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BOOKS 26 JULY 2016

Back to the ture – mankind’s new ideas that aren’t new

at all
Rethink: the Surprising History of New Ideas by Steven Poole reviewed.
BY MICHAEL BROOKS

GETTY IMAGES/LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION

   
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W
hen Steven Poole writes a book review, he likes to lie to himself. His only
conscious decision is to jot down a few notes as the deadline approaches.
There is no pressure to think deep thoughts, he tells himself, or to reach the
required word count. Then invariably, in a few hours, he has written the entire
review. This happens time and again. No matter how many times he convinces
himself he is merely jotting and thinking, the result is a nished article.

Human beings are extraordinarily good at deceiving themselves and possibly

never more so than when they think that they have had a new idea, as Poole
makes clear in this fascinating compendium of new ideas that aren’t new at all.
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He digs deep into subjects as various as cosmology, economics, health care and
bioethics to show that, as the writer of Ecclesiastes put it (long before Poole),
“There is nothing new under the sun.” This is demonstrated in the re-emergence
of ideas such as therapeutic psychedelic drugs, inherited traits that aren’t
programmed into the genome, cognitive behavioural therapy, getting our protein
from insects, and the multiverse.

Poole explores these propositions deftly enough, but they are not what interest
him here. Rather, his subject is the way that we have seen them all before. He ties
together what he concedes is a “highly selective snapshot of the looping
evolution of ideas” with the observation that: “Any culture that thinks the past is
irrelevant is one in which future invention threatens to stall.” Originality, he
argues, is overrated.

The book might be something of a downer for those who like to gaze at
“progress” with wide-eyed admiration. The starkest takeaway is that we are
clearly hopeless at putting good ideas to work. In his discussion of arti cial
intelligence, for instance, Poole mentions the emerging idea of a universal basic
income, which is likely to become a necessary innovation as robots take over
many of the least demanding tasks of the human workforce. Yet he traces it back
to 1796, when Thomas Paine rst published his pamphlet Agrarian Justice.

Maybe this tells us something about the limits of the brain. It has always
innovated, thought through its situations and created solutions. But those
solutions can only be drawn from a limited pool of possibilities. Hence we get the
same ideas occurring inside human skulls for millennia and they are not always
presented any better for the passing of time. Richard Dawkins and his ilk provide
a salient example, as Poole points out: “Virtually none of the debating points in
the great new atheism struggles of the 21st century . . . would have been
unfamiliar to medieval monks, who by and large conducted the argument on a
more sophisticated and humane level.”

So, perhaps we should start to ask ourselves why so many proposed solutions
remain unimplemented after what seem to be thousand-year development
programmes. It is only through such re ection on our own thinking that we will
overcome our barriers to progress.

Sometimes the barriers are mere prejudice or self-interest. After the Second
World War, Grace Hopper, a computer scientist in the US navy, created a
language that allowed a computer to be programmed in English, French or
/
German. “Her managers were aghast,” Poole writes. It was “an American
computer built in blue-belt Pennsylvania” – so it simply had to be programmed
in English. “Hopper had to promise management that from then on the program
would only accept English input.”

It is worth noting that Hopper was also a victim of postwar sexism. In 1960 she
and several other women participated in a project to create COBOL, the
computing language. Critics said there was no way that such a “female-
dominated process” could end in anything worthwhile. Those critics were
wrong. By the turn of the century, 80 per cent of computer coding was written in
COBOL. But this is another unlearned lesson. A survey in 2013 showed that
women make up just 11 per cent of software developers. A swath of the population
is missing from one of our most creative endeavours. And we are missing out on
quality. Industry experiments show that women generally write better code.
Unfortunately, the gatekeepers only accept it as better when they don’t know it
was written by a woman.

Solving the technology industry’s gender problems will be a complex

undertaking. Yet it is easy to resolve some long-standing di culties. Take that
old idea of providing a universal basic income. It appears to be a complex
economic issue but experimental projects show that the answer can be as simple
as giving money to the poor.

We know this because the non-pro t organisation GiveDirectly has done it. It
distributed a basic income to an entire community and the “innovation” has
proved remarkably e ective in providing the means for people to lift themselves
out of poverty. Projects in Kenya, Brazil and Uganda have made the same
discovery. As Poole notes, even the Economist, that “bastion of free-market
economics”, was surprised and impressed. It said of the scheme: “Giving money
directly to poor people works surprisingly well.” You can almost hear the
exclamation “Who knew?” – and the slapping sound of history’s facepalm.

Michael Brooks’s books include “At the Edge of Uncertainty: 11 Discoveries Taking
Science by Surprise” (Pro le)

Michael Brooks holds a PhD in quantum physics. His most recent

book is At the Edge of Uncertainty: 11 Discoveries Taking Science by
Surprise

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This article appears in the 21 July 2016 issue of the New Statesman, The English Revolt

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