Of Ideas and Perspective

Innate in each of us is a desire to be recognized. Part of that is to be recognized for the things that we create, including our thoughts (assuming it is valid to claim our thoughts are our own creation, which is an argument for another time). The primary means of soliciting this recognition is through communication.

"There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to." -Montaigne

Though this desire to be recognized is the genesis of many human vices, it does have many benefits. For example, it is the invisible hand that promotes the economy of sharing of ideas, which leads to greater understanding and knowledge. Most of everything we know is something we learned from someone else, and the more we share (as a society) the more we know. I believe one of, if not the greatest human invention of all time was the printing press. Before the printing press the sharing of ideas was confined almost exclusively to verbal communication. Books were expensive and hard to duplicate, thus hardly distributed. With the printing press came an exponential growth to the sharing of ideas. Think of the advances in science, medicine, technology, etc. As more and more ideas are shared and studied those ideas can be combined, added upon, and further developed. But is there a limit to the marginal utility of idea sharing? 

In the centuries since the invention of the printing press most of the idea sharing to the masses has come from those deemed worthy by society to share their ideas--usually scholars and professionals--through books and articles. We have now entered a new age of idea sharing with the web and social media; an era where the sharing of an idea with thousands of people, which used to take months or years and costs an arm and a leg, is literally a few keystrokes away, and accessible to almost anyone. But with this increase in idea sharing also comes, I believe, a cumulative decrease in the quality of the ideas shared. I think most of us would agree that after spending an hour or so browsing through our news feed on Facebook or Twitter we come away feeling dumber rather than enlightened. I’ll read thoughts about the country’s economy from someone who obviously knows nothing about the theories of economics, or a repost about some awful thing about some politician from a website that is clearly just trying to push traffic to their page. There is something to be said though about the potential merits of such an increase in idea sharing—perspective.

It is becoming more and more difficult to sift through and discern the ideas worth assimilating and the ones that need to be discarded. It seems that when ideas were few and well established by credible sources there were more accepted universal truths. Truth in the world is now relative with everyone defining it for himself or herself, based on the billions of ideas being shared every day. If there is such a thing as universal truth, is social media leading us farther away from it? Though an increase in idea sharing facilitated by the web may be making it harder to understand truth, it does seem to be expediting and enriching our understanding of something else—each other.

Learning a "Useless" Language

I don't remember doing homework all through high school. I would participate in class, but if I didn't get my work done while at school it just wouldn't get done. I was a good test taker, and often made deals with my teachers, and that's how I got by. I got called on a mission to preach in the Georgian language. It's a language spoken by only 2 million people in a small country, and there are basically no uses outside of that country.
I spent 12 weeks at the missionary training center studying the language for up to 10 hours a day. This was an amazing eye-opening experience for me. I learned how awesome learning was. I learned how awesome gaining knowledge was. Before that point in life I was only concerned about sports and games. It was a new and amazing experience to get excited about learning and be entertained by studying. It changed my life. I think I read like 5 books before that time. On my mission I fell in love with reading, and it's now one of my favorite pastimes. Who would have thought learning a "useless" language would have such an impact on me and my learning for the rest of my life.

Humanism and the Nobodies

In class we briefly discussed humanism during the Renaissance. We discussed that during this time people became more aware of and concerned with individual accomplishments. Individuals became more important as individuals, and not as part of larger whole. I thought to myself about how, outside of characters from the Bible, I know the names of very few individuals who lived before the Renaissance who were not royalty. This may be simply because the farther back we go in history the less we know about the people then, but I wonder if it has to do with this trend of humanism during the Renaissance. It almost seems strange or out of place when I read details about regular folks who lived b.c.e. Is this just me, or does anyone else think similarly?

Georgia Invaded

"Russia Invades Georgia" the headline read. Immediately my stomach turned and panic started to build inside of me. The panic quickly left me, though, as I realized that the headline I had just read appeared at the top of relatively small article a few pages into the newspaper. If Atlanta was actually being taken over by Russians I thought that I would probably have already heard about it, and not from an obscure article in a newspaper.

Many people don't realize that Georgia is not only the name of a state, but also a country, which sits east of Turkey, and south of Russia, and I was one of those people. I was just out of high school and was more interested in whether or not Lebron James was going to stay with Cleveland than what was happening in small Eastern-European countries.  Fast forward a few months. While studying at USU I received word that I had received a very special letter in the mail back home in Centerville. After class I quickly drove the two hours home, and opened my mission call. "...You have been assigned to labor in the Armenia Yerevan mission...you will prepare to preach in the Georgian language." I had been called to serve in the Republic of Georgia. I immediately remembered the article I had read a few months previous. I don't know much about geography, but I did know that Russia was a fairly large and powerful country, and that Georgia was not. I probably should have been more worried initially about living in a country at war with a country like Russia, but I wasn't. It turns out I didn't need to be anyway. After doing some research I learned that the conflict lasted only a short while (which wasn't much of a surprise), and that things were pretty quiet now in Georgia. Serving in Georgia really changed my life. It is where I had my first glass of wine (inadvertently), and where I made some incredible friends. It's the reason why I'm studying business and preparing for law school. It's the reason why I'm married to Rachel Garn and have two daughters. And it is the reason why I'm at BYU, so I guess in way it's the reason I'm writing this blog.