Why Are the Great Thinkers Dead?
Suppose I ask you to name some of humanity’s great thinkers. What would you say? If you’re in philosophy, Plato and Aristotle will immediately come to mind. Then maybe Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz, Adam Smith. Go down the list. Maybe you’d add St. Augustine, J.S. Mill, Bertrand Russell, maybe even Wittgenstein. Among scientists, you’d surely include Galileo, Newton, Einstein. Then Darwin, Lavoisier, Archimedes, Maxwell, Boltzmann, etc. Q: how far do you have to go down the list before you name a person who is now alive? Pretty far, I bet.
Do the same thing for artists and writers. You have people such as Mozart, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, etc. (I don’t know that many artists, so you fill in the rest. ?) Again, how far do you have to go down the list before you reach one who is now alive? Pretty far. You might even refuse to name any living artists as ‘great’ no matter how many names you are prompted for.
Let’s count artists and writers as “thinkers” for present purposes. Why aren’t there more (any?) great thinkers who are currently alive?
I have thought of 8 natural answers. But I’m sure readers can think of more. Here are the explanations I thought of:
1. Most people are dead.
Human history is many times longer than a human lifespan, so of course most great thinkers (and also most terrible thinkers, and most left-handed thinkers, etc.) are dead.
Right. The current population is almost 8 billion. About 110 billion humans have ever lived (including prehistory). So about 7% of all humans who ever lived are alive now. That’s a significant fraction – enough that you would think it should contain some of the great thinkers, if they were randomly distributed. Plus, there are reasons to think modern people should be advantaged (see below). But it seems as if fewer than 7% of the great thinkers are alive today.
2. People are getting dumber.
I don’t think this; I’m just listing this as something someone might suggest. It’s false. Per the Flynn effect, IQ has increased by around 30 points over the last century. That is a lot. Today’s average person, if transported back in time by a century, would be in the 98th percentile in IQ. I don’t know how long the Flynn effect has been going on, but I don’t think there’s any reason to think that people were much smarter for most of history than they were in the early 20th century.
3. Corruption of modern society.
Maybe we have bad philosophical ideas today that make it hard to do good intellectual work. E.g., maybe we have too many postmodernists who reject reason and objective reality. Maybe we have bad values, so we only care about material goods and titillating entertainment, not great art or great ideas. Maybe society doesn’t support intellectuals. Etc.
Maybe. I can agree that our culture contains some bad ideas, and there is a shortage of sophisticated values. But I don’t think society was so great in the past either.
Interlude: Advantages of the present
For most of history, very few people had much leisure time. They would get up in the morning and work all day. At the end of the day, they’d probably be too tired to do any intellectual work.
Also, very few people were educated. Never mind college; for most of history, most humans could not even read. Think about how many brilliant minds in the past were wasted because the person had to work all day at manual labor, could not go to school, and never learned to read or write. The past must have wasted the overwhelming majority of its people who had the potential to be great.
They didn’t have such great values either. For most of history, people didn’t really believe in free inquiry, and basically all societies were dictatorships.
We have enormous? advantages today, compared to the thinkers of the past. Think about how easy it is to get information and to communicate with other thinkers. If you want to think about X, you can very quickly and cheaply access what is known about it from your house. Researchers around the world can exchange ideas instantly. When you combine all this with the greater IQ of today’s people, we should be overwhelmingly outperforming the past.
4. Ancestor bias.
Maybe the datum is false. Maybe we just refuse to recognize a person as a “great thinker” until after they’re dead. One possible reason for this: the longer someone’s works have been around, the more time they have to accumulate other works talking about them. If we get our impression of how great a thinker is from how many other things are written about them, then we’ll have an inherent bias toward surviving works from the distant past (of course, most past works are forgotten).
Related point: a thinker’s reputation grows over time, just from word of mouth. Maybe it takes over a century to accumulate a really great reputation, so by the time you’re recognized as “great”, you’re dead.
I think there is some truth to this. But if you just look at works of contemporary thinkers, it is just hard to name any of it that is likely to last for centuries, the way Plato or Kant has. Qualitatively, current work just seems way less interesting than the great works of the past. (No, this doesn't conflict with my earlier post on history of philosophy, https://fakenous.net/?p=1168.)
5. Low hanging fruit.
Maybe most of the really important ideas have already been taken, so even if someone independently comes up with one of these great ideas, just like a past thinker did, the new person won’t be recognized as great. After a few thousand years of people recording their ideas, it just gets really hard to find any more great ideas that haven’t been stated.
6. Lured to other fields.
Maybe the potential great thinkers of today are being lured into doing other things, like starting up tech companies. I bet that a lot of people who could do excellent work in science or philosophy are becoming computer programmers, or lawyers, or some other high-paying profession. Maybe this was less of a problem in the past because there weren’t so many things for smart people to do.
7. Shortened attention span.
Maybe people of today just don’t have the attention spans necessary to make great intellectual achievements. You have to focus hard on one thing for years, with little distraction. Today, while you’re trying to think about a Great Problem, your phone keeps sending you social media notifications. You have to think about renewing your driver’s license and filling out your taxes. Contemporary news media is tempting you with titillating stories. You have much more entertaining games on your computer than anyone in history before about 40 years ago could have possibly conceived. You can't think about one thing for a decade.
8. The Academy suppresses greatness.
a. The Academy has taken over intellectual life. If some non-academic tries to publish his masterwork on philosophy, or physics, or history, no reputable publisher will take it. If it gets published somehow, then practically no one will read the book. That’s partly because non-academics are just crowded out by the vast mountains of academic work; no one has time to listen to non-experts. As a result, non-academics do not even try. This would be okay if the academics would do the great work. But …
b. Maybe the academy screens out great thinkers. Perhaps a person with the personality traits of a great thinker, including a high degree of independence and a certain sort of ambition, just would not put up with the regimentation of academic training, or they’d be weeded out during the process.
c. Or maybe the academy takes people with the potential for greatness and mediocritizes them. It funnels them into doing much less interesting work than they are capable of doing. I must say that I see some evidence of this. Academia funnels people into writing very narrowly focused discussions tied to the details of the academic discourse in a particular field over the last few years – because that is the best way to get enough publications in the right journals to get tenure. It encourages lots of reading of and detailed attention to other academics’ arguments and claims. It does not encourage big ideas about the great questions. It does not encourage developing an independent philosophy. Once you’ve finished reading 50 other people’s articles, it’s hard to have your own ideas that aren’t heavily tied to those other people.
. . .
I suspect that the explanation is a combination of several of the above (maybe all except #2, since 2 is false).
What else have I overlooked?