The Surprising Reason Why Plato Hated Innovation

if you don't innovate your peers will if your company doesn't innovate your competitors will if your country doesn't innovate your geopolitical opponents will one cannot be both a conservative and a technologist at the same time I saw a video game conference with the title games for change apparently games for fun is no longer enough only God goes from zero to one the rest of us go always from one to n macelli advises rulers to as much as possible not innovate but why would the Protestants the innovators dislike Innovation so there is a country known for

being a mere cockp cat this country has purposefully lack intellectual property rights and a systematic program of forced technology transfer at best its citizens are good technicians at worst they're are intellectual Pirates copying stealing spying this country Gerard reminds us is America 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 pmic pamphlets and they go I reject the charge of innovation you sir are the real innovator you fast forward

to today everyone in their dog wants to be an innovator and the most derivative Ventures all label themselves is 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 I distinctly remember what uh one of my favorite professors had

told me in the beginning of my first PhD level philosophy seminar he said Jonathan now that you're no longer in an undergraduate level class for your final paper I want you to write something original and 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'm might settle for a few foundational truths what does that have to do with originality what if wisdom had already been captured and conversely what if the pursuit of orginality led me

not to wisdom but falsehood or perhaps even worse trivialities claims which even if true do not matter now I felt somewhat affirmed in my suspicions as I was uh 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 uh directly translates to Hidden Treasure and the

idea here is that the Buddha had systematically hidden fully written Scrolls uh 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 mirror Discovery and not of creation so how did we get from desperately trying to show our unoriginality to Jonathan I want you to write something original that is the topic of my lecture today to trace the changing attitudes towards uh

Innovation which of course is a close conceptual relative of originality and the precise relation will make very soon part one of this lecture will be a reconstruction of innovation theorist bag godin's work Innovation contested which is a fantastic intellectual uh intellectual history that uh spans uh 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 your 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 phes when we study uh uh astronomy we don't read Galileo why when it comes to forming the right normative attitudes towards Innovation ought we reach back into the far past now the answer I would wager is because normative attitudes do not progress like a u Wildfire amidst a dry field that slowly envelops encompasses and illuminates greater and greater terrain unanimous monotonic cumulative instead and I hope you'll 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 opos skates as

soon as you move the flashlight to a new part of the room a previously uh lightened part would go dark as soon as we tend to gain a new profitable philosophical perspective we tend to abandon old ones in 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 now 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 and pathology that lead 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 a getting ahead of ourselves let's begin with part one intellectual history now Beno godin's intellectual history uh splits the Western tradition um into three distinct periods the classical view covers Greek Antiquity to the 16th century the Reformation view uh covers the 16 and 17th centuries and the modern view covers the 18th century to the present now what's going to be most interesting to us is how and why the attitudes towards Innovation changes uh between these three

periods but what are we studying when we study Innovation is there a consistent conceptual Foundation at play across these three Millennia I think there is consistent across all but one View and I'll make clear which one that is across all but one of the views on Innovation Innovation describes change that is artificial deliberate and novel and let's go through each of these criteria and their implications so first artificial uh describes artificial change it does not describe change natural change such as Seasons or floods nor does it describe Supernatural or perhaps Divine change like Providence or

fate nor does it capture uh a metaphysics or anology of change that permeates all as perhaps found in avit or heraclitis but it's not enough uh for change to be artificial for it to be considered Innovation second this artificial change also needs to be deliberate now this precludes man-made change that is say a merely an emergent property or an unintended consequence of a set of deliberate actions and what will become evidently important is that this Criterion will tie Innovation closely to the idea of the self as the action by which one's will and self-conception is

deliberately realized so keep keep an eye out for that and lastly Innovation needs to be novel now novelty is quite different than what we began this lecture with originality originality being the first to do something is neither sufficient or necessary for novelty novelty is simply strangeness and a deviation from expectations finding a new star well that's original but not novel because now we expect frequent astronomical discoveries now wearing a tan suit at a presidential address well that's novel but original as I've been told it's been done before now novelty only requires Innovation to be that

species of human activity which disrupts the status quo and violates expectations even if it is not the first instance of set activity Innovation then at its core is a social political concept describing a specific relationship between of transgression between a minority and a status quo now together the Criterion of deliberateness and Novelty pit Innovation against another species of artificial change that's popular in the history of ideas the natural trajectory of human Affairs or colloquially what people do when they're left alone think about the invisible hand in Smith the vicisitudes of fate in mavelli think about

the generation of states in Plato these are the unintended and expected behavior of human activity a social ontology if you will Innovation then is the complement to that ontology those intended and unexpected acts of will that goes against this default social ontology an entrepreneur disrupting the market equilibrium the prince introducing new laws right a philosopher king rejuvenating the institutions of aristocracy now in this model human agency is expressed in history through two forces the natural course of human Affairs and acts of innovation that jerk us away from it and so the Affinity toward Ward Innovation

or lack thereof will be strongly determined by what people conceived this natural social ontology to be and so before we've even begun I think we can already get a sense of why it may be interesting to study attitudes towards Innovation far from just the limited technological concept that we associate it with today innovation has been used to describe all consequential acts cultural political intellectual artistic which disrupt and redirect the trajectory of our species now furthermore it's also interesting to study Innovation because it seems intimately conjoined with other foundational Concepts influential in the history of ideas

