Ideas used to be protected and nurtured only in closed enclaves, and it is still likely that in such wombs you will find most all viable, embryonic ideas, but there any "deformed" ideas are summarily aborted. Those "deformed" ideas that manage to come to term and survive birth, along with those who mother them, if they too survive, are chased outside the walls, as the birth of a new (called deformed because the form is novel) idea reminds the old ones that they are mortal. Indeed these old gods are dying hard, even after everybody stops giving them lambs and goats for dinner. The pendulum swings back and forth between Spartan and Athenian, Platonic and Aristotelian, just as it swings between dictatorially radical and conservatively liberal politics, as if not only these classical categories, but their mutual untouchable-ness, being from opposite sides of the tracks, was indeed immortal.
(When I met the department head in applying to transfer from the architecture school, where I'd taken a leave of absence from practice after ten years of it to acquire a master's degree, to the art history department (as my word side demanded equal time), he visibly recoiled in my presence as if he were afraid I would touch him and growled, you know we work completely differently over here, and indeed I learned that was true. If it's not lowly training for artisans like architects or artists who do or will be sent out there to get dusty and dirty on a job site, if it's a white collar department, you're not allowed to materialize an idea even if it materializes spontaneously, verifying that it's alive, that two ideas, even possibly from opposite sides of the tracks, had sex; that's clearly in bad taste, worse even than just getting dusty and dirty on the job (versus a hobby), if that were possible. Don't get me wrong. The life of the mind is protected there. If the theory that that could theoretically happen is a cogent one, that theory will hold sway, as indeed it does. But that, as Maya Angelou puts it -- we are the ones we have been waiting for -- is going too far. How banal. How crass. Indeed, when I realized I had a living idea on my hands my voice stopped in my throat. For two years I could not write or say a word about it, and then I realized why -- the love child of two mating ideas and their mating at all are in bad taste! I burst out laughing and was free! The first version of this tome was called the dissertation in bad taste.
At least Romeo and Juliet woke up the world outside the hallowed walls, and now royals out here marry mixed race commoners. So maybe ideas born of intercourse between the "right" and the "wrong" side of the tracks stand a chance out in the world. And now millions traffic in ideas, the world's greatest libraries at the fingertips of any who can log on, and everybody who can read can, and in a way cannot but, assume some responsibility for the criminal or appropriate indulgence, neglect, challenging engagement and discipline, or abuse of arcane ideas that are already shaping, or could one day shape the shared world.
