Transcript for Intellectual History of “Innovation” Lecture

0. Introduction

For thousands of years, innovation was despised until something flipped in the 18th century and it became glorified. In the 17th century, one of the worst things you could call someone was “innovator.” You’d read these polemic pamphlets and they’d go, “I reject the charge of innovation. You, sir, are the real innovator. We fast forward to today, and everyone and their dog wants to be an innovator and the most derivative ventures all label themselves as innovations.

Something radical shifted in the West and here’s the surprising thing. When you read the reasons why the greatest thinkers of the greatest civilizations before ours despise innovation, they actually make a lot of good points that we’ve completely overlooked.

In this lecture, you’re going to learn what the forgotten dangers of innovation are, why we’ve been seduced by this idea, and why it matters for innovation today.

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I distinctly remember what one of my favorite professors had told me in the beginning of my first PhD level philosophy seminar, she said, “Johnathan, now that you're no longer in an undergraduate level class, for your final paper, I want you to write something original.” I didn't say this out loud, but what was going immediately in my mind was, “wait a second, that's not what I signed up for. I came here for wisdom. I might settle for a few kinds of foundational truths, what does that have to do with originality?” What if wisdom had already been captured, and conversely, what if the pursuit of originality led me not to wisdom but falsehood or perhaps even worse, trivialities, claims which even if true, do not matter? 

I felt somewhat affirmed in my suspicions as I was also taking a class at the time on the great religious thinkers, and I learned that the Christian theologians were trying to do the exact opposite, they were trying to show that what they were saying was unoriginal, that it was already in the Bible, for otherwise, they risk heresy. Even stronger, certain sects of Tibetan Buddhism have a Terma tradition which directly translates to hidden treasure, and the idea here is that the Buddha had systematically hidden fully written scrolls to be uncovered in the most opportune of moments. And so what scholars are saying in this tradition is even stronger, not only is this not original, this isn't even me. The role of the scholar, at least when they're participating in Terma, is of mere discovery and not of creation.

So how did we get from desperately trying to show our unoriginality to “Johnathan, I want you to write something original”? That is the topic of my lecture today, to trace the changing attitudes towards innovation, which of course is a close conceptual relative of originality and the precise relation I'll make clear very soon.

Part one of this lecture will be a reconstruction of innovation theorist Benoît Godin's work, Innovation Contested, which is a fantastic intellectual history that spans the Western tradition and traces how innovation changes. But why do intellectual history? Why bother ourselves with the thoughts of the long dead? Why revisit the great books of yore? After all, when we study Math, we don't consult Pythagoras, when we study chemistry, we don't have to reach back all the way to Thales, when we study astronomy, we don't read Galileo.

Why when it comes to forming the right normative attitudes towards innovation, we reach back into the far past? But the answer I would wager is because normative attitudes do not progress like a wildfire amidst a dry field that slowly envelops, encompasses and illuminates greater and greater terrain. Unanimous, monotonic, cumulative. Instead, and I hope you will agree after this lecture, it appears that normative attitudes change, like moving a flashlight across a pitch dark room, where the very act of enlightenment obfuscates. As soon as you move the flashlight to a new part of the room, a previously lightened part would go dark. As soon as we tend to gain a new profitable philosophical perspective, we tend to abandon old ones and the ways in which they were valid.

And so we reach into the past, not as a sterile intellectual exercise, but to rescue unduly dimmed perspectives for the current moment. This exercise of rescuing old ideas, if it's to be done successfully, is almost always deeply uncomfortable. After all, it's either about prying our grip loose on our core normative commitments or it's about introducing new ones that must at first seem dangerous or at least, alien. Well, I'm afraid I can't promise success today, but not to worry, I can promise quite a bit of discomfort. In part two and three in this lecture, I will ask what must be learned from this intellectual history, and I will go on to argue that our current love for innovation is a fetish in pathology that leads not to real and meaningful innovation, but derivative fashions and unwanted change. I will highlight parts of our commitment to this attitude, this fetish of innovation, that we must reject and suggest a more classical ideal to resurrect.

But that would be getting ahead of ourselves, let's begin with Part One, Intellectual History. Benoît Godin's intellectual history splits the Western tradition into three distinct periods. The Classical view covers Greek antiquity to the 16th century, the Reformation view covers the 16th and 17th centuries, and the Modern view covers the 18th century to the present. What's gonna be most interesting to us is how and why the attitudes towards innovation changes between these three periods.