The responsibility of idea stewards

What we owe the ideas we inherit

This piece was co-authored by Nason Maani, and his version is cross-posted here

Ideas, and the institutions that house them, are under pressure of a kind few of us anticipated a generation ago. Universities are being challenged, research funding is being constrained, and the very legitimacy of expert knowledge is being contested in ways that feel (and perhaps are) particularly acute and raw. In such a moment, it is tempting to reach for the language of defense, of protecting ideas, of shielding institutions. But that approach may not always be right for the moment. And it is particularly not right when we think carefully about our role in the world of ideas. Those of us who work in these settings could call ourselves producers of ideas, or thinkers, or scholars, or, as we suggested earlier in this series of essays, workers in idea factories. But perhaps more than anything else, we are stewards of ideas, both holding ideas in trust and improving them for the next generation. That shift in framing is central to the point of this essay, part of our Ideas about Ideas series. When we think of those who generate ideas as stewards, it pushes us to ask what such stewardship demands of those of us fortunate enough to find ourselves in the business of ideas, particularly now when the task may be as much to reinvent our ideas as it is to preserve them.

What then might be the responsibilities of stewards of ideas? We organize our thinking here along three lines. First, we talk about foundational moral, intellectual, and aesthetic responsibilities. Second, we dwell on instrumental responsibilities that have been implicit in our writing on these topics but that we feel here deserve to be underlined: the responsibility to widen the door for many, to speak when silence is easier, and to the institutions where ideas are generated that shall outlast us. Thinking of these responsibilities finds us following a single thread through this essay, that stewardship is not only about conservation, but it is as much about the willingness to build anew when the forms that are inherited are no longer fit for the purpose of the moment. Let us start with our foundational responsibilities.

In Science as Vocation, Max Weber argues that scholars cannot hide behind their methods; the choice of what to study itself is a moral choice. To have the privilege of time to think incurs an obligation about what one thinks about. This does not mean that science and scholarship need to always have a clear and direct application; it does mean however that stewards of ideas have to ask whether their work serves larger societal goals, a centering of consequentialism that we have previously argued for in health. All too often, we assume that what is ultimately consequential or most important is that work that was funded before, or work that aligns to the goals of the current dominant funder of science. But our responsibility transcends these imperfect criteria, which can and do change over time. Hans Jonas’s The Imperative of Responsibility sharpens the point further. In a world where ideas have consequences at scale, our responsibility extends forward in time, to those who will live with the real-world expressions of what we thought. This obligation feels particularly pressing now, as we live with the real-world expressions of once-fringe ideas. When the public is increasingly skeptical of what we produce, the answer cannot be retreat into technical narrowness, or necessarily to retreat to what we did before, but rather to lean into work of visible consequence, done in the open, with a clear commitment to our larger social purpose.

Adding to our responsibility to produce work that matters is an intellectual responsibility of doing the work right. Bernard Williams, in Truth and Truthfulness, identifies two relevant virtues here, accuracy (i.e., doing the hard work of getting it right) and sincerity (i.e., saying what one actually believes). Currently, it feels as if both are under pressure. Accuracy requires slowness, reading widely, engaging with inconvenient evidence, being willing to update and change. After all, a certain mind is also a closed mind. Sincerity requires refusal of the performative positions that professional incentives, and, increasingly, political pressures reward. Both of these virtues feel under some challenge at the moment making them, of course ever more important. And it is through accuracy and sincerity that we can advance ideas that challenge what we know, to the end of being better at the very ideas that we generate. And, doing so is hard. Kuhn reminds us that paradigms resist revision; part of intellectual responsibility is being honest about when the frame no longer fits, including frames within which we have built our own careers.

Adding to our moral and intellectual responsibility is our aesthetic responsibility to ideas. This calls on us to be clear in our ideas, with clarity serving as an act of generosity towards the others who will pick up, advance, and improve upon our ideas. George Orwell, in Politics and the English Language, argues that clear writing is not decoration but a moral act, because obscurity protects bad thinking. To write clearly is to attend carefully to the reader, to offer an idea in a form that can actually be received. The aesthetic responsibility then, correctly understood, is craft, the discipline of saying precisely what one means and not more. In a noisy information environment, where attention is scarce and skepticism is high, this craft is central to how ideas earn their keep.

