How Ideas Travel

Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther partly as a warning about the dangers of extreme feeling, such as the romantics cultivated. There was allegedly a wave of suicides copycatting the suicides in Werther: Goethe was not a good warner, but he was an awfully good depicter. Maria Theresa got worried and, just to be safe, banned Goethe entire. This shows up in Wikipedia as a partial explanation of why there is a hundred-some year hole in Austrian literary production. 

People find such meddling funny, partly because they don’t think much about the power of ideas. One of my heroes, Cordwainer Smith, pictures the ideal government as having two important jobs: preventing the export of religion and preventing the export of news. He was a China expert and knew something about what ideas do when they get loose. 

Anybody who thinks and writes is morally bound to know something about how ideas travel, for the same reason that anybody who shoots a weapon is morally bound to know something about who might be standing in the line of fire. We have examples in front of us of how fast ideas propagate: Facebook, the economics and aesthetics of Apple, the connected world. All of these revolutions were accomplished so fast and so thoroughly that most people cannot imagine what it was like before the revolution. That’s how idea-revolutions work; they wipe out the history of their predecessors, make the earlier thoughts unthinkable, except by antiquarians. 

So, I have come here to Austria to see what is happening with ideas about food. Knowledgable people all over the world are worried; the current food-ideas lend overwhelming support to patterns of shipping, consumption, toxification, and land-use that have frightening consequences, projected a few decades into the future. Lots of people would like to see food ideas change. So, intellectuals make gambits: they put ideas out - regional food, slow food, respect for animals, food security. Some of these get taken up, here and there, in advertising, in policy, in the operating rules of idealistic farm and retail businesses. 

One doesn’t need interviews like mine - long, rambling conversations with farmers and gardeners and merchants - to study these idea-gambits: they are well defined in various literatures. Interviews are useful for seeing what happens to ideas as they enter the minds of individual people, as they become part of how people make meaning of their lives through conversation and sometimes conversion. Do the ideas fit with other stuff?  Do they get domesticated, or do they remain on the fringes of people’s lives? (How often do food decisions really reflect a concern about buying local products: once a week or once a day?)  Do they combine with apparently unrelated ideas? (Does ‘eating organic’ come to be seen as a species of ‘conspicuous consumption?’ ) Are they linking up with powerful ways of thinking that are already central to people’s motivations? (Does the idea of food security combine with old memories from the war, about the time when the country fed the cities while the rebuilding was happening?)

Ideas are like viruses. They mutate in minds, in small ways. We have a terrible fear that certain viruses will become airborne. Many people have the hope, that organic agriculture will become airborne. Whether out of fear or out of hope, it seems awfully important to study with a microscope what happens to ideas in the culture media of minds and communities — what happens, that is, in the mind of a third generation baker in Bad Zell and around the Stammtisch in Gasthof Ahorner at Sankt Thomas am Blasenstein.