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Ambition
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3 min read

Forgetting the big ideas

How to collect ideas that have changed the world. Nick Jones reviews A History of Ideas.

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

A painting of an 18th Century servant bent over a washing tub.
Jean-Siméon Chardin's The Scullery Maid.
National Gallery of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I devour new ideas. One way to sate the appetite is dining out on Radio 4’s In Our Time archive. The show’s host Melvyn Bragg politely and firmly guides academic experts as they share their wisdom and insights with the listener. Among these great teachers, one had a title that stood out for me - Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas. It was held by the late Justin Champion of Royal Holloway University. While I may never aspire to don his mantle, I do love the idea of, well, a professor of ideas. So much to discover and explain – to educate upon. 

As well as formal academics in universities, other types of educators share that teaching load. Among them is the School of Life. A purveyor of therapy, courses and books, it has published A History of Ideas. The book is a collection of what the School calls humanity’s most inspiring ideas throughout time, ideas ‘best suited to healing, enchanting and revising us.’ Its stated goal is to answer the biggest puzzles we may have: about the direction of our lives, the issues of relationships, the meaning of existence.   

Given the School of Life was started by authors, therapists and educators, A History of Ideas could be considered its textbook, but it is no academic textbook. Instead, every idea it addresses hangs off a full-page image accompanied by essay, often based on articles the School has published. 

Arranging ideas is always challenging. The book documents the history of the world’s ideas in 12 chapters. Good news for Julian Barnes, whose A History of the World in 10½ Chapters remains on top of the concise world history league by one and a half chapters. Prehistory and The Ancients, and Modernity bookend chapters on the great religions, Europe, The Americas, Industrialisation and Africa. 

Within chapters, fine art, architecture and objects illustrate the ideas. Grand masters can be expected on the pages but they are joined by lesser works. Such selections serve their purpose well. The Scullery Maid, by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, depicts the drudgery of washer work yet brings to visual life the accompanying first essay on Christianity. This is no art history exposition of some baroque high altar piece – rather:

‘Central to Christianity has been the argument about the value of ordinary people… this was a religion that never stopped stressing that God's mercy was offered to all irrespective of social status.’

Nor does it shy away from tackling what today may be seen as problematic ideas. On original sin, it asks:

‘why would it be helpful to keep this in mind? Because once we accept the bleak verdict, we are spared the risks of misplaced expectations. To know that everyone we encounter will, at some level, be flawed reduces our fury and our disappointment with this or that problematic aspect of their character.’

Wise words in an age where few can disagree agreeably. 

The ideas of industrialisation are, perhaps, foreshadowed by the 18th century scullery maid’s crude washing tub. From today’s perspective, it seems that some of the big ideas haves been vigorously scrubbed away by the industrial revolution and allied revolutionary trades. However, the commentary on The Scullery Maid concludes:

‘an ideology can be said to have achieved true victory when we forget it even exists. We can tell that Christianity has been one of the most powerful movements of ideas there has ever been, in part because of how seldom we notice that it has ever had the slightest influence on us.’ 

Living in a ‘decade of disruption’, to quote Rory Stewart, there are many big questions being asked. Among them, “will it all be OK?" The History of Ideas is a carefully curated gallery that illustrate the big ideas helping answer those questions. Given the authors set out to curate ideas that could enchant, it may also re-enchant those asking - with that which they have forgotten exists.  

A History of Ideas is published by The School of Life.  

ISBN: 9781912891962 

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Who’s missing from Inside Out’s internal family?

Where Riley’s writers could go next.
Cartoon characters of emotions at a control desk.
Inside Riley's head.
Disney.

Once upon a time a man got angry. Then he got angry at himself for the fact that he got angry, which of course didn’t help. As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh would say, “If we become angry at our anger, then we will have two angers at the same time.” Similarly, there was an occasion when he got really nervous that he might make a mess of giving a speech, and his nerves became so overwhelming that he delivered the speech badly. A self-fulfilling prophecy, one might say.  

