We don't have big ideas any more. That's the essence of Gabler's opinion piece in the New York Times (from back in August, by the way; it got lost among my browser tabs). What we have instead is a glut of information that lets us pretend we're thinking.
Do I agree with Gabler? Meh. I suppose I do, and yet, I can't bring myself to care.
Big ideas like the ones Gabler cites with admiration -- those of John Rawls, Einstein, Marshall McLuhan, and Betty Friedan, for instance -- contribute to a shared culture and world view (if only because we're arguing about them rather than thousands of smaller things), but it's hard to say they help us make better sense of the world. Rather, they help us to make some sense of the world. It might not be better. It might not even be right. Gabler approvingly cites Marx and Freud as big-idea men, but doesn't mention that many of both men's ideas have been discredited, and that some of those ideas have been blamed for a lot of human misery.
Am I arguing for the banishment of big ideas? No, not really. Without them, humanity would make no forward progress, especially in the sciences. Newton's big ideas allowed a lot of important, productive, and useful work to be done before Einstein showed us where Newton was wrong -- and Einstein himself couldn't have conducted his research had he not been educated about, among other things, Newton's ideas.
Yet we're not just living in an age of unprecedented access to information. We're living in an age in which it is unprecedentedly easy to rebut ideas convincingly -- or at least convincingly enough for a lot of non-specialists. It used to be that credibility could be judged by the glossiness of one's presentation -- not that that that was a good way of judging, but it was a way, and it still is the way a lot of us judge credibility. But with the Web lowering the barrier to publishing virtually to nil, idiots can appear as credible as geniuses.
We're also a lot more skeptical than previous generations, and not just because we've seen more ideas like Marx's and Freud's rebutted or debunked. Over the last four decades we've seen authorities of all sorts lose their credibility: government, the media, scientists (over self-aggrandizing fools like Pons and Fleischman, allegations of influence-peddling by corporations in scientific research, and alleged political bias allegedly contributing to research bias), and religious leaders (James Bakker and Jerry Falwell, for instance). Whether mistakes have been intentional or not, no one is trusted by everyone to be "an authority" or "an expert" any more. Those who have a "big idea" will have a hard time finding a receptive audience even if they penetrate the noise.
In spite of finding even more anti-big idea factors than Gabler cites, I still don't know that I buy into his thesis. It just smacks too much of the griping older people do about the way the world is, because the world isn't the same as it was when they were young. They might be right, but we'll never know because we all roll our eyes and ignore it -- even those of us who aren't young any more.
(Full disclosure: I have had a hard time slogging through Gabler's biography of Walt Disney.)
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