Poe, Marshall “Meme Weaver: The Author Tries—and Fails—to Cash in on a Big Idea” The Atlantic Monthly (October 2011)
Big ideas, big dreams and big actions—those ideas, dreams, and actions that actually change the world—are not wrong in and of themselves, but they too often become merely part of the idol-making process, the bane of everyman. As soon as we begin thinking, “This idea, this dream, this action is the one that is going to make me famous, or rich, or powerful, or happy, or [well, you fill in the blank]“ then that idea, or dream, or action is doomed to be something that contributes not so much to the furtherance of God’s Kingdom purposes here on earth, but rather to the building of an image of our own divinity, our castle in which we do what we want and from which we rule the world.
I say “not so much” because even our idols can in fact be useful to God’s work, quite apart from the evil they cause us. But this just underscores the subtlety with which a big anything becomes an idol and therefore much more difficult to discern than we had thought when we began to research it. This article tells a moving, funny short story of the author’s quest to write a “big ideas” book and what happened as that quest began to be fulfilled. His conclusions make us rightly skeptical of anyone or any thing that attempts to reduce the complexity of most of reality to a few simple principles or ideas, the so-called “big” ideas. The big ideas are big because they have so much stuff attached to them, so many complex and difficult questions and propositions that flow from and into them that they are not easily understood, much less proclaimed. Just look at Martin Luther’s “big idea” of sola fides: we are still talking, writing and arguing about it 500 years after it was re-discovered by the German monk.
Meme Weaver is a great article for discussion: brief, easily readable, very slyly humorous, and most of all: greatly thought provoking.