These are not my examples; they are examples given by psychologist Richard Schwartz in his introduction to Internal Family Systems (IFS). This therapy (sometimes also called “parts therapy”) is a form of self-analysis in which participants learn to resist supressing or controlling their difficult thoughts or emotions, the different “parts” of their inner world, and instead adopt a posture of curiosity towards each of them. This posture allows people to be in a beneficial relationship to their emotional lives, rather than being ruled by them.  

Fundamentally, the relationship that emerges is one of compassion, understanding that our thoughts and emotions have a job to do, even the uncomfortable or shameful ones. So, anxiety, for example, guards us from committing social faux pas, whilst joy helps us to keep hold of a sense that life is ultimately worth the living, no matter how hard things get. Even sadness and grief, as much as we fear being overtaken by such emotions, have an important role to play, for example by helping us to define what things and people are most valuable and important to us. 

For those who haven’t seen the Inside Out films, the writers cleverly take this idea of the “internal family” of emotions and create five relatable characters that embody them – Joy, Fear, Sadness, Anger and Disgust. In the first film, we see how these characters interact inside the head of a little girl called Riley. They are helping her to hang on to her sense of self despite the upheaval she experiences in her outside world, when her family relocate to a new city, and she must settle in to a new home and school. In the sequel, we rejoin Riley as she enters the turmoil of puberty, and the five initial characters are abruptly forced to work alongside some new arrivals – the “teenage” crew of emotions: Anxiety, Ennui, Envy, and… the biggie… Embarrassment.  

This Self is transpersonal – it exceeds the boundaries of who we each are as an individual person and connects us to something large.

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When he first developed IFS in the 1980s, Richard Schwartz was, by his own confession, a committed atheist, with what he describes as “a distain for religion”. Schwartz writes of the frustration he felt at that time when several Christians got excited about IFS in its early stages of development. His peer, Robert Harris, even went so far as to publish a book that set out a Christian version of the therapy. Initially, Schwartz felt the biggie – embarrassment – that his therapy was being taken up by Christians. However, as time went on, and as much as Schwartz tried to push aside the spiritual dimension of IFS, he increasingly found that spirituality could not be eliminated from the picture: 

“As I used the model with clients through the eighties and nineties, increasingly they began having what can only be described as spiritual experiences. These vicarious encounters with the mystical profoundly affected my own spirituality and I became interested in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, shamanism, Kabala – everything but Christianity.”

Over time, Schwartz’s antipathy to the relationship between IFS and Christianity began to wane. He saw how much he had been working on the basis of prejudice, limiting his own exploration of Christian ideas in response to some unhelpful encounters he’d had with a few heavy-handed fundamentalists. He made deliberate moves to engage with Christian dialogue partners across the breadth of the tradition and began to see how congruent IFS was with the teaching of Jesus. The posture of curious compassion towards oppressive and uncomfortable emotions that Schwartz was encouraging his clients to adopt was mirrored perfectly in the attitude that Jesus advocated towards “enemies” in the outside world: do not judge, instead seek to engage them with kindness, and work towards their healing.   

In recent decades, Schwartz has come to rethink IFS as an integration of psychology and spirituality, rather than as a form of psychotherapy. He speaks of “spirituality” as an innate essence at the core of each person, which he calls the “Self”, and acknowledges that many of his more religious students prefer to think of this essence as “the soul” or “Atman” (the eternal self within Hinduism). And, whilst he still describes himself as fundamentally agnostic and is wary of making his own definitive religious commitments, he has come to agree that this Self is transpersonal – it exceeds the boundaries of who we each are as an individual person and connects us to something larger.

Screenwriting for a popular audience of all-faiths-and-none, it is perhaps unsurprising that the makers of Inside Out have thus far eschewed the deep and fascinating spirituality of IFS. Riley’s “sense of self” is at the centre of both films, but the way it is depicted implies that it is something that only comes into being at birth and exists entirely to regulate Riley’s engagement with the outside world. So far, there has been no exploration of more existential questions such as faith and eternity. However, the concept of the film is so brilliant, and for a complex idea it is so well executed, that I am sure we can look forward to many more Inside Out films to come. If that is the case, then just as Schwartz found himself going on an unexpected journey of spiritual exploration, the writers of Riley’s may well find themselves doing the same. I, for one, look forward to finding out what Riley discovers.  

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