BBC had an interesting podcast on the Bloomsbury Group this week. The Bloomsbury Group included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and others that was active in the early 20th Century in England. I’m not suggesting I agreed with much of the ideas coming out of that gang but it was a reminder of my longstanding view that we need to talk -and talk a lot - if we want to address the big challenges of our time.
I have this romantic idea of Russian dissidents chain smoking and drinking too much vodka as they planned for the end of Communism (much the same as the Bolsheviks planned to bring in the Communist revolution - although I read somewhere Lenin didn’t drink much).
Since I started in economic development 30 years ago I had hoped to find a kind of Bloomsbury Group in New Brunswick - but there hasn’t been much at least that I could find. We had the Self-Sufficiency Roundtable which was kind of nice (I co-chaired that for a while) - that brought together an interesting mix of artists, social policy types and a few economic types. There have been other ‘thinky-tanky’ kinds of activities - Pond-Deshpande does some interesting stuff - but I’d like to see more.
For me this was even more important in places like New Brunswick. In the larger provinces there are more formal think tanks where these collisions presumably take place.
I know you will say there is too much talking these days - everyone is yakking - but yelling at each other on social media is at the opposite end of what I seek. I seek really bright people in their subject matter domains - interacting - getting up close and persona - debating the biggest ideas and then bringing forward solutions.
Some of the best moments in my career have been sitting on old, dirty couches chatting up folks about important issues.
And, yes, I know that kind sounds like the elites, I guess, and not many like the elites anymore.
The Elites are, by definition, the intellectuals...superior in intelligence, education, and attitude. They don't start revolutions, they pick up the pieces afterwards. They are hated because they are superior to the rest of us and most hate begins and ends with jealousy. Talking is good, but we should not listen to people who have no expertise in the current topic. An artist has no business talking about nuclear power...a nuclear scientist usually has no expertise in the social value of post-modern art. Today we are faced with technologies that only a tiny fraction of people understand, but everyone has an opinion. Never in human history has so much information been readily available, and we have reached the point where logic crushes fantasy, and we struggle to reconcile our beliefs. When we talk, we use platitudes and generalities, scoffing at science and logic. We think "Belief" is a substitute for reality, but logic defies our fantasies. Whether talking will help or hinder our efforts to create a better world is open for debate and something we should discuss in public.