesman, is not likely to start a war over their idea. Someone who has a new idea for the overall arrangement of society is somewhat more war-prone. Deep thoughts are literally dangerous. Paraphrasing Keynes somewhat, the armies of the world are moved by little else.”
The rest of the piece is packed full of lovely small ideas: from the risks of “Captain Ahab” philosophy, to the importance of small ideas in science*, and why Bloom is a better role model than Stephen in Ulysses. Highly recommended.
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* which suggested a twist on John Lennon: “science is what happens when you’re waiting for other paradigms”