Free The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo Page B

capable of managing the demands
     of a changing environment with surprising ease: wild grasslands, futures markets, entrepreneurial businesses. All of these
     systems are confronted constantly with unsuspected risk, but each has found ways to thrive. More worrisome, however, Holling
     and a team of mathematicians and biologists also found examples of the opposite sorts of systems, filled with what he called
     a “perverse resilience,” that insisted on preserving bad ideas. In such “maladaptive systems,” Holling explained, “any novelty
     is either smothered or its inventor ejected. It would represent a rigidity trap.” Such systems might look good for a while,
     but when they are hit with the unexpected, they react in ways that doom them. They simply can’t shed their wrong ideas fast
     enough. Sound familiar?
    Once, a few years after he first proposed the idea of a sandpile experiment, Per Bak was having dinner at Churchill College,
     Cambridge, with a group of British scientists. Something about the setting, all the formality and the stiff necks, brought
     out the American side of Bak that delighted and bewildered his fellow Danes. A few glasses of wine into dinner, his contempt
     for the “big science” he saw around the table began to slip out. Bak liked to observe that multibillion-dollar science programs
     almost never produced meaningful discoveries. They were cash furnaces. Nobel Prizes were won by scientists who had made extraordinary
     breakthroughs by themselves or working in teams of two. Big universities, where conservative and riskless views of the world
     were the norm, where the future of mankind always seemed to be one more billion-dollar atom smasher away, set Bak’s teeth
     on edge. Science, in his mind, was about taking a hammer to the glass walls of old, wrong ideas. Here at dinner he had a sense
     of a group of guys who spent their time polishing those glass walls.
    Bak popped. “Why is it that you guys are so conservative in your views, in the face of the almost complete lack of understanding
     of what is going on in your field?” he asked. To Bak, the fact that science still explained so little demanded constant radicalism,
     the sort of creative imagining that has inspired great scientific leaps throughout history. In intellectual terms, he felt,
     the constipation of a place like this couldn’t possibly be justified when there was still so much amazing science left to
     do. The Cambridge scientists responded that they didn’t see another choice. “If we don’t accept
some
common picture,” they said, “there would be nothing to bind us together as a scientific community.” Bak was astonished. The
     explanation for this shared wrong view — you had to call it a
delusion,
really — was social rather than factual. People agreed because they wanted to be part of the community more than they wanted
     to be right. It was a situation you could find echoed around the world in foreign policy or finance in 2008: a set of shared,
     wrong ideas, clung to loyally by people who couldn’t quite see past their illusions or the imagination-killing need to agree
     and fit in. Bak knew that if you wanted to truly understand the world, these commonly held ideas were absolutely blinding.
     But he had seen what his revolution in thinking was already making possible. He was just one guy in a lab, the Cambridge dons
     chided him. But those were the sorts of guys, Bak knew, who made history.

C HAPTER F OUR
Avalanche Country
1. Snowman
    I have sat with him before and the eyes remain the same as ever — lucid, clear, a bit soft. His head nods now at times, just
     slightly. Mortality’s creep. But the famous face is unchanged, its strong lines as unforgettable as when they graced television
     sets and magazine covers. He has a way of listening, cocking his head forward like a curious bull, that bespeaks a funny mixture
     of impatience and decency, a polite urgency that can set you off again on all the