Great minds and big ideas
I met a friend for a glass of wine the other day for the first time in a while. That usually means we have a lot of gossip to catch up on. Where have you been? Who have you met? What’s happening at work? Etcetera. But this time we got straight into some really deep discussions about big ideas.
We talked about institutionalised racism and the patriarchy and how to be a good ally and when it’s okay to stop doom scrolling and not feel guilty about the fact that one has the privilege to remove oneself from these discussions. (We are both cis, hetero women.) I love diving into these kind of discussions with good friends and I have noticed that it is happening more and more often these days. And it made me wonder if this could be a positive effect of the Covid-19 pandemic. Hear me out…
I have heard it said that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people. Since the pandemic and its associated rules and restrictions, many of us have found our social lives and our work lives severely curtailed. There are no events. And we hardly meet other people. And, if we do, they have very little exciting to tell us about what they have been doing and with whom. There is no gossip! Could it be that in the absence of events and people to talk about, we are forced to talk about ideas instead? Have we all become great minds during the pandemic?
“What evidence do you have for your argument?” I hear you say. I submit for your consideration, large pieces of evidence, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, which has opened discussions about institutionalised racism and inequality, as well as the recent Reclaim These Streets action in the UK following the murder of Sara Everard, which brought to the fore the sexual harassment that women are subjected to by men on a daily basis in patriarchal societies. The furore around Meghan and Harry’s departure from the UK and that interview coalesced some of these discussions about race and gender and stimulated some heated debates about these big ideas among family and friends the world over.
I’m also thinking about the numerous podcasts that have sprung up during the last year. Stuck at home, working or furloughed. Many people have taken the opportunity to discuss ideas on the airwaves. I have been a guest on three pods in the last fortnight! There are, of course, other explanations for pods, and protests. And not all the ideas that are spreading are good ones. But, I like the idea that the forced separation from people and events might just have encouraged us to expand our minds.
Perhaps you’re wondering about now what on earth this has to do with buying less and being more? This is supposed to be a blog about consumption and sustainability after all, right? Well, this is my thinking… Consumer culture thrives when our ideas are kept small. When our minds are focused on people and events, what we have and what we wear become important. What other people have and wear are topics of discussion. We worry about what other people think about what we have and what we wear. And that keeps us shopping.
Discussing ideas refocuses our (great) minds on bigger things and consumption starts to become less important in comparison, as it rightly should be. Who cares what the new black is when we are discussing the terrifying death rates of black people in police custody or black women in childbirth? Looking forward, we need to be fluent in the language of big ideas in order to avoid the impending climate catastrophe. As much as I advocate for changing our individual consumption habits, that won’t be enough to save us from impending doom. If humans are to survive on this planet we will need to re-imagine much about the way we live today and that is really going to require some great minds discussing some very big ideas.
