Emergence

WHAT’S ‘DANGEROUS’?

 
What do we mean by dangerous ideas?
 
In the most straightforward sense, they’re things that can harm us – either through our malevolance (think of terrorism), ignorance (think of fundamentalism) or inaction (think of climate change).
 
These represent real and present dangers, and we’ll speak to them – though sometimes obliquely – throughout the conference.
 
But there is another and more provocative sense of the word ‘dangerous’ – and it’s this sense that we’re really after here in Camden.
 
Truly ‘dangerous’ ideas cause slowly unfolding explosions in the mind of a person, group or society. These ideas challenge our taboos, upend our certainties, and transform our sense of ourselves and our place in the world. They call us to new possibilities, and cause what the philosopher Thomas Kuhn first called paradigm shifts (a term that’s been killed with kindness).
 
The story of many dangerous ideas follows a familiar arc that starts with a few lonely pioneers, out on the edge of human experience discovering or inventing a new way of interpreting the world.
 
Because their ideas attack convention and received truths, they are at first rejected out of hand.
 
But over time, as the evidence mounts, as the truth slowly outs itself, there comes a rapid and clamorous rush. A veil is torn open in our consciousness, and we see the world anew.
 
This process happens continuously in individuals, organizations, and society at large. And though we rightly fear the sense of groundlessness that such ideas engender, we must embrace them nonetheless. For danger is at the heart of innovation.
 
Or to say it another way: dangerous ideas are the only ones that truly change the world.