An Unoriginal Post about Originality

Two posts in two days?

Boredom strikes. Well, not boredom: instead the certain malaise that settles over me when I've finished one paper but the deadline for the second is still so far away. It's when I try to finish as much creative or personal writing as possible, until guilt wrenches me back to my work.

Today I turn to the great myth of originality.

It's a hoax. Or rather, an absurdity.

No great idea is ever wholly original. We do more than stand on the shoulders of giants; we are entangled in a web of shared culture and experience. Their mingling creates the conditions for similar thoughts within individuals. These thoughts are born not through lightning from a blue sky, not by our own peerless ingenuity; instead they slowly evolve in our minds, through our society, bubbling up in moments that only seem like revelations.

An example: Darwin's concept of natural selection and evolution did not spring forth in a vacuum. The fundamental concepts informing his theory had been stewing for decades, even centuries; Thomas Malthus or Adam Smith were only the latest in a long line of thinkers propounding ideas of invisible hands or selecting forces. Others, like Charles Wells, developed very similar ideas to Darwin's theory several decades before Darwin published, and Alfred Wallace independently conceived of the full principle of natural selection, albeit in less developed form. Yet Darwin remains a shining example of scientific genius; his work the definition of blinding creativity. He was, of course, a spectacular talent, but his name survives because he was a meticulous researcher, a major name, and he had the connections. Beyond that, and for a myriad of complex reasons, the time was ripe for natural selection.

I remain a bit of an optimist. I believe individuals are capable of unique ideas - but only to a limited degree, and only with limited utility. In the sciences – and by this I include all methods of inspecting our world and ourselves - the foaming crest of something different always travels on a deeper wave. In art originality is especially elusive. It is practically impossible to imagine something completely unique, something totally outside the realm of experience; we can conceive only composites of what we have already seen. There are only so many pieces, and thousands, millions of people have already arranged them in different ways. And again, what is remembered is often less original than it is especially well done. You can always puzzle something together that might seem special, but will it be worthwhile?

That is a critical point. I feel originality is progressively more possible as ideas grow less useful. I can imagine a history of the sociological impact of cactus needles; I can imagine writing a book and sprinkling its sentences at random across the pages. Such groping toward the immortality a truly original thought supposedly brings is perhaps most unbearable in music. Listening to Arnold Schoenberg's experiments in atonality is mind numbing at best, but are the soothing sounds of Indy rock clones much better? Are we doomed to struggle towards originality - to fail spectacularly, or to decay into comfortable mediocrity?

Perhaps, but this is not to despair. Rather, the foolish quest for absolute originality is merely a function of our own egos wrestling with the impossible. On a personal level originality ought to be an ideal, not a goal. Ultimately, what matters is the struggle – our struggle, as a society, a species, to develop new, hopefully more productive ways of thinking and doing. If we do this together, are we worse for it?

Lamentations

One of the fun things about a blog is that you can occasionally look back at a previous post and consider how the world changed since then. When I last wrote the financial crisis was still in its infancy; since then it's expanded into a deepening economic recession. From China to Europe to North America, there's no end in sight. Maybe the stimulus packages will have some impact; perhaps they won't. Here in Canada we don't have to worry about such things. Our sagacious conservative regime has its head firmly in the sand, its focus squarely upon agitating the opposition parties into a political crisis.

Either way things are bad, trending towards disastrous, and there's no end in sight. Meanwhile, I'm on strike. Yes, strike. Every few years at my university students and staff swap books and classes for rusty barrels. It has resulted in pretty decent contracts when compared with the rest of Canada, though we'll see what we get this time 'round.

Our demands are pretty simple. The union represents both graduate students and contract professors, many of whom must reapply for the same job every term, even if they’ve worked at York University for decades (as some have). Meanwhile, though our graduate student membership has grown by nearly a third since 2001, a shared pot of money has not increased at all. We need that money to fund our research; ultimately we must research to eventually earn jobs. We want our professors to have a little job security, and we want our shared funds to reflect an increase in membership.

In a sane world these issues would have been resolved quietly some months ago. However, university administrations across Ontario are standing firm this year, apparently because of a decrease in endowment funds they gambled on the stock markets. Never mind that endowments are used primarily to award undergraduate scholarships; never mind that our university is currently sitting on $150 million raised through fundraisers to improve the quality of York's education. The union has responded by picketing the seven gates to the university and withdrawing its members' labour, to which the university's senate reacted by closing the entire university. 50,000 undergraduates are out of school; 4000 contract staff and graduate students are out in the cold.

With characteristic slowness, I'm working my way towards the point - or, in this case, the grievance.

Ignorance. We live in a culture where people are so swept up by the minutiae of their daily lives that they won't - or can't - consider larger, more abstract issues. A culture where undergraduate students hate their former teachers for locking them out of their classes because they have absolutely no idea how graduate school works, how contract professors live, or how a university is run. A culture where drivers seeking to cross a picket line would rather attempt to ram through strikers than consider the fellow humanity - and legitimate grievances - of those on the other side of the gate. A culture, more fundamentally, where Canadians reward a blundering, Machiavellian Prime Minister with increased support after his dangerous partisanship derails the government in a time of economic crisis. A culture where the majority of Americans (and Canadians) resist a bailout of "corporate fat cats" because they can't be bothered to learn the fundamentals of how their economy works. A culture and civilization ultimately governed by the few because the many don't deserve democracy.

On that note, it seems grim indeed that the economic and political model increasingly gaining currency around the world is that of China. This, too, is born partially from ignorance: China’s growth rates are absolutely necessary to avoid social chaos, and they are in part a mirage founded upon unsustainable environmental degradation. Still, one worries for the future of a supposedly democratic West where the demos can’t be bothered.