“Bewilderment, in its ancient and literal sense of being cast away in a trackless wild, was the lot of the explorer….” Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver (p. 47 in the paperback edition).
If you happen to be looking for a framework in which to consider innovation, then the 3,000 pages of the Baroque Cycle may be just the thing. The series provides a foundation for looking at the rise of natural philosophy from alchemy, the development of a new system of commerce and trade, and a transformation in government, all taking place in a 60 year span, 1655 to 1715.
The great challenge we have in looking back is that we look with our own eyes. Obvious, yes, but that is the problem. We see with a framework we are conditioned to see. We organize and rationalize so that the past is explainable in the terms of the present. We find in the past our roots, and we laugh off the sillinesses of fashion and faulty understanding. It is as if all roads lead to us, glorious us, and any others that were abandoned became that way for good reason.
But it’s not so, Loretta. It takes real work to get back to where we once belonged. By becoming immersed in the details that don’t seem pertinent to the easy telling of a story in our own terms (in the simplified terms required of important “executives” who don’t have time for epiphanies brought on by depth or reach) are we able to start to see the patterns in things that held sway before things changed.
The transformation of moral theory to mechanical theory, of the application of geometry to the physical world, the movement from theology to technology, a transformation in the idea of power, of the place of God and where to look for the mystery in the world, the rise of the importance of money, of securities, of the concept of coinage–how a metal with a stamp on it can become a thing of value (and we think using cowrie shells as money is silly). Stephenson frames this cluster of changes in three stages–Quicksilver, the raw materials, Confusion, the remix and development, and The System of the World, the emergent new order, not at all fore-ordained, hung in the balance, not the necessary outcome, but one that does win out.
A system of the world that we recognize, but now, with the question: is it the system of the world that has to be, or is it just what we have got to work with. In The 500 Year Delta, Jim Taylor argues that we have largely built our world order, and expectations of the future, on 18th century science and philosophy. All the neat gizmos and stuff we have–that’s just the baroque, if not now the rococo, expression of the combinations possible. And after the rococo, perhaps it all gives out, we reach a point when we keep doing the same thing but like some edge of a Mandelbrot set, we do it at such a tiny bit of scale that no matter how important it is to us in the moment to be doing it, it doesn’t change the shape of the set in any meaningful way.
Innovation in the tiny bits at the edges of a well worn set of activities is entirely justifiable. There is innovation there, and because it preserves the pattern of discovery imported from the Royalty Society, it still feels good, in that way of feeling good that is no longer a crime against the Church. But it is also little bits of innovation.
We might say we have this dilemma: either innovation now comes in little bits, hard-fought, as evidenced by all the tiny bits of papers being published–thousands upon tens of thousands a year–all reporting “progress” in the development of an improvement in a model that might account for a disparity in the data that doesn’t conform with expectations which themselves were under debate some years ago but now aren’t because it didn’t resolve and folks got tired of it and couldn’t publish anything more about it and so moved on to refining the consequences of whatever side prevented more papers from being published debating the issue.
(Which raises a lost role for the humanities, which at present they are singularly unprepared to do, and that is to critique the debates of science. It is not the *scientific* credentials that are in play in such debates, but the *rhetorical* ones. The nature of an argument, the use of fallacies as devices to win approval, the status of evidence, the conclusions drawn from the use of mathematics or models or a set of observations, the narratives of how the world works, or how science works, or how the quantification of an argument works. None of this is the domain of science. It is the domain of rhetoric, the humanities. But humanities folks stopped valuing logic and rhetoric and anything that smacks of quant a long time ago. Time to get out of bed and chop some wood, guys and gals–your fire burns dim and there’s opportunity if you are ever willing to work up a sweat about it.
The system of the world–a remarkable achievement–a great controlling myth–but not a myth because it is present, not past. It is too deeply embedded in our understanding to be something we can just use the tools of our understanding on. It is our status quo, it is the middle of a series of great debates that have reached impasses in multiple directions, with its deism, capitalism, statism, and scientism.
There is a picture of a medieval traveller who goes too far and reaches the edge of the sphere of the stars and pokes his head out into the beyond. What things of amazement might there be, to step outside the system of the world? The edges of the system in which we live and compete and fuss and take our stands are available–in the form of history, in the form of exploration, in the form of epiphany, in the form of the future, and in the form of will. These, too, are all the subject matter of the humanities. Falling back into the present system of the world, any of these will appear to be orthodox and thereby amusing, or heterodox, and therefore pure fiction, albeit potentially dangerous fiction.
It may be, however, that the lot of the explorer, to see the precursors of innovation, will have to become bewildered. To find oneself “more truly and more strange”, in the words of Wallace Stevens. And for that, we need a kind of fiction that does not merely deceive or remix, but works toward the edges of things, where we might poke a head out and see there are ways to start afresh, to discover, and set an agenda for what comes next.
Too big an idea? If so, then isn’t that rather like saying, there’s nothing left to know or to explore? Isn’t that like saying, now that we must accept banality in the future, what’s the point of doing much more by way of innovation, except to redistribute wealth among competing factions? And what if wealth turns out to be cowrie shells, all the way down? Then isn’t it like saying, this shell game is more important than trying to find out the root of things, something beyond the perceptions of the present? That’s at the heart of the debate between Newton and Leibniz. Is it a silly debate? Or would it, if it were fresh again, inspire and motivate discovery? Or, is there another such debate, drawn on similar stuff, that might do this for us, in the here and now? And maybe that *is* the debate we hare having, in some ponderous, slow, generational way–whether the status quo is good enough, and what’s to be known is a minor and perhaps lucrative remix, or whether there is a status commutatio that opens up new ways of thinking, making, dealing, and aspiring. We don’t need more collaboration to support the status quo. It doesn’t even take any effort, let along folks all working together, unified by the common bonds of the quotidian.
We need collaboration to support the status commutatio–that’s where the really big tremendous innovation awaits. That’s what a framework of innovation fiction can begin to do for us. Maybe we need more innovation fiction.