I have started reading Johansson's (2006) Medici Effect. I read the first chapter some time ago, so I started with chapter 2 and continued on from there. Chapter 2 describes the rise of "intersections" which is a term that Johansson introduces to describe the place where ideas combine to make new ideas, a sort of psychological place of innovation. He argues that because of three forces, increased movement of people, the convergence of science, and increased computational power, intersections between ideas are becoming increasingly common and important. In chapter 3, Johansson introduces the concept of associative barriers and describes how they inhibit innovation. In chapter 4, Johansson gives three ways that associative barriers can be broken down: being exposed to a range of cultures, learning differently, and reversing assumptions.
Johansson's ideas seem very familiar to me. That is, I feel like he is talking about me and my life. I have intensely pursued the cross-cultural perspective that Johansson describes. I have always been driven to learn differently, and I believe assumptions were made to be challenged--somewhat to the chagrin of my family and colleagues.
I always wanted to travel, but I didn't get the opportunity until my mid-twenties. At that point, I joined the Peace Corps. In my application essay, I stated that I needed to get out of American culture, that it was limiting the way I thought and that I felt stifled by it. I don't know how I knew this--only that I was right. Living overseas was a revelation and a catharsis. So many silly, petty, arbitrary rules that I had been acculturated to accept sloughed off me. It was wonderful. I don't think I can ever go back to living in a place that is not intercultural. People's ways of thinking are just too narrow and it is really hard for me to be patient with their perspective. Maybe God will ask me to grow in that area eventually.
In the section about learning differently, Johansson notes that education can inhibit creativity because the more we know about the established way of doing things, the less we tend to question those assumptions or try to find new ways to do things. Since I was a teenager, I have hated this about education. I have always wanted to turn things on their head and find a new way to look at them, but my impulse to do this was ill-defined, and teachers, not recognizing why I would want to do such things, overrode that desire and insisted I stick to the curriculum. To be fair, perhaps if I had been better at articulating what I wanted to do, they would have been more supportive... but when one is a teenager, this kind of clarity is hard to come by.
I wanted to drop out of high school, but persuaded myself to stay in order not to miss the "high school experience." Graduation was a complete letdown, and I spent the summer after I graduated mourning the loss of my senior year. I could have been doing so many other more interesting things besides sitting zombie-like in the classroom. It is one of my enduring regrets. I was less passive about my education in college, but that resulted in me changing my college four times and my major seven times. I finally got my bachelors in communications (almost as non-specialized as one can be), my masters in linguistics, and my Ph.D. in higher education. I have since been toying with the idea of getting a Ph.D. in neuroscience. It is just such an interesting field. It would mean starting all over again, but maybe I could wipe out a lot of the prerequisites with MOOCs... I don't know.
Assumptions were made to be challenged--including Johansson's assumptions. One thing that bothers me about this book is that Johansson makes so many grand statements. I understand it is probably an aspect of his personality. He strikes me as one of those excited idealists, but he sometimes undermines his credibility with me by taking such an uncritical view of the world. Much of what he talks about, I don't know enough about to challenge, but he did make one statement that I know is not true and given my general experience of the world, that statement makes me highly skeptical of some of the other statements that he makes.
He says: In biology virtually every discovery, including the double helix, has reinforced and refined Darwin’s theory of evolution, not questioned it (Locations 440). I am not an expert in biology, but from what I know of science in general, this statement strikes me as ridiculous. How can Johansson treat evolution as a forgone conclusion? I'm willing to acknowledge that it is a very respected theory, but there are scientists whose discoveries in biology have very much not "reinforced or refined Darwin's theory." There have been books written and documentaries made to this fact. Ben Stein created a documentary on a number of scientists who were ostracized from their academic communities for questioning evolutionary theory.
A lot of experts want to pretend these questions don't even exist. They don't have good answers for the questions posed against evolution--they just sneer at anyone who would ask such questions and label them as ignorant or religious. This is a very ironic stance to take in light of the need to "reverse assumptions." Some assumptions are not allowed to be challenged, and Johansson, with his very uncritical approach, demonstrates that he does not follow the tenants that he is extolling. He is locked into his own cultural associative barriers. I suppose we all are, but I would respect what he has to say more if his own barriers were not so easy to see.
Social Justice and Equity
Another aspect of Johansson's approach that I really do not appreciate very much is how he ignores the way social rules and power structures affect innovation. As I noted in my first blog about Johansson's book, he states that innovation is different than creativity in that the general society has to accept and implement a creative idea in order to make it innovative. Perhaps I have just not reached the point in the book where he talks about this, but this social adoption of creative ideas is, from my experience, the single greatest barrier to innovation.
Johansson's examples of innovation include Edison, Da Vinci and Darwin--white males. He admires them for their creativity, but they would never have accomplished what they did without patrons and without the respect that their gender and race gave them. Lots of creative people are marginalized. They don't fit the usual paradigm of more conventional people in the world--people who have the power to sideline them. Prejudice is a rampant and common poison to creativity and innovation, and there is as much or more of that in the world than ever. I hope that later in his book Johansson acknowledges this fact. Innovation does not necessarily have a bright future. With all of the forces that he describes that create more intersections, we could very well have the rise of a totalitarian state instead.
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