In the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society — which also happens to be my favourite movie of all time — Robin Williams plays John Keating, an English Literature teacher at a private boys-only boarding school in New England called the Welton Academy (nicknamed “Hellton” by its students). The four pillars of the very traditional Welton Academy are Tradition, Discipline, Honour and Excellence.
And so in comes a new teacher, Mr Keating, who employs unorthodox methods of pedagogy — at least by the standards of Welton — which then inspires a group of boys to form the titular society. In one of Mr Keating’s lessons, he has the class take a walk in a school courtyard, where the boys begin walking in their own rhythm and speed before eventually walking in a march. This lesson is observed by Mr Nolan, the headmaster of Welton and human embodiment of the four pillars of Welton.
In a later scene, Mr Nolan asks Mr Keating about the lesson, with the dialogue going as follows:
Nolan: What was going on in the courtyard the other day?
Keating: Courtyard?
Nolan: Boys marching, clapping in unison.
Keating: Oh that, that was an exercise to prove a point. Dangers of conformity.
Nolan: But, John, the curriculum here is set, it’s proven, it works. If you question it, what’s to prevent them [the students] from doing the same?
This dialogue between Nolan and Keating summarises the main philosophical theme of the movie. It is the classic, “If it’s not broken, why fix it?” versus, “Things can always be improved”. You probably know which side of the argument I am on. It is not that tradition is not important — things become tradition because they have worked. Evolution — biological or cultural — does not really care what is logical or what is cool; it cares only about what works. But tradition has its limitations.
Some recent scholarship bears this out as well. In his book, The Rise and Fall of the East: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Yasheng Huang argues that beginning with the civil service examination, the Keju in 587CE, up to the present-day personnel management system by the Chinese Communist Party, China has managed to develop effective methods for homogenising ideas, norms and practices.
It is not a debate that Chinese civilisation is one of the greatest in all of human history, in no small part contributed by its methods of managing conformity. Having a relatively meritocratic large bureaucracy before anyone else certainly helps. But as is a common theme, the things that work great in one setting will be a detriment in another setting. When it is time to come together in solidarity and push to catch up with the rest of the world, conformity is great. But once you are at the frontier of technology and innovation, conformity is terrible.
Indeed, Huang shows that innovations peaked in Chinese history (at least in the dynastic periods) when China was politically fractured and ideologically diverse, namely during the Han-Sui Interregnum and the Warring States period. And it was least innovative during the Yuan and Qing dynasties. The Qing, of course, was the last dynasty of China.
And it is not peculiar only to China. Eric Chaney, an economic historian at Oxford University, documents that starting in the 11th century, scientific activity in the Islamic World — the origin of many groundbreaking scientific paradigms — began to decline. He empirically demonstrates that moving away from a more secular bureaucratic structure and towards the increasing empowerment of conservative religious leaders — who restricted intellectual production and discouraged interpretations of Islam that undermined their authority — reduced incentives to engage in scientific activity, thereby contributing to the decline.
The flip side has also been documented. In his book, The Secret of Our Success, cultural anthropologist Joseph Henrich, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, argues that it is the “collective brains” of our species operating over generations that explains our fancy technologies and massive ecological success. It is not some innate inventive power that we have or even the best creative abilities of individual brains. Henrich adds that our “collective brains arise from a number of synergies created by the sharing of information among individuals”. Indeed, these synergies manifest themselves in social norms and, as Henrich puts it, “how well a society functions depends on its package of social norms”.
And this is where diversity matters. In a recent paper, Henrich, along with co-authors Max Posch and Jonathan Shulz, provides a really clever method of showing how diversity and the interactions between diverse minds drive innovation, at least in the US between 1850 and 1940. To measure innovation, they use patents per capita and “breakthrough” patents per capita. Here is where it gets really interesting. To proxy for social interactional diversity, the authors use surnames from the US census. They find that surname diversity increases both the quantity and quality of innovation, with more patents per capita and breakthrough patents per person.
Of course, this surname method is less applicable in places where surnames are more standardised such as South Korea, China and even the Malaysian Chinese people (think of how many seemingly unrelated “Tan” or “Ng” or “Lim” people you know). But the point still remains — greater diversity is good for both the quantity and quality of innovation. And what the Chinese and Islamic points tell us is that it is, in particular, diversity of viewpoints and perspectives that really matter.
Coming back to tradition, as I have mentioned, it is not as if tradition is always useless. It survives for a reason. And it is not as if innovation is always positive. The hackneyed, completely trite point happens to be true: “It’s all about balance.” (By the way, the next time someone tells you, “It’s about finding the balance,” and they say it as if it was a brilliant idea, point them to Tywin Lannister’s quote from Game of Thrones in response to, “It is my belief that a moment of chaos affords opportunities lost soon after,” where he says, “You say that as if you were the first man alive to think it. Yes, a crisis is an opportunity. What other brilliant insights have you brought me today?”
Balance is difficult. It is easy to figure out whether tradition or innovation is appropriate in extreme situations. But at the margins, the decision becomes far trickier. Perhaps a rule of thumb is as follows: “If you’re unsure, always choose against the status quo and always choose new.” With a disclaimer that this is not professional advice, the rule of thumb is true for one’s personal life. Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago economist and co-author of Freakonomics, published a journal article on a large-scale randomised field experiment in which research subjects having difficulty making a decision flipped a coin to help determine their choice. For important decisions (such as quitting a job or ending a relationship), individuals who are told by the coin toss to make a change are more likely to make a change, more satisfied with their decisions and happier six months later than those whose coin toss instructed maintaining the status quo. Tradition is safe, but only innovation can get us where we need to go.