the relationship between self and group the natural course of human Affairs and conceptions of selfhood following the thread of innovation and its changes will lead us to uncover a deeper change in a bundle of entangled ideas that we can reasonably call call majority now we officially start our story of innovation where I suspect most intellectual histories of the West are forced to begin Plato now Plato wanted to freeze his ideal polace in time and this is a sentiment that I think is fully audible in the laws in this later dialogue we are told that the

ideal polace ought to always approximate 5,040 families the games and toys of children should be frozen in time I quote to you laws chapter 7 when the same children always play the same games and Delight in the same toyss in the same way under the same conditions it allows the real and serious laws to remain undisturbed but when these games vary and suffer Innovations children have no fixed acknowledged standard of propriety and impropriety end quote of course as an Exemplar the Egyptians are praised for fixing a rigid calendar of festivals and unchanging set of songs

and art so why does Plato dislike Innovation so well I would wager that there's a concern from both the content as well as the form of innovation and the concern from content is somewhat tological because in a fully good Society the content of innovation which must violate the status quo it has to be novel necessarily Dev Ates from the good well Plato's project is to is Plato's project is to arrive at just such a thing right the capital G good now the contingent good not good enough but a good that cannot be meaningfully improved and

from which any deviation is almost necessarily bad this then is another foundational idea that Innovation is entangled with what we may call perfectability right whether we can conceive and achieve the full good if we can this platonic line of thinking goes let's get there and maintain it there's no need for innovation in Utopia now this explanation I think also disarms an immediate objection Jonathan Plato's clearly not against Innovation how could he be think to the three waves in the Republic platonic feminism platonic communism the philosopher king think about his rejection of the old gods and

his rejection of Homer Prime aasia Plato seems to be a social innovator now indeed Plato does not argue against Innovation full stop and but he encourages it only under two very specific circumstances the first is when the perfected organism is forced to react to change laws chapter 2 accidents and calamities occur in a thousand different ways forcing us to make a great many Innovations second and much more relevant to this objection Innovation is legitimate within a deficient organism laws chapter 7 change we shall find except in something evil is extremely dangerous now Contra our modern

position then Innovation is not something to be pursued in the ideal State one only innovates in order to stop having to innovate more but it's not just the content of innovation that Plato takes issue with also its form Innovations by the fact they are novel will inflame People's Natural fetish for novelty until they start seeking difference for differences sake L chapter 7 they worship anyone who is always introducing some novelty or doing something unconventional to shapes and colors making them despise old things and value novelty the biggest disaster any state can suffer now PL Plato

seems to have anticipated the develop developments of modern art with the unconventional shapes and color colors and the peel to shock but why is this an issue right let alone the biggest disaster a state can suffer well this love of novelty and think about L novelty is the relation of substance right in some form is a disregard of substance itself in so far as it is novel not in so far as it is good it is lotted that is the concern in some sense this love of novelty which again is the relation of substance uh

is is even worse than introducing Badness because the love of novelty makes citizens unconcerned with questions of good or bad it's not just abandoning the good it's abandoning the very concern for goodness now if not in its specific argumentation and formulation Plato's General attitude towards Innovation is echoed Across The Classical period namely Innovation is primarily a political and social concept it is Suspect with a slightly negative connotation and it is only legitimate as a corrective force and to show just how ingrained these three character characteristics are let me reconcile two ostensible counter examples which will

further flesh out this classical view the first discernable ancestor to our Innovation is a Latin innovatio which emerged in the 4th century and unlike in Plato took on positive connotations but observe how Inovio is used in the vgate Bible Latin translation job declares his faith that his wealth will be restored my glory shall be innovated and my bow shall regain its youth in Lamentations the Jews pray for their return to Jerusalem bring us to yourself O Lord and we shall return innovated are days as at the beginning as before humanist poet aurelli uses the word

innovatio to describe the fiery death and birth of the Phoenix now I mentioned that across all but one view Innovation and its predecessors described artificial deliberate and novel change well innovatio is that exceptional view which violates all three criteria even in instances where Inovio describes novel phenomena it is almost always a tighter subset that which is novel but not original or an unexpected return to a previous state in fact the word itself tells us as much because innovatio is derived from appending the prefix in which could mean within into inside to the root novitas which

means novelty inovo is novelty that comes from within or a renewal and of course as all these biblical examples show neither is it limited to describing artificial uh nor deliberate change so why do I suggest that this is a continuation of Plato in this classical view well the first answer is that there are really two intellectual histories of innovation here history of the con history of the word emical ancestors and history of the concept attitude towards artificial deliberate and novel change innovatio is only an ed logical but not a full conceptual ancestor and so uh

the positive connotations of innovatio do not represent a break from the suspicions of Plato as it's engendered by a different of overlapping concept indeed attitude towards the root novitas again which just means novelty uh without the connotation of return took on a much more mixed connotation where the familiar suspicions of Plato merged as a fear of strangeness but there's a stronger point to be made here not only does a positive attitude towards innovatio right this idea of a return not contradict the negative attitude towards Innovation there is a consistent philosophical underpinning that actually pulses across