Let us now move to the instrumental, but no less important, responsibilities of idea stewards.

We have written previously about the politics of recognition, about who gets to participate in generating ideas, who is seen as doing so. If such recognition is unevenly distributed, and we argued that it is, the stewards of ideas have a particular obligation to mentor, to amplify, to cite, and to open the spaces they occupy. This responsibility is both individual and institutional, it extends to who we read, who we invite to speak, whose early work we champion, and how we structure the rooms (sometimes literally) in which ideas are shaped. This is one of the most tangible forms idea stewardship takes, and it is a practical antidote to the challenges of closed loops that Bourdieu discussed in his account of intellectual fields. Separate and apart from being the right thing to do by our responsibilities, widening the door to other and newer ideas stands to practicably help us rebuild the trust that we have lost in recent years, to move us back to the center of the public conversation where a plurality of ideas shape how we, as a society, think.

Beyond accuracy and craft, idea stewards have a further obligation. There is a long and clear tradition that articulates the responsibility of idea stewards to engage with inconvenient truths. We have long admired Edward Said’s Reith Lectures where he argued that the intellectual should refuse expertise as isolation. Indeed, he pointed to the example of the Vietnam war as one in which, if debate regarding its merit were restricted only to those “certified experts” in foreign policy, much of the scope and accuracy of public discourse regarding the war would have been lost. There is clearly a large difference between expertise, and knowledge. Noam Chomsky’s The responsibility of intellectuals put it bluntly: intellectuals should tell the truth and expose lies. As part of this, intellectuals should fight to maintain the space for subjective representation, for asking important questions, and challenging assumed wisdom. This is particularly resonant when a field, as public health is now, is under threat. Idea stewardship then becomes inseparable from a willingness to stand up for the ideas, publicly, even if uncomfortably.

And finally, stewards of ideas have a responsibility to institutions within which we build. Michael Polanyi and Alasdair MacIntyre both have made this point eloquently in their writing. Stewardship of institutions needs to accept that the structures that support idea creation, journals, societies, departments, schools, are built by many and should transcend any one of us. To be a steward of these institutions means to accept that one is a temporary caretaker. But caretaking is not passive. There is a strong argument to be made that several of our institutions were built for a different world, one with slower information, narrower participation, different kinds of legitimacy. If we were merely to preserve these forms, we would be doing our responsibility a disservice. The modern research university was itself an act of reinvention and the moment calls for more of the same.

Idea stewardship is demanding work, and in difficult times, more demanding still. It is also a privilege. The work of ideas is one of the few vocations in which the work itself, if done right, is indistinguishable from its purpose. The ideas we inherit are not fully ours, and neither are the institutions that house them. They are, transiently, in our keeping. What we do with them, and whether we have the courage to reshape them when the moment requires, is what this generation of stewards will be remembered for.

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The Ideas about Ideas project

The Ideas about Ideas project, co-written with Dr Nason Maani, and cross-posted on the Money, Power, Health substack is a series of reflections of how thought lives in the world. It follows ideas as they emerge in institutions and everyday life, as they move across borders, as they harden into orthodoxy or fade into silence. It argues that ideas are not possessions but shared conditions of living, and that to see them clearly is to recognize both their power and the obligations they impose. Fundamentally, this project is built on the notion that without ideas we have nothing, and that the business of creating a healthier, better world rests on ideas.

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Also this week

In The Milbank Quarterly:

Firearms as a Market-Driven Epidemic: Potential Pathways to Reduce Preventable Firearm-Related Harm in the United States – with Eszter Rimányi, Jonathan Quick , Stephen Hargarten, Charles Branas, Nason Maani, Jonathan Lowy, Zain Hussain, and Nicholas Hoffmann

In PLOS Mental Health:

Understanding the impact of natural disasters on post-traumatic stress disorder and depression symptoms: An examination of counterfactual displacement scenarios - with Mohammed Abba-Aji , Gregory Cohen, Salma Abdalla, Ruochen Wang, and Jaimie Gradus.