the Power of Ideas

Popular culture has a conception of ideas as being abstract and not being particularly relevant to life being live. It doesn’t take much effort, though, to see that ideas have much more power than we typically give them credit for. I don’t want to go on and on about this, because I feel like I’m stating the obvious… but I find cases where ideas have such a powerful weight to be really fascinating. This weekend, I found two such cases and thought I would post them up. 

This is a review of a new memoir by a woman who spent a relatively long period of her life being quite miserable because of her attachment to the notion of being muse to an artist:

What attracted culture-hungry young women to artists and writers a half- century ago? Roiphe, who grew up on Park Avenue aware of her mother’s misery and her father’s affairs, preferred burning out “like a brilliant firecracker” (borrowing an image from Kerouac) to living “like my mother’s pearls resting in a velvet box.” But a woman did not have to go up in smoke to feel alive — it was possible to find an exhilarating kind of breathing space with a man absorbed in his work, who did not provide safety, who did not or could not play the traditional male role. As for writing, painting — anything serious — one had to do that in defiance of the widespread dismissal of women’s efforts, not that it wasn’t hard. Roiphe was not the only talented girl who gave up writing too soon, after a few crushing words from her tweed-jacketed English professor. Sadly, her ambition shrank to this: “I was going to be a muse to a man of great talent… . I was going to caress the forehead of the bedeviled and misunderstood F. Scott.” She was a dangerously naïve innocent with an unhealthy fixation on fame and glory, which she would share with the grandiose young man she fell for…

And this is a interview with a woman who just wrote about male friendship among American adolescents: 

How can we help boys and girls (as well as men and women) to remain better emotionally connected to one another?

We need to rethink how we are defining maturity, which, inthis culture, is equated with independence, autonomy, and separating from others. I think maturity should be defined as the ability to have mutually supportive, intimate, and deeply empathic relationships. If that was the epitome of maturity, the way we think about parenting and about schooling our children would radically change. In addition, if we paid attention to the decades of research underscoring the importance of friendships for the psychological health of males and females, we would also change the way we parent and school our children. Rather than autonomy, independence, or critical thinking being the goal of development, the goal would be to foster children’s social, emotional, and cognitive capacities so that they can thrive in all areas of their lives.

It says something of the power of ideas or ideals that they can make us unhappy. I think that’s also why they are worth exploring.