both attitudes now recall that I've argued that constitutive to the suspicion of innovation is a certain view of perfectability the good can be achieved in any deviations after that state is to be avoided well not only do supporters of innovatio agree with this they go even stronger not only can the good be achieved it has been already and we need to undo everything since that moment Plato's suspicions of novelty are taken here to the extreme the only time when the new is lotted is when it's a return of the really old now let's move on

through time and towards the second ostensible break uh from the classical tradition and that's macavelli now while sparse melli positively used the Italian inov inovar in The Prince and the discourses now some of these uses had the Latin connotations of renewal and return but most or many of the uses did not for example melli prescribes Innovation as an arrow in the prince's quiver of vertue I quote to you melli here he's listing what is required of the of the prince to neutralize or destroy this those who can or must be expected to injure you to

innovate old institutions with new ones continues listing on the virtues Innovation then as it is in modernity is a positive positive prescription that the prince ought do so how is this not a break from Plato well let's bring back this idea that Innovation is always framed against the natural trajectory of human Affairs what I've called a social ontology and ask ourselves this well what is virtue set against the backdrop of what is it the counterbalancing force to well that's simple that would be Fortuna right the vicissitudes of Fate macelli's Florence was littered with political turmoil

the michi's two-fold Exile mavi's own rise and fall and rise and fall again and his um contacts with the tumultuous boura papacy the social ontology for melli was that of one m major crisis followed by another which the ruler must deal with innovation in tactics institutions laws was the only hope that the ruler had to survive now in this context melli is not praising Innovation qua Innovation but innovation in response to underlying change now the other instance in the discourses where Ma Val recommends Innovation is in the context of founding a republic and building institutions

from scratch of course these are the exact same uh two circumstance that Plato also advises innovation in response to change or building towards the just State let me let me frame this reconciliation as such if one were to ask both macelli and Plato whether Innovation had a place in an otherwise good and stable State the answer from both of them would be a resounding no the real difference between macelli and Plato then is not the ostensible break in their views on the purpose and desirability of innovation but rather the different social ontologies inherent in a

utopian or a practical work in fact upon closer inspection maell advises rulers to as much as possible uh not innovate and and especially not take on the appearance of innovation because it's very dangerous to be an innovator melli then also belongs uh to this classical view of innovation and helps us highlight one of its most crucial features that stand in stark contrast to the modern View for the classical view the purpose of innovation is stability without it the Natural State of Affairs is chaos for the modern mind this is exactly reversed the purpose of innovation

is disruption a species of chaos without which the natural state of Affairs is stagnation a species of stability in the classical view Innovation is done to stop innovating the ideal state does not need to innovate in the modern view Innovation is done to gender more Innovations the ideal state is constantly disrupting itself that's the first view the classical view um and let us now investigate the second one before we attempt to make sense of all of this and the second view is that of the Reformation especially uh specifically the the English Reformation now in the

16th century the English soon followed the lead of Luther breaking away from the Catholic church this consequential Christian Innovation however did not engender a love for innovating in countries where it took root just the opposite it spawned a Puritan adherence to Authority and a disdain of novelty it is in Protestant England and not Catholic Rome that the connotations of innovation would go from suspicious slightly negative to evil fully negative now it's readily understandable why the Catholics would dislike Innovation right after all Luther's Innovation had just cost them much of Christendom but why would the Protestants

the innovators dislike Innovation so well that very framing that very question I think betrays a modern myopia because the Protestants would have never described themselves as innovators the self-conception of the Protestants wasn't that they were adding on something new but that they they were revealing something very old to them the Protestants it was not they who were the innovators who but it was the Catholics who are the true innovators who've added Pagan artificial and Roman elements ritual hierarchy festivities upon the pure and divine teachings of Christ so it is under this intellect intellectual backdrop and

the new context of religion that Innovation alongside its negative connotations entered into everyday English language the new domain of religion changed the implications of each of innovation three criteria innovation's artificiality was contrasted against the purity of divine works and teachings it's because Innovation is artificial that all traces of it must be removed the deliberateness of innovation on the other hand call to mind schemes minations and conspiracies it was associated with uh runaway private opinions and Liberties and lastly a very specific species of novelty became emphasized deviation not just challenging the status quo but taking a

right status quo into the wrong direction what is core here is that the religious domain Works under very different assumptions of perfectability than the political Loosely speaking political designs are made by fallible humans whereas God prescribes us the complete and Timeless good and so there's an even greater reluctance to change it is no surprise then that with the understanding of innovation as man-made minations which deviate from the good Innovation became synonymous with heresy listen to how the word is used I read to you a pic of the time notorious detractors and psychop Fant derogating from

those things which they go about to innovate or abgate that so they may establish their own Novelties whether in church or state or both now as the tenor suggests Innovation is no longer an abstract concept to be investigated arms length put on a scale to be weighed it became became politicized and demonized it is the mark of politicization to see a proliferation of synonms renovation and Reformation jumped in popularity disciplinary language also popped up as people wanted to describe the phenomenon but without using the word invention in the crafts Discovery in The Sciences imagination and

