The Pain Of A New Idea

“One of the greatest pains to human nature,” declaimed British economist and journalist Walter Bagehot, “is the pain of a new idea.”

I’m having trouble remembering the last time a new idea found habitation in my brain.

Here’s one: democracy. A new idea? No. Not at all. But it is an idea. What’s new about it is that I don’t believe I’ve ever truly experienced it. Until recently, the United States – it was roundly assumed – was a democracy. This is officially now not the case. According to an article in The Nation by Bernard E. Harcourt, “there is today no institutional counterpower to a presidential tyrant.”

This moment [the election of Donald Trump] presents a constitutional crisis for the American people. Its possibility was always inscribed in the Constitution. By its terms, the president is not necessarily elected by a popular majority, but by a counter-majoritarian institution, the Electoral College, that is now controlled by a minority of the population residing in less-populated rural states. The Senate is by design a counter-majoritarian institution controlled by the same minority of American voters, and can thereby block any majoritarian legislation passed by the House of Representatives. The Supreme Court can be packed with judges nominated by a president elected by the counter-majoritarian Electoral College and confirmed by the counter-majoritarian Senate. In rare circumstances, all three branches of government can be counter-majoritarian. At that moment, there is no longer democratic rule.

“The majority of the American people are no longer formally represented by any branch of the government,” Harcourt goes on to say. “There are no effective checks or balances to his unbridled executive power. There is no effective limit to Trumps executive authority today.”

Harcourt is not alone. The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has declared that the United States is a “flawed democracy.” “If Mr. Trump is unable to reverse the trend towards social polarization, U.S. democracy will be at greater risk of further deterioration, especially given the interplay of this trend with other, long-standing drivers of democratic decline.”

Thus far, there’s been little evidence that Mr. Trump plans to address the problem of “social polarization.” Drive anywhere in the country and you’ll see tent cities and people collapsed on sidewalks feeding an opioid addiction. 40% of the American population struggle to afford at least one basic need for health care, housing, utilities or food. Another 25% cannot afford and do not fill prescriptions on which they depend.

But I don’t want to dwell on political matters with which most people are already too painfully familiar. I’m more interested in the pain of new ideas. Why should a new idea be painful? Are there new ideas that are pleasurable? Have I ever had an idea that made me feel good? Have I ever had an idea? One single idea I could call my own?

The word ‘idea’ is Greek, meaning form or pattern, and stems from the Greek infinitive idein, to see. Seeing patterns one hasn’t noticed before is one idea of what an idea might be. This is generally how most discoveries are made. One day circa 200 BC Archimedes of Syracuse sat in a bathtub and noticed the water rise. He also felt lighter. He felt buoyant. Buoyancy is a great idea but it’s not a human idea. It’s a phenomenon. An experience. An event. It’s bubbles and waves and fluid alleviation. It’s the idea of whoever or whatever created this universe. Atheists would say it was a whatever and the more religiously inclined would say it was a whoever. Whatever or whoever some force or entity or intelligence created buoyancy. And Archimedes took notice of it and came up with the idea of fluid dynamics to describe it. It has since been named Archimedes’ principle, which states that “any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object.”

That was most assuredly a new idea, but I very much doubt that Archimedes felt much pain. He was sitting in a bath of nice warm water. I’m sure it felt pretty good. Nor is Archimedes’ principle, strictly speaking, an idea. It’s an observation of a pattern that became formulated as an idea.

The bathtub is an idea. Bathing is an idea. Principles are ideas. Theories are ideas. Concepts are ideas. Propositions are ideas. But water? Water isn’t an idea. Water is water. That’s my idea. My idea about water. I didn’t experience any pain arriving at that idea. I did experience a little pain in trying to understand Archimedes’ principle, but as soon as I did so, my brain felt buoyant and ready to navigate further perspectives. “Any idea, wholly or partially immersed in a thought, is buoyed up by a perspicuity equal to the weight of the phenomenon molested by the investigations of the brain.” This is my principle, which may not yet be entirely sound, but I take showers, not baths.

Here are some of the more prominent ideas to circulate human society in the last few millennia or so: language, agriculture, signs and symbols, law, punishment, reward, redemption, good and evil, logic, liberty, prophecy, rhetoric, capitalism, communism, relativity, negativity, connectivity, hedonism, fatalism, hypnotism, magnetism, pragmatism, nihilism, surrealism, happiness, being, immortality, God, love, pleasure and pain, tyranny and despotism, slavery, evolution, time, poetry, music, philosophy. Few of these ideas hurt. The idea of slavery is perhaps the most painful. The idea that it became an idea at all is painful.

Here are some ideas from the last 25 years or so: free market economics, privatization, social networking, fracking, renewable power, NAFTA, the war on terror, derivatives, financial deregulation, classicism, and the Bilbao Effect. Again, none of these ideas hurt in and of themselves. Frank Gehry’s architectural designs hurt. They hurt my eyes. They hurt my sense of aesthetics. But whatever ideas brought them into being are just that: ideas. It’s when ideas are put into practice that they cause pain, quite often a great deal of pain: injury, homelessness, starvation and death for great numbers of people while making a smaller percentage of people very, very wealthy. Politicians, billionaires and arms dealers get rich. The upper tiers of society get rich. But the rest of us do what we can to mitigate the harsh circumstances created by austerity measures and thuggery and corruption until a real opportunity for change presents itself.

There are good ideas and bad ideas and ideas that have elements of badness and goodness mixed together and ideas leaving a trail of unexpected consequences, which is a cautionary note regarding the idea of bioengineering in saving human society from the trauma of abrupt climate change.

I have difficulty in trying to remember an occasion in which a new idea caused me any amount of discomfort, disorientation, or malaise. I can’t. Maybe it’ll come to me later.

Insight is a different matter. Most of the insights I’ve had over the years have been liberating. They’ve been good things. A few, however, have been deeply painful. Coming to the realization that X has not been the good friend I’ve imagined for decades but something of a douche bag is painful. Insights are to ideas what whiskey is to perfume: one provokes a response of action or inaction and the other comforts or inflames. It’s a difference of degree and poignancy. Perfume is cerebral. Whiskey is visceral. 

Epiphanies are where it’s at: the manifestation of the divine. A hummingbird hovering in front of your face on a warm spring day surrounded by azaleas and rhododendrons. A sudden acute realization that everything is simultaneously real and unreal, particle and wave, energy and matter. And that somewhere in between is a row of cabbage, the fading light of the morning star and steam rising off the surface of a river.