What we owe the ideas we inherit
This piece was co-authored by Nason Maani, and his version is cross-posted here
Ideas, and the institutions that house them, are under pressure of a kind few of us anticipated a generation ago. Universities are being challenged, research funding is being constrained, and the very legitimacy of expert knowledge is being contested in ways that feel (and perhaps are) particularly acute and raw. In such a moment, it is tempting to reach for the language of defense, of protecting ideas, of shielding institutions. But that approach may not always be right for the moment. And it is particularly not right when we think carefully about our role in the world of ideas. Those of us who work in these settings could call ourselves producers of ideas, or thinkers, or scholars, or, as we suggested earlier in this series of essays, workers in idea factories. But perhaps more than anything else, we are stewards of ideas, both holding ideas in trust and improving them for the next generation. That shift in framing is central to the point of this essay, part of our Ideas about Ideas series. When we think of those who generate ideas as stewards, it pushes us to ask what such stewardship demands of those of us fortunate enough to find ourselves in the business of ideas, particularly now when the task may be as much to reinvent our ideas as it is to preserve them.
What then might be the responsibilities of stewards of ideas? We organize our thinking here along three lines. First, we talk about foundational moral, intellectual, and aesthetic responsibilities. Second, we dwell on instrumental responsibilities that have been implicit in our writing on these topics but that we feel here deserve to be underlined: the responsibility to widen the door for many, to speak when silence is easier, and to the institutions where ideas are generated that shall outlast us. Thinking of these responsibilities finds us following a single thread through this essay, that stewardship is not only about conservation, but it is as much about the willingness to build anew when the forms that are inherited are no longer fit for the purpose of the moment. Let us start with our foundational responsibilities.
In Science as Vocation, Max Weber argues that scholars cannot hide behind their methods; the choice of what to study itself is a moral choice. To have the privilege of time to think incurs an obligation about what one thinks about. This does not mean that science and scholarship need to always have a clear and direct application; it does mean however that stewards of ideas have to ask whether their work serves larger societal goals, a centering of consequentialism that we have previously argued for in health. All too often, we assume that what is ultimately consequential or most important is that work that was funded before, or work that aligns to the goals of the current dominant funder of science. But our responsibility transcends these imperfect criteria, which can and do change over time. Hans Jonas’s The Imperative of Responsibility sharpens the point further. In a world where ideas have consequences at scale, our responsibility extends forward in time, to those who will live with the real-world expressions of what we thought. This obligation feels particularly pressing now, as we live with the real-world expressions of once-fringe ideas. When the public is increasingly skeptical of what we produce, the answer cannot be retreat into technical narrowness, or necessarily to retreat to what we did before, but rather to lean into work of visible consequence, done in the open, with a clear commitment to our larger social purpose.
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