the Arts Innovation was going on which is not under the banner of of innovation and this highly negative connotation of innovation uh developed in religion would seep back into politics through the bloody attempts at English republicanism known as the interregnum if in the religious domain Innovation was synonymous with heresy than in the political realm it became synonymous with Revolution by the 17th century Innovation had become a completely Untouchable word so how did Innovation transform from a derided idea to a woried ideal that we've come to know today the first thing to say is that this

change of innovation was a symptom of a much deeper cause where an entire bundle of entangled ideas transformed together together Revolution was also rehabilitated our conception of time became oriented towards the future and modern ideas of progress uh reason and individualism took root but if I were forced to entangle the specific pathway of Innovations Rehabilitation I would tell the story uh of how it became associated with this idea of utility it should come as no surprise then that Jeremy benam the utilitarian is the next thinker uh in godin's uh intellectual history now benam was one

of the first to publicly defend Innovation and in the passage I'm about to read you he's responding to Adam Smith's critique of projectors which were essentially entrepreneurs for speculation distorting markets among uh among other things I read to you bentham's response to Smith sir let me beg you whether whatever is now the routine of trade was not at its commencement project whether whatever is now establishment was not at one time Innovation end quote bentham's argument is this every useful thing we have now was once an innovation surely there are more useful innovations that can improve

upon how we do things today and I think what this reminds me of is uh his fellow utilitarian John Stewart Mills arguments one of them at least for free speech look at all the wrong ideas which we once thought were right we're probably holding wrong ideas now and therefore we should permit new and innovative ideas to be shared now we don't commonly think of mill in this way but I think it's productive to understand uh his defense of of free free speech as a defense of innovation in the arena of ideas as benam did in

the arena of Economics both utilitarians Arguments for Innovation proceed again through this idea of perfectability or in this case more accurately fallibility we probably aren't at the full good now in fact we don't even know what the full good is so we should be open to Innovations this fallible response to the question of perfectability is the Crux to Innovation Rehabilitation and I think it was uh engendered through at least three discernable Pathways the first is that you know Innovation once it start uh once it gets tied to utility cul toine productive economic technological activity now

in these practical domains it's natural to think that we have a long ways to Improvement that we are fallible now the second pathway of fallibility is utilities association with quantification once you quantify something GDP 0 to 60 time weightlifting the Temptation that seeps in is that the room for improvement is endless because the number scale is infinite at the very least one can always do better if not marginally fractionally so so here's an example uh numerical and quantitative reasoning gained immense Prestige through the Scientific Revolution and under Elizabeth the first Reign there was a concerted

effort to measure and quantify the state which became the discipline known as political arithmetic now for most of the western tradition uh the size of a state had very little to do with its goodness in fact it's almost the opposite right Plato wanted to freeze uh his Society in laws uh to 5,40 families and Aristotle often warned us of unruliness of a large citizenry so I think it's no coincidence that as soon as we started quantifying the state as soon as we started measuring intellectuals like bacon concluded I quote the greatness of a stake in

bulk or territory does fall under measure and the greatness of finances and revenue does fall under computation now of course today GDP demographics charts and graphs seem to be all that politicians care about when it comes to the health of their Nations the Insight Here Is this different epistemic modes carry with them different assumptions and prioritize different ends the epistemic mode of utility is quantity rather than quality it's number when framed in this numerical mode there's an implicit admission that more is better more can be achieved and there is an imperative to do so everything

starts becoming a maximalist Enterprise the third and last pathway of fallibility uh is simply the increase in knowledge in modernity right the Scientific Revolution the printing press enhanced travel and dependable accounts of other cultures all brought forth knowledge that really called into question what what were once thought of as settled answers and together these Pathways along I'm sure many more paved way for a very fallible self-conception where Innovation became slowly rehabilitated and through this Rehabilitation each of innovation's three criteria took on again a very different connotation artificiality was now celebrated man was responsible for shaping

his own destiny and improving his condition deliberateness created a cult of Genius around innovators the fact that one Wills a brilliant Innovation into existence shows that perhaps there's something special about the innovator and so the third Criterion of novelty also becomes more demanding Contra the Roman view where innovatio implied novelty that was not original in modernity we require Innovations to be novel and original more importantly contr the Reformation view this novelty was no longer the new that strayed away from the good but it became the new that brought us closer to the good through utility

Innovation become became tied to the idea of progress and so Innovation slowly began his Rehabilitation uh in the in the 18th century and initially it was just associated with the tiny sliver of of invention the useful Arts but after World War II it became it began to Encompass the entire life cycle of technology that we've come to know today from governmental policy uh all the way to scientific discovery to invention and ultimately to commercialization Innovation again became politicized but in the opposite direction not demonized but deified and if the symptom of De demonization is a

proliferation of synonyms then the symptom of day ification must be a reduction of the linguistic set today we want to label anything tangentially related and many things T unrelated completely unrelated as Innovation and of course the positive connotations from utility and Technology seeps back into the domains where Innovation was once suspected and derided when we label something as a social political Innovation today we mean that to be a compliment and thus we've arrived at our present moment so let's move on to part two of the lecture what does this intellectual history the changing attitudes towards

