Story by Jacob O’Gara
God is dead—no, Nietzsche: God is TED. At least that’s how the conference organizers and speakers apparently see things. TED—“Technology, Entertainment, and Design”—is dedicated to transmitting “ideas worth spreading,” and, more importantly, ideas worth enforcing. And “dedicated” is the right word here: its first and original meaning refers to the consecration of a venue or trinket to better serve a god. TED Talks are certainly inspirational (another right word), but one sometimes gets the gnawing sensation that the various luminaries who deliver them are on a crusade in service of a divine power, something that is at once tremendously annoying and more than slightly sinister.
TED was co-founded in 1984 (a portentous birth year if any) by Richard Saul Wurman, an “information architect,” in Monterey, California. Wurman ruled TED as a “more or less benevolent dictator” until 2001, when it was bought by the Sapling Foundation, a non-profit owned by Chris Anderson. Anderson—not the same Chris Anderson who edits Wired magazine, which was, interestingly, developed at an early TED conference—had been the founder of the appropriately named Future company, which publishes the official magazines of all the major video game console manufacturers. As curator, Anderson transformed a cliquish, inside-baseball darling of the Silicon Valley jet set into the spotlight-grabbing, global “ideas worth spreading” factory it is today.
However, it’d be wrong to equate this exposure with openness. TED conferences are not events for the rough, unlearned hoi polloi. Unless you have six thousand dollars to spare or did something worthy of an invitation, you will never attend one. To their credit, the people behind TED have put a large number of TED Talks on iTunes as podcasts, but this action just underlines my point: you may learn from TED, but you may not learn at TED. This is the very definition of elitism, and those who attend and speak at TED are very much the elite—high-powered scientists and educators, celebrity journalists, millionaires, billionaires, former heads of state. They remind one of the philosopher kings of Plato’s Republic. The world is theirs to shape.
Any critique of TED that focuses exclusively on the conferences’ guest lists has the grating tendency to veer off into the sweat-damp world of Alex Jones-style conspiracy theories. TED doesn’t represent a looming plot to establish any sort of menacing “New World Order.” It represents the world order as it exists now, one on the wane. With TED, an assortment of “Davos men”—a term coined by the late Samuel Huntington, referring to the handful of hyper-wealthy men who transcend national boundaries and see things like governments as scalable nuisances—have shifted the popular image of the elite from that of privileged, authoritarian “masters of mankind” to that of kindly wise men (and women) who just want to share their alchemistic “ideas worth spreading,” ideas that could turn our gloomy world of lead into a shimmering gold planet.
There’s something irritating, if not infuriating, about listening to exhortations to “do something” from people who are or were in the position to do exactly that. Perhaps, though, we should feel lucky that the TED class is so apparently lazy or incompetent. The problem of TED isn’t with who presents the talks or that the proposals found therein are seemingly, tragically beyond our grasp; the problem is the ideas themselves.
Taken individually, there’s nothing particularly dangerous or upsetting found in most TED Talks, certainly nothing that would warrant a mass run for the hills. Please, don’t lose sleep worrying that a speech on AIDS activism by Annie Lennox is going to kick-start a putsch. And please, do listen to Ken Robinson’s incredibly moving TED Talk on education reform—I dare you not to tear up a little. However, the numerous presentations seen and heard at TED are informed by the same larger vision: that scientific and technological advancements can fundamentally overturn the human condition, and for the better. History books are littered with human wreckage strewn in the wake of similar utopian thinking.
The dream of utopia, of creating a Heaven on Earth, often produces nightmarish results. The utopian objective is almost always framed in theological terms; the quest for utopia is considered a battle between crusading true believers and heretical skeptics, and when a Heaven on Earth is at stake, heretics are burned.
During the Middle Ages, cleric-led mobs of peasants readied Europe for the Second Coming of Christ (which was just around the corner, they thought) by baptizing the continent in blood. Almost half a millennium later, Europe was yet again leveled by utopian ideologues, this time by adherents to the competing “political religions” of fascism and communism. Movements since—the Weathermen of late-’60s United States, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the Khomeinist wing of the Iranian Revolution, for example—have justified acts of violence and mayhem as an ugly but crucial part of their mission to drag civil society to utopia.
With the creation of the microchip and the attendant rise of Silicon Valley, the vision of utopia was reframed—from a theological delusion to a scientific possibility. Technology is seen as the instrument that can override and reprogram human nature, and those who understand and wield such technology are regarded as modern-day prophets. A telling glimpse into this exuberant techno-utopianism was offered in 2002, when Wired—the house organ of this mentality—published a story called “God Is The Machine.”
People who have lost their faith, many have observed, tend to annoyingly think that therefore they’ve found their reason. Equally grating is the tendency among self-avowed secularists to mold their reason into a sort of faith. This is especially common among so-called “New Atheists.” In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins puts forward an atheist alternative to the Ten Commandments, which concludes with the irritating and useless mantra of “Question everything” (of which the strongest and most obvious criticism is: really, everything?). Earlier this year, The Good Book by A.C. Grayling was published, which seeks to either be a “humanist” or “secular Bible,” depending on which edition you buy (and, not to be outdone by Dawkins, Grayling also proffers his own version of the Ten Commandments to his secular humanist audience; apparently, the Moses role is a very tempting one). Sam Harris—who could be said to have started this whole “New Atheist” thing in 2004 with The End Of Faith—has advocated a “religion of reason.” Daniel Dennett, when asked what should replace religion, came to the conclusion that TED was a perfect substitute.
The need for creed and the search for church is a feeling that squirms in the pit of even the steeliest of humanists. However, if they can manage it, they would be wise to resist the temptation of dogma creation. Dogma, particularly of the humanist, utopian sort, makes smart people say incredibly stupid things. It can also wind up leaving a lot of people dead.
In France at the tail-end of the 1700s, when many a head was being divorced from many a body, the anti-Catholic cranks who helmed the guillotines created a new religion, called the Cult of Reason. This was a purely utopian project: its creators sought to transform France into a Heaven on Earth by venerating ideals like truth, liberty, and reason, and by venerating those who embodied these ideals as gods. The calendar was completely remade (something that happens in societies governed by a utopian ideology), formerly Christian cathedrals were appropriated by the cultists for reason, and festivals were held in the Goddess of Reason’s honor. Anyone who opposed this atheist movement was cast as a heretic opposed to the progress of humanity, and was killed. This “religion of reason,” as Harris might put it, turned otherwise normal folk into bloodthirsty megalomaniacs.
Within this context, a more appropriate and revealing TED slogan might be “ideas worth dreading.”