Making the World Safe for Smart: Why TED Matters

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: Society

Published September 21, 2009 @ 11:11AM PT

Venture Capitalist Steve Jurvetson shares a love of rockets at TED2007

For gifted students attending public schools, one of the quickest lessons they learn is how to subdue and minimize their own intelligence and creativity for the sake of blending in. This lesson is well taken, because we live in a society that veers between wary of and openly hostile towards intelligence - of just about any kind. In America, the gospel of average is one of the most recurring and potent political and societal forces. This is why it's so remarkable - and so important - that the revered TED Conference has achieved what it has over the last few years.

The strands of American populist anti-intellectualism can be traced back basically as far as you want. You can certainly look at the Bush years, with their unyielding attacks on science and really, the very idea of expertise. You can go back to Nixon, whose hatred of his university peers is the stuff of legend. You can cite the Know Nothings and other fringe political movements that reveled in ignorance and denial rather than in fact. You can go back to Andrew Jackson, perhaps the first major American political figure to wrest control from the select group of New England blue-bloods that had largely driven things up until that point.

Regardless of where you cite its beginnings or which pieces you chose to include, the fact remains that this has been an important part of American social and political history. In some ways, it's easy to understand how this came to be. The founding mythology of America is about wresting control from tyrannical rulers and placing the onus of power on the common man. When there is no more tyrannical ruler, an intellectual elite becomes a pretty decent stand-in for those who recognize how powerful the binary is.

Perhaps even more than that, there is something decent if warped about the idea. The decent piece is the notion that everyone has both the right and the capacity to contribute to shaping their own destiny and the destiny of the groups which they belong to. This is the beautiful idea at the center of democracy.

But this should lead us to ask how we can better unleash the unique talents of each individual. It should not lead us to ask how we can tear down those whose talents are different than the group. The point is that everyone has talents that are different than the group.

While from the list above it may seem like this is a conservative-liberal thing, it's not. The founders of the modern conservative movement began by founding journals, think tanks, finding their way into universities, and more. Their urge towards conservatism was a fundamentally different rational understanding of the role of government, not the sort of brutal, silly, naive, shrill, nativist hollering that has somehow become the characteristic of that movement today. There are still some conservative intellectuals and for the sake of all of us, I hope they can reclaim their movement.

It's against this backdrop that the TED conferences, a gathering of some of the world's brightest minds, has risen to increasing cultural prominence. TED invites some of the world's most intelligent people to give what they dub the "talk of their life," a twenty minute performance that is broadcast not only to the people in attendance, but around the world. Over the last couple years specifically, TED has cultivated an immense online following, using its TED.com website, Youtube, Facebook, and basically every other distribution medium it can get it's hands on to use it's talks to promote conversation, discussion, and action.

This week, the awesome folks at frog design are releasing a special TEDGlobal-themed issue of their excellent quarterly publication designmind. The theme is "The Substance of Things Not Seen," and the issue features guest pieces, commentary, and interviews with fascinating folks like Second World author Parag Khanna. What's wonderful about the magazine - just like TED itself - is that the ideas and intelligence celebrated are of no one particular shape. It is not just think tankers, it is not just artists, it is not just activists - it's anyone who sees the world in a way that could make the rest of us think just a bit differently.

I was one of those public school students that learned how to turn it down very quickly. I spent years avoiding being outed as participating in the "gifted" program until finally, I just stopped caring. I was lucky though, because I had a family, friends, and the random lucky personality characteristics to be fine.

We cannot continue to teach young people that being smart sucks - whatever type of smart they are. We cannot keep perpetuating the lie that "not caring" and "being cool" are the same thing. The challenges we face are too great for us to condition a whole generation to suppress what they're good at and what they care about. More than that, the beauty of the world that comes from discovering passion and talent is the single best force we have to counter a pessimistic, bleary view of things.

TED isn't the only answer, but I feel and I hope that there is a shift away from the rabid anti-intellectualism of the last decade. Its substance is certainly not yet easily seen, but I see it in the students I've worked with - from every type of university - who are shedding apathy as the fashion of day's past, and committing their minds and spirits to be and do more.

All day, I'll be sharing some content from the TEDGlobal issue of designmind, as well as from the upcoming Pop!Tech conference - another brilliant place to see incredible minds in action.

(Photo: Steve Jurvetson)