Innovation across 2 200 years have to offer us today well let me tease out that answer with a different question why did Innovation connotations change so radically the dominant reason must be that the primary domain of innovation had shifted as Innovation gets grafted into new domains it ingests their connotations and philosophical assumptions around perfectability I mean Loosely speaking politics lends itself to conservative assumptions we have a reasonable idea of the ideal state is and the purpose of innovation is to get us there and to keep us there religion tends to be reactionary we are given

a standard of Good by being far superior to us any Innovation any artificiality is deviation technology on the other hand is inherently Progressive not only are we not at the full good now we don't even know what the full good is what future discoveries and inventions that are have yet to be made we innovate to innovate some more Innovation becomes progress but that's not the end of the story because the intuition is formed in the dominant domain then seat back into other domains where it does not belong the Insight here is that words are the

vessel by which normative attitudes traffic across domains we are inclined to assume that just because we use innovation both to discuss political revolutions and and reforms and making of the iPhone that those two phenomenons share some kind of underlying a common logic and and of course normative status this is perhaps why normative attitudes change like moving a flashlight across a dark room where Enlightenment if so facto obfuscates as soon as we gain a profitable new philosophical Insight in one domain there's a tendency to extend it into other domains including previous modes of thought that were

indigenous and as a result probably more fitting language is the carrier by which the bacteria of normative attitudes spreads from one host where it was cultivated to another host or does not belong and once framed in that light I think the answer to the motivating question of what we have to learn is quite obvious but let me make it more obvious still what would we say to someone who holds the Reformation view of innovation Well we'd say something like this you unduly demonize Innovation right your dislike of innovation even in religion is already exaggerated given

recent events but the bigger issue is that you've projected this completely negative attitude onto the realm of politics and utility we moderns then need be need to be told the exact opposite we unduly fetishize Innovation our love of even technological innovation is exaggerated given recent events but even worse we've projected this disdain of the past and love of artificial change onto domains of social life and religion where does not belong I think many Curiosities of the modern social World um become more intelligible under the light of a misplaced technological optim ISM I mean we want

everything in the social World to Change these days we Delight in challenging Norms in transgression engaging in critique change of course was the one of the rallying cries which Obama successfully ran a campaign on and just the other day I was walking down Manhattan and I saw a banner an advertisement for a video game conference with a title games for change apparently games for fun is no longer enough now many people think about social progress I think in the mode of utility like we think about GDP more is better and more equality more representation more

rights we've abandoned that this idea that there is somewhat of an end or even goal to history and instead much like GDP growth we also want the social world to be in a state of permanent revolution well the platonic model provides another way of thinking about the health of the polus we want there to be more stagnation if we've reached the ideal State social justice is not a maximalist Enterprise but a balancing act around an optimal point now I don't think we're there but Plato reminds us that we need to have a there in view

now in like manner the highly negative views on Innovation formed indigenously in the domain of religion seem much more reasonable than of those today who so readily Embrace religious Innovations new W Trends combining religions arbitrarily dismissing parts of scripture if you truly believe that a being much Superior to you has prescribed the good then you should probably do what it says and not try to innovate your way out of it now there's no reason to spare technological innovation either of course as somewhat of a technologist at least myself I'm partial so let me provide you

a few counter arguments that I find if not totally convincing than at least somewhat compelling and to begin at the very least technological innovation should be suspect for it engenders social and religious Innovation right the Protestant Reformation couldn't have happened without the printing press Arab Spring was facilitated by social media and the Cold War went the path that it did because of the nuclear bomb and forward-looking it's unimaginable that in a world with genetically engineered babies with artificial wounds with people living on Mars with robots replacing much of the workforce that our social and even

religious World wouldn't change just as drastically one cannot be both a conservative and a technologist at the same time reactionary perhaps Progressive certainly agnostic of course but conservative and possible but beyond that technology has RIS risk vectors all of its own a technology is about giving Humanity more power but it uh it's it's Levering up to use Financial language it increases the volatility of human Affairs higher Highs but also lower lows I would wager that even in Technology Innovation is overly fetishized because in our peaceful half century the higher high Innovation calls to mind the

iPhone the PC harmless toothless SASS and helpful vaccines but there's an entire generation which experienced the lower lows to whom technology meant gas Chambers and killing machines 70,000 warheads and more than a few dozen nuclear near misses let us not forget so soon that this too is technological innovation now the philosopher Nick bolom has an analogy that I think to be uh somewhat Illuminating But ultimately too fatalistic for bolst room technological innovation is like taking out balls from an urn some balls are are white and and they're largely beneficial and that's maybe I don't know

penicillin some balls are gray and their consequences are mixed and that's say uh gunpowder but some balls some balls are black and those are apocalyptic and most crucially in this thought experiment or metaphor rather this urn is opaque and you can't see the color before you take it out will the printing press disrupt Catholicism will the displacement of workers by AI in set Revolution Will Gene editing un unleash devastating biochemical weapons over the long run bolst's point is that innovators can't know or control the impacts of their Innovations this is the flip side to fallibility

yes Mr benam there's probably a lot more white balls left in that ear but there's probably a few black ones in there as well if we continue on our path of innovation bom's line of thinking goes we could be all living to 300 on Mars seeing Kumbaya a post scarce world or we could have blown ourselves to Smither as we have um done almost done multiple times but the perhaps the most unsettling thing is that whatever path we end up on will result from our hands but be but largely to a great degree be out

