October 12, 2003

• Reduced to Basics

  
  

  When I visited the Smithsonian Arts and Industry Museum one of the exhibits we walked through was the Human Genome Project.  We all know about DNA, that it is composed of two long strand of sugar connected by paired combinations of four nitrogen bases.  Even more restricting the four bases only combine guanine with cytosine, and adenine with thymine.So in essence all your DNA is made up of GC alternating with TA pairs.And yet, for all the many similarities that DNA preserves across humanity, there are more than 6 billion unique individuals on the earth today.

  
  

  Fiction writers learn that all stories are variations of the same few plots.  Depending on which teacher you follow there are 3 or 7 or maybe nine.  I have a book that lists 77 masterplots, but it freely admits that many are no more than subsets and expansions of the basic ideas.  Yet out of these few structures come all the stories you've ever heard.

  
  

  Mortimer Adler undertook to outline the Great Ideas of Civilization some 7 decades back.At the time that he first compiled his list, he included 102 ideas.Since then he has added one.The Great Ideas derive from the Great Books of the Great Conversation which has been conducted across millennia.You don’t have to have read all the Great Books to be familiar with the Great Ideas, they permeate our logic, our language and sense of what is.People who have never picked up John Locke will argue that there is such a thing as Property and that a Property Owner has the right to receive benefit from use of his property even if he himself doesn’t perform the labor that produces the benefit.(In other words, you don’t have to know Locke to be a Capitalist.)

  
  

  But Locke’s articulation of the idea wasn’t our first introduction to it.All the Great Ideas are found in the writings of ancient Greece.Mark Twain said, “The ancients stole all our ideas from us …”For example, any discussion of Change must begin with the writings of Heraclitus who predates Plato and Aristotle but said that the only constant of the Universe is Change.

  
  

  My imagination has been caught by the suggestion of my friend that I consider for my next book an introduction to basic philosophical ideas and concepts.Not an Introduction to Philosophy such as you might encounter during your Freshman year at any University, but a brief and simple discussion of Ideas.Why do we ask these questions and what difference do they make to the way we live? Adler attempted to cover 22 of the basic ideas in a PBS series with Bill Moyers (and as an aside, if I could have traded lives with anyone from the past century it would be Bill Moyers, that man has gotten to sit down and participate in deep conversation with everyone I would have wanted to talk with.)When Adler’s series was edited and published in a book, it covered 522 pages not counted appendices.Yikes.

  
  

  But then again – how many people will pick up a 522 page volume?How many Junior High students would read it?I think that’s my target audience.Junior High aged people who are at the brink of a lifetime in which they will be wrestling with the Great Ideas whether they know it or not.I’m intrigued by the thought of arming them with just enough of an understanding to give them tools for starting their journey.So that’s my Sunday morning thought.

  
  

  I tried commenting yesterday and it didn’t go so well.Some of the pages wouldn’t load, some of the comments wouldn’t load, and on at least one site a comment that I submitted, disappeared.I’m NOT griping about Xanga, oh, no, I’m not.After 2+ weeks away, I’m grateful to Xanga that it’s here.Plus, knowing the problems that I had commenting yesterday, I’m going to assume that all the many people who are subscribed to my site tried to comment on ME as well, and that if only the stars were aligned properly, I’d have had hundreds of comments in the counter …

  • 8:02 am
  • 16 Comments