Johnnie Moore: Lunar Man

Wow. Double-wow! Spent a wonderful day in DC, Monday, with Johnnie Moore who was on his way to a conference in San Francisco. (His next connection? Evelyn Rodriguez of Crossroads Dispatches!)

Gee, where to start? Our itinerary; 4 hours @ a coffee shop in Del Ray, 3+hours @ a resturant in Old Town Alexandria for lunch, 5 hours being fed @ my inlaws home near Mount Vernon. It was an amazing day I'm still, umm, trying to digest, but just as when I met Jon Strande, it proves how much shared air matters. Affinity is one thing, a beautiful thing, but proximity drives the tuning forks off the scale.

Gladwell:

We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that's not how it works, whether it's television comedy or, for that matter, the more exalted realms of art and politics and ideas....

There is a wonderful illustration of this social dimension of innovation in Jenny Uglow's new book, "The Lunar Men" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30), which is the story of a remarkable group of friends in Birmingham in the mid-eighteenth century. Their leader was Erasmus Darwin, a physician, inventor, and scientist, who began thinking about evolution a full fifty years before his grandson Charles.... They called themselves the Lunar Society...

[Mathew Boulton, William Small, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, Samuel Galton, et al. Benjamin Franklin was a corresponding member; Thomas Jefferson was a pupil of William Small's. More Here.]

"They developed their own cryptic, playful language and Darwin, in particular, liked to phrase things as puzzles—like the charades and poetic word games people used to play," Uglow writes. "Even though they were down-to-earth champions of reason, a part of the delight was to feel they were unlocking esoteric secrets, exploring transmutations like alchemists of old."...

One person's passion—be it carriages, steam, minerals, chemistry, clocks—fired all the others. There was no neat separation of subjects. Letters between [William] Small and [James] Watt were a kaleidoscope of invention and ideas....

What were they doing? Darwin, in a lovely phrase, called it "philosophical laughing," which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence. But there's more to it than that. One of the peculiar features of group dynamics is that clusters of people will come to decisions that are far more extreme than any individual member would have come to on his own. People compete with each other and egg each other on, showboat and grandstand; and along the way they often lose sight of what they truly believed when the meeting began. Typically, this is considered a bad thing, because it means that groups formed explicitly to find middle ground often end up someplace far away. But at times this quality turns out to be tremendously productive, because, after all, losing sight of what you truly believed when the meeting began is one way of defining innovation.

Bricoleurs, all. Despite the headlines or doubters, the world and the web are wonderful places of possibility, and better for it thanks to the Johnnies, Evelyns and Jons. Lunar man, Lunar woman. People who reach, and fly.