The clearest thinking emerges with a sense of perspective, from a distance as if seen through a looking-glass. The angle of approach can be adjusted; the focus fine-tuned.
It’s natural for young people to strive for outstanding results in a particular field so that they may be invited into an elite group. Once accepted into the Academy or Society, they recognize that the group itself, adherent to longstanding traditions, has set restrictions, unspoken but no less binding, upon how they may think and act, speak and behave. In short order, the youthful energy and creativity they bring is stifled, and ultimately silenced.
This form of inertia happens almost as a force, or drift, in business and the professions, in literature and the arts, in technology and science. Psychologists have studied this phenomenon, referring to it as “conformity to ingroup norms.” Intellectual historians have long understood how those working from outside the Academy are unbound by such self-imposed restraints, and thus better enabled to find and create breakthroughs. In discussing the origins of the Industrial Revolution, Brownowski and Mazlish have noted:
Because the Royal Society was now dominated by this intellectual snobbery, the fine technical work of the eighteenth century was done outside it. It was done by rather unorthodox men, many of them non-conformists, who had therefore been excluded from the universities and had learned their applied science at first hand, in their own trades. And they came to form their own societies…Men such as these made the practical inventions on which the Industrial Revolution depended…[1]
“And they came to form their own societies”—food for thought for young people seeking alternatives to the established order. Those on the outside of the Royal Society were the ones driving the Industrial Revolution. The established intellectuals had the self-assigned certainty of knowing they were labeled as “extraordinary” and “elite,” but once bestowed such a moniker, any true intellectual breakthroughs they might have devised came to a grinding halt. It’s almost as if having achieved their objectives, they ceased to strive for any new or greater goals. Their purpose was no longer to discover and invent, but merely to maintain their seat on the Royal Society.
As Francis Bacon in the Novum Organum wrote:
It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve forever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress.[2]
Does this mean one should invariably eschew the Academy? No, but it does mean that young people (as well as those older) must be vigilant that their best ideas may never see the light of day if they permit the Academy to channel their energy only into areas deemed “appropriate” and “acceptable.”
The view from outside the Academy is clear: the air is pure, the horizon limitless. In law and medicine, in science and technology, in art, music, and literature, the real breakthroughs of the future will come from those on the outside—they will drive the future because they are unconstrained by the past.
[1] J. Brownowski, B. Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel, Pg. 308 (Harper & Row 1960)
[2] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, in The Philosophers of Science, Pg. 84 (Random House 1947).