of our control when viewed on a civilizational time scale Innovation is not a rational process it's not a hegelian unfolding of an imminent principle it's instead it's more like playing Russian roulette with bolom Z there's a legend told of the emperor tiberias an inventor who comes to Tiberius very very glad because he's invented uh a technology to create a piece of glass that cannot break tiberias calls him up and he asks well um have you told anyone else how to uh create this this invention and the inventor says no and so Tiberius immediately beheads him

to protect the glass making industry now For Better or For Worse not even an emperor can stop Innovation today the competitive Dynamics in modernity makes it such that if you don't innovate your peers will if your company doesn't innovate your competitors will if your country doesn't innovate your geopolitical opponents will we are forced to innovate forced to participate in history whether we like it or not for bolster the only political structure that has even a chance at stopping technological innovation would be a totalitarian One World surveillance and all three need to be true at the

same time state which I think we can all agree would be a cure much worse than the disease itself and so if the two paths ahead of us are Russian Roulette or 1984 then a third path starts to seem a bit more attractive now this is a path that is the bane of all economists in which every respectable educated person will tell you to loath stagnation marginal improvements in safe and boring vertical such as SAS just enough to keep our growth dependent economy from collapse but not too much as to engender foundational technological breakthroughs if

bolstr is right then maybe the best we can hope for is that Humanity has taken the lwh Hang fruits already and is too stupid or impotent to reach for any more fruits Peter teal famously lamented we wanted flying cars but we got 140 characters instead perhaps we should joyously respond amen hallelujah democracies have barely recovered from the trauma of social media perhaps it's good that they don't have to deal with winged automobiles I think I may have angered just about everyone on the political Spectrum from social progressives to right-wing technologists macavelli did warn me that

it was dangerous to be an innovator Perhaps it is doubly dangerous to try to innovate upon Innovation so let me extend to Olive branches now first uh even a cursory glance at my LinkedIn or my wardrobe for that matter will suffice to convince you that I'm no enemy of innovation so let me be clear what the thesis of this lecture is I hope to have shown the con Pathways of Technology through which innovation usurped the throne and then annexed religion and politics from which it was originally exiled and held in disrepute I'm not pulling out

the guillotine I'm pointing out that our emperor appears to be naked our current fetish for Innovation is an obvious pathology but I'm not so sure what the right relationship is I'm not saying that we're in a perfect social world I think bolst's earn is is much too fatal istic a complete metaphor for technological innovation and I certainly don't think stagnation is the only way way out or even that desirable I'm not here to prescribe an answer as much as to introduce a new question because in modernity an entire Fields such as Innovation studies are created

with the fundamental premise that Innovation is good and the question is just how do we maximize is how how do we accelerate it where I I want us to start asking where when and crucial if we should engender Innovation now the second Olive Branch I'm going to send is much more substantive so far my argument against the fetish for Innovation is in part one a genealogical critique and part two that it encourages unwanted change I will now show how the fetish of innovation stifles meaningful Innovation that is to say if after all of this you

still are as if I confess I still am a writer bent on originality uh a technologist or uh someone who's interested in social reform even then perhaps especially then you must relinquish the fetish of innovation and for this third and final task I turn to the philosophy of Rene Gerard Gerard brings to the foreground a concept that has been lurking uh in the background across its entire intellectual history imitation Gerard observes that the modern elevation of innovation is at once and the same a devaluation of imitation that is to say in the classical and Reformation

period it was okay to admit um imitation of others and of course frown down upon to innovate to do your own thing in fact a primary source of value came from your closeness to his distant ideal Jesus Christ amand of Gaul Julius Caesar in modernity that has flipped we would rather withhold this greatest form of flattery and instead as the modern saying goes be our own man we want to stand out we want to be unique we want to be well individual the source of value of the self is no longer proximity to distant ideals

but distance from proximate peers an imitatio Christi giving way to Keeping Up with the Kardashians now I just learned that in the old days there was a very funny uh derogatory slang used by members of the British Parliament and that slang was chair buer and the implication being that one does not come from a respectable enough family as to have inherited quality enough chairs the insinuation is that one is an upstart climbing to that position oneself of course we also have a word to describe the exact same phenomena self-made and our relationship with the concept

has flipped completely just as every self-made man wanted to show that he was not a chair buyer now rich kids are desperately trying to appear as if they are self-made as if they do indeed pay for their own chairs whereas whereas uh proximity with a great lineage once lifted our status up it now at least a some degree and to a certain way in a certain way tends to tarnish our achievements he didn't do it on his own the fear of every ambitious rich kid begins now this elevation of innovation and devaluation of imitation also

informs how we think real and meaningful Innovation happens the dominant mod modern view on IM Innovation is that Innovation and imitation are distinct and somewhat incompatible I mean this is how we talk about innovation in the realm of Economics right there are innovators and they are imitators there are those who go from zero to one and those who go from 1 to n those who pursue vertical technology or the or others who pursue horizontal globalization and those are fundamentally different people firms uh and countries innovators are the source of economic progress of value and imitators

