“I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.”
― John Cage
There are many ways of tackling the question of where good ideas come from. The most obvious one is starting with the psychology of creativity. However, I prefer to start with a much simpler approach: a historic-geographic one.
We know that good ideas rarely happen in isolation. Isaac Newton understood that without the scientists before him he couldn’t have come up with his grand ideas when he wrote: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. Good ideas don’t happen in isolation (a point to which we will return). Ideas tend to come in geographic-historically delimited clusters, in epochs and hotbeds of innovation, like Silicon Valley in the digital era. Or the Enlightenment of the 18th century, which brought a host of good ideas in politics, religion, literature, science and technology.
Let’s turn time back to 2.000 - 3.000 years. Unsurprisingly, we can see that the hotbeds of innovation lie in the early Civilizations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Sicily. If we pull out a genetic map of Europe, we find that these are exactly the areas that have the highest genetic admixture of Anatolian farmers.
Duh, not a very clever observation. Of course, the agricultural revolution and innovation go hand in hand. Except, that they don’t. Agriculture had existed thousands of years before civilizations came, both in the Fertile Crescent and in Europe. Farming spread to France about 7,800 years ago and to northern Europe about 6,000 years ago.
Anyway, let’s fast forward a bit to the Middle Ages. The map still holds a good correlation with innovation and farmer genes. In Medieval Europe, Southern Spain was more advanced than northern Spain, and the same is true for southern France. However, in Italy (Venice) the situation is reversed: the once so innovative south (Sicily and Rome) are backwards.
Let’s return to the present from our time travel and we find that this reversion is pretty much true for all the places on the genetic map. WTF happened? The places that were once so fertile in producing ideas are all behind now, both in ideas and economic productivity. Southern Spain is poorer than northern Spain, and the same is true for many other countries like France and Italy. The production of ideas and economic wealth seems to have slowly shifted from the south to the north over the centuries. Let’s pull out another map: Hunter-gatherer genetic admixture. This map is almost the inverse of the previous map and what’s more, at least in truly democratic countries it matches European centres of innovation: Britain, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, the Baltic states and Finland are far more innovative than their southern neighbours.
Now here is my claim - and I have been called racist for this: innovation has always come from hunter-gatherer admixture. The reader has the right to be incredulous as hunter-gatherers aren’t necessarily famous for being highly innovative and creative. The thing is hunter-gatherers were perfectly adapted to their lifestyle before farmers arrived on the historic stage, so there was simply not much need to innovate. Hunter-gatherers are known for being highly egalitarian and reluctant to take up a “modern lifestyle” like farming that involves rote work. My hypothesis, hunter-gatherer, who had joined farmer societies (mostly involuntarily due to necessity or slavery) simply had to become more creative.
In The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020) Joseph Henrich writes how WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) are like hunter-gatherers in being more field independent:
Mobile hunter-gatherers, who possess extensive (not intensive) kin-based institutions, are field independent. Consistent with this, anthropologists have long argued that, compared to farmers and herders who have more intensive kin-based institutions, hunter-gatherers emphasize values that focus on independence, achievement, and self-reliance while deemphasizing obedience, conformity, and deference to authority.
I will argue that education, egalitarianism (democracy) and optimization of workflows (i.e. making work easier) are exactly traits of people with higher hunter-gatherer admixture and that these lead to creative ideas, especially when the society in which these people live has a farmer mindset: obedience, conformity and deference to authority. I am claiming that creative people abhor this mindset These creative people include scientists and artists who have been notorious for their anti-establishment stance throughout history. Arthur Koestler, who was an early pioneer in creativity research, also counted comedians among other creatives such as physicists and poets. And he was spot on, comedians often make a living from their anti-conformity and anti-authority attitude.
Eastern Europe and Russia are placed with a high hunter-gatherer admixture that likely has not reached their full potential yet due to political circumstances. In particular, Russia is somewhat of a paradox. Russia has produced so much culture and science which is typical for hunter-gatherer rebirths (Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, etc.) and yet is ruled by oligarchs. Oligarchy is an indication of a third evolutionary tribe: pastoralists. I won’t go too much into detail about the role of pastoralist types in this book. They certainly are an important force when it comes to the diffusion of new trends, and they are on average more creative than farmer types.
My conclusion, while farmer types are high in productivity and in-groupism (kinship ties), hunter-gatherer types are more innovative and provide egalitarian structures. In brief, farmers lose out, people don’t get rich by hard work alone. This has been termed the “conscientiousness paradox”. Not only were forager (hunter-gatherer) types the creative innovative force for the most part of history, but farmer types actively were the conservative force throughout history.
Let’s return to the above maps one more time. Major ideas always tended to spread from south to north and rarely the other way round. Ireland was one of the places where early Christianity was most welcome. The Renaissance spread from Italy to her northern neighbours. The Protestant Reformation spread from Southern Germany to Northern Germany and further north. The Enlightenment did not spread to southern Europe as much as it to areas higher in HG admixture. Marxism was most popular in Russia, where there wasn’t even much industrialization or a proletariat for that matter. Southern Italians, on the other hand, welcomed the arrest of the Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci by Mussolini. Gramsci never understood why those poor southern farmers preferred more land to more freedom. If Europe's greatest philosophers in antiquity came from Greece and Sicily, they came from Italy and France in Mediaeval times, Britain and Germany later. Today Europe’s most innovative philosopher is perhaps the Swedish-born Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom.
A similar relationship is true for the Americas. Once so rich Meso-America lags far behind once backward Canada. Even within the US, it was the north that was liberal, industrialised and opposed to slavery, whereas the south was conservative and backward. For Asia and Africa, the north-south divide is much less clear, however, it seems to be true for the Indian subcontinent, whose southern regions are more innovative, prosperous and safer.
In case you find the idea interesting check out my latest book Dreamers, Visionaries and Revolutionaries : The Secret of the Idea People for more details:
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