are just helping to spread Innovations at best or their derivative leeches at worst now this may not be the most sophisticated View on Innovation the academy but this is the language that Modern Man conceives how Innovation happens as sprouting internally from The Genius of the innovator largely neglecting the other Pathways that premodern would have also attributed to say through the Mastery of a tradition or a divine inspiration now Gerard argues that the dominant view is wrong and this wide golf between the two concepts is really caused by our modern fetish for Innovation imitation is not

just an afterthought by which innovation spreads but it is a necessary precondition even stronger the dependency between the two are so constitutive to each that one seamlessly morphs into the other without a clear boundary they not they are neither incompatible nor distinct what Gerard wants to resurrect are key features of the Roman innovatio that any meaningful change must proceed internally within a tradition via and not Contra in imitation now as evidence that imitation and Innovation are inexorably linked Gerard reminds us that there is a country known for being a mere cockp cat for making cheap

knockoffs now this country has purposely lacks intellectual property rights and a systematic program of forced technology transfer at best its citizens are good technicians at worst they are intellectual Pirates copying stealing spying this country Gerard reminds us is America 18th and 19th century America to be precise Americans are ready to are soon to forget that at the time Britain was the dominant technological Powerhouse in the industrial revolution and had an antagonistic IP relationship uh with America who's trying to siphon technology from Europe by any means the very practices of pirating that America condemns China of

today are the very practices that it had to do in order to become an innovator no Act of innovation can be entirely done from a vacuum and thus must involve some degree of imitation and no imitation can be adopted without being adapted and thus must involve some degree of innovation America's usurpation of Europe as The Innovation Powerhouse is just one of many such occurrences in modern history Germany to England Mai Japan to the West Gerard concludes I quote the metamorphosis of imitators into innovators occurs repeatedly but we always react to it with amazement perhaps we

do not want to know about the role of imitation in Innovation dart's Point here is that innovators like to believe that they are fundamentally different from from imitators because it gives them psychological comfort that their position is both deserved and secure but let us not forget Steve Jobs took the gooey from Xerox SpaceX stands on the shoulders of the space program and PayPal wasn't the first to enable digital money transfers only God goes from zero to one the rest of us go always from 1 to n ostensible ax of X Neo Innovation are fabricated histories

created by an idolatrous fan base an insecure posterity or a very very clever marketing department now the unintuitive conclusion that Gerard's philosophy of innovation takes us to is that capitalism has been so Innovative because it encourages imitation between competitive firms and even geopolitical Rivals but how does capitalism do this after all as we've just discussed in modernity we are so reluctant to imitate others right imitate ation is somewhat an a mission that the model is in some way at least Superior to me an mission that I'd rather not make capitalism alleviates this reluctance to imitate

through the profit mechanism for Gerard profit is a reality check an unob way of determining winners and losers amongst competitors and this alleviates the unwillingness to imitate because if one is on the losing less profitable side one is forced to admit defeat and so there's no additional shame in imitation capitalism for Gerard is a sobering and ruthless Arena where losers are already so thoroughly shamed that there is no additional shame in being a mere imitator for basic survival so what happens to domains in modernity that do not have such an objective way of determining winners

and losers Shard points to the humanities as the canonical example now there's not a lot of mental gy gymnastics you can do to convince yourself you're winning when you're staring at a dwindling bank account in pages of red but in the humanities well you can face rejection after rejection poor reception after poor reception and still cling on to your the idea of your genius after all no great financier was recognized as such postmortem but plenty of great artists and philosophers have been perhaps people just need a bit more time now in the humanities the mechanism

to decide between Masters and disciples those with something to teach and those in need of learning is weaker and so disciples have more room to pursue the opposite strategy to imitation they try to demonstrate their independence by systematically taking the course opposite to to that of the Masters even if it goes against their own self-interests Gerard called this negative Mimis n called it reson your music captures the harmony of the heavens well that's great well mine is painfully dissident you make beautiful sculptures well that's great I'll autograph urals your writing is structured and systematic mine

is fashioned after an atonal Symphony where every sentence is equidistant from the thesis what is I iic about the strategy of negative mimesis is that it fails at the very thing it aims to achieve independence negative mimesis is derivative first because one is still dependent on the model by being exactly other than what they are originality especially if it's just putting a negative sign on the model is not independent it is derivative second because there tend to be trends of negative mimesis often one is simply imitating one model whose bre breaking away from a primary

model not even is negative mimesis not independent then often it's not even original now Gerard gives the example of the late 20th century Continental intellectual climate that was infatuated with Jack laon's I as an Exemplar of rebellion from structure and it drove everyone to be much more incomprehensible than their peers it was a mimetic competition of who could write in the most obscure way couched in this language of Independence and originality now this example goes to show the other the third and other major problem of negative mesis tradition such such as writing with Clarity and

structure often exists for very good reasons and so Gerard concludes the obligation always to Rebel may be more destructive of real Innovation than the obligation never to Rebel the very ask Jonathan I want you to write something original may end up being the greatest Blocker of meaningful originality now when we follow the dominant modern View and pursue Innovation directly we end up not with real Innovations and here I'm defining real Innovations as innovations that are valuable beyond the fact they're novel what we end up with are fashions innovations that are valuable only for their novelty

maternity then has fully realized Plato's fears recall Plato was suspicious of innovation because it would inflame our natural desire for novelty and make us chase after it for its own sake now the issue with loving novelty in this way is becoming indifferent to the object to substance altogether in so far as it is new not in so far as it is good it is celebrated but there's a much deeper issue here at stake this indifference to the object is conjoined with an obsession of the self now I've heard it declared many times in the tech

world I want to change the world almost always I can't help but suspect the declarant cares less about changing the world and being the one doing it this narcissism dra elaborates constitutes a Theology of self I mean think about the the constitutive elements of this modern fetishized view of innovation that we talked about the drive to be fully self-sufficient the refusal to remit to admit dependence to others in Tradition the insist of exilo creation the arrogance of going zero to one the constitutive components of our heavily fetishized view of innovation is evidently theological the only

being that is a suitable subject for such an action is the capital G Christian God the modern fetish for Innovation then at its core is really the desire to be such an innovator we want to have the being of God God of course the Christians have a word for that Satanism the theological critique of innovation then is that it represents a culture that has abandoned humility and encouraged satanic Pride we have deified the self and Innovation is our ritual of worship our right of passage for godhood but we are not gods and our desperate attempts

at establishing ourselves as such would be comedic if it weren't so tragic when finite dependent social creatures like us attempt to pursue radical Independence we simply imitate the appearance of self-sufficiency that which only entangles ourselves further independency we conform to contrarianism we slavishly rally under the banner of rebellion and we apish reproduce the appearance of Genesis there's a scene in a Marlin Brando movie where he plays this stereotype of Independence biker jacket slanted hat at the bar playing the drums and he's asked what are you rebelling against and he thinks about it for a moment

he lets out a weary sigh and he says what do you got if we only stand for Innovation we don't stand for anything other than untamable Pride Place us amongst conservatives and we become progressives grow us in a progressive myu and we fashion ourselves into reactionaries pop us amongst Christians we become atheists work in the technology sector for 2 and a half years and we start lecturing against Innovation so what ought we do in domains where we want to encourage real Innovation that's big if and not just derivative Fashions what is to be prescribed because

it clearly can't just be imitation at best jart has shown that imitation is a necessary condition but what are the other sufficient prerequisites for real Innovation the full formulation of Gerard's philosophy of innovation is encapsulated in this one utterance I quote the main prerequisite for real Innovation is a minimal respect of the past and a Mastery of its achievements it is Mastery and not imitation that is being prescribed just as Innovation for innovation's sake produces comical failures imitation for imitation sake produces equally sterile results because opposites at first glance first glance both are really motivated

by the same pathology a radical concern for social signaling over substance be that uh in seeking distance Innovation or seeking proximity imitation what we are after in both instances is a social relation and not the content itself Mastery on the other hand is concerned with the object one Masters things one imitates people Gerard then is simply echoing Plato's heed to not take our eyes off of substance the real innovator must be open to both discipleship or breaking away from tradition Rebellion but not have either one as uh the the phenomenological goal so to speak improving

the thing Beauty and art profit in capitalism wisdom in philosophy that must be the only primary goal that you are aiming for real Innovation then is kind of like an orgasm it can't be achieved by being aimed at focus on the thing and it'll creep up on you faster than you think but what makes this orientation of being object focused possible well that's encapsulated in the phrase minimal respect minimal as to not treat the past as unsurpassable but respect as to see tradition uh as having something important to teach us this attitude is a middle

way between the Sila of idolatry and the carpus of rebellion and so the course which the philosopher at the helm has to chart is radically different in different historical Waters to enable real innovation in the classical and Reformation era the danger was to Veer too close to the silo uh of idolatry right too much imitation too much respect for the past and the Philosopher's role is to delegitimize tradition to poke fun at it so that more may feel licensed to break free during our modern era the threat is to chart too close to the cibus

of rebellion too little respect of the past the unintuitive conclusion that Gerard reaches is that the love of innovation is precisely what is preventing real Innovations by discouraging its necessary pathway imitation and by trapping Us in social games all while convincing us of our independence the Philosopher's role the objective of this lecture is to WAN Society off this fetish in the final analysis then the fetish for Innovation threatens our future on all fronts by both encouraging un wanted change and by stifling needed change and with technology I suspect we can no longer stand ath history

and yell stop if we are forced to move history forward I suggest we Resurrect The imitative features of the Roman innovatio that seeks to build the future not by cutting clean from the past but by being rooted in and sprouting from it it's only right then that this project of rescuing innovatio took on the shape of intellectual history an exercise that is in itself innovatio thank [Applause] you thanks for watching my lecture if you want to go even deeper into these ideas then join my email list at great books. you'll not only get lectures and

interviews but also transcripts book summaries and essays all to help you explore the most important books in history if you like this lecture you should definitely check out nich's genealogy of morality because it also traces a history of how modern values came to be the main argument of that book is that everything you've learned to call morality equality altruism compassion moderation are values designed to suffocate greatness if you want to learn why n thought so and how we came to hold these values in the first place go check out my lecture on the genealogy you

can find links to everything we discussed today including transcripts and my booknotes in the description as well as my website great books. thank you