Think Like a Mongol

On Curation vs Creation

I recently had an itch to dive deeper into history, particularly the stories of the most impactful people in history, so I read Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. What struck me the most was how the Khans were stewards of innovation. Under their rule, the Mongols never directly invented anything, but through an embrace of religious freedom, technology, and new ways of thinking, the world saw an explosion of era-defining technologies. In other words, despite conquering their neighbors, technological progress flourished under the Mongolians because they encouraged innovation and connected creators and scholars together - they brought Arab mathematicians to collaborate with European monks who debated with Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners. This cross-pollination led to fundamental innovations that propelled the Western world into the beginnings of the Renaissance:

As early as 1620, the English scientist Francis Bacon recognized the impact that changing technology had produced in Europe. He designated printing, gunpowder, and the compass as three technological innovations on which the modern world was built. Although they were "unknown to the ancients... these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world; first in literature, then in warfare, and lastly in navigation." More important than the innovations themselves, from them "innumerable changes have been thence derived." In a clear recognition of their importance he wrote "that no empire, sect, or star, appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries." All of them had been spread to the West during the era of the Mongol Empire. 

- Jack Weatherford

This example illustrates how innovation can arise from two fundamentally different, yet complementary approaches:

• Creation

• Curation

The merits of creating something new are obvious in themselves. Without them, we would still be hunter gatherers trying to catch rabbits with our hands. But what of the curators that fed the creators? Those that connected the creator to something new, something that stoked the flames of curiosity and innovation? What about those that saw beauty and potential in the creator’s lifelong work and connected it to those that need what the creator offers? Surely these curators that maximize the role of creators, like the great Khans, influence the world at an equivalent magnitude of the creators themselves.

Like the Khans, there are two notorious curators who can lay claim to innovation through their unwavering commitment to trial-and-error: natural selection and tradition. Rather than creating something from scratch in a laboratory, natural selection curated the best traits for different survival needs through millennia of curation. The spontaneous emergence of new traits were created while natural selection did the tough part - curating which of those traits are most fit for survival. Of course, this curation process led to human intelligence which could further accelerate curation for survival through experimentation with tools. By trialing different tools and techniques for survival, humans collectively began to curate what previously created ideas work well through traditions. 

This concept that natural selection and tradition are great curators lends merit to the Lindy Effect, the notion that older ideas (e.g. family, governance) and technology (e.g. cups, chairs) still used today will last longer than new ideas and technologies. Those that ignore the role of curation throughout history fall victim to the hubris that just because they don’t understand the explanation for a tradition, they assume that there is no value in said tradition. They potentially ignore millennia of curated trial-and-error and repeat the mistakes of their ancestors. Or they fall victim to a passing fad. Such statements may seem counterintuitive in an essay about innovation, but creation does not determine whether an idea is any good. Curation is what separates the intellectual wheat from ideological chaff.

Returning to pragmatism in the modern world, enabling this curative process of selecting the best ideas starts with drawing connections between people and ideas. There are many vocations dedicated to this step of curation; one example is translation: the works from antiquity and monolingual artists would be inaccessible to us all without experts who dedicated their time to unlocking the door for people who don’t speak the creator’s language. More metaphorically, those in marketing and sales translate the value of products to customers who don’t speak the same language as technical creators. Others embrace curation-enabling inventions such as the Gutenberg press or the internet which many publishing houses use today to connect new ideas to people. Another could build an environment where creators feel comfortable freely connecting with each other and their ideas - a marketplace of ideas if you will. Lastly, someone may work in legislation to study ideas and attempt to codify the great ones into the law of the land.

Not everyone dedicates their life to curation by translating great works, opening publishing houses, or hosting conferences to connect people - everyone has a different path and a world filled with curators echoing the work of a few creators would become quite boring quite quickly. Just like how there needs to be a balance between those focused on curation and creation, we should consider how curation and creation operate within ourselves.

On an individual basis, we have three modes of operation: consumption, creation, and curation. Consumption is our default mode of operating - our sensory organs are programmed to constantly take in new information. Creation is consumption’s opposite, it is when we push our ideas, experiences, beliefs, and stories back out to the world around us. If we were to artificially model the world as a distinction between world and self; consumption is the flow of information from the world to the self, while creation is the push of information from the self back into the world. Curation is the gatekeeper between the two domains: the one who regulates what information flows in and out as a semipermeable membrane would. This curative process involves the cultivation of which ideas to consume and the refinement of the ideas we hold. I like to think that the first prisoner to recognize the facade of the puppeteers in Plato’s Cave is allegorical for our inner curator.

To describe consumption, creation, and curation in Freudian terms, consumption and creation are unconscious processes while curation is conscious. Consumption is unconscious for fairly obvious reasons - try turning off your ability to see, hear, feel, or taste by sheer willpower. Consumption is always happening by background processes just like the regulation of your heart rate and digestive tract. Creation is also unconscious but for less obvious reasons - most accomplished creators know that their best ideas came in flashes of absent-minded brilliance, whether it was while doing chores, going for a walk, or even sleeping. They know that they must feed their mind a problem to solve and answers cannot emerge until it is given a space to speak, a space where the conscious mind is not continuously chattering.

Although we can’t ask him, I’m inclined to believe Nikola Tesla would agree with this Freudian analogy as he saw the source of his creations as something outside of his conscious self:

“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”

― Nikola Tesla

Curation is the conscious part of this creative process - the selection of what information and challenges to incubate our inner consumer with and the decision on what to do with the flickers of creation - whether to cultivate those flames into something great or let them extinguish.

More commonly than encountering our own creations, we undergo a curative process when we consume ideas presented by others. We are then faced with a decision: compare this to our existing worldview and determine whether to accept it in a syncretistic fashion, accept it in an eclectic fashion, or reject it outright. 

Those that do not curate their life either choose the path of the continuous consumer who chooses indecision and lets whatever they consume slowly subvert their beliefs or the continuous creator who reflexively rejects new information because he is always pushing his experiences onto the world. This type of creative curmudgeonry paradoxically chokes out the inner creator because it stifles the creator’s oxygen: inspiration.

The syncretist spends his time as an integrator - he accepts new information and pieces it together into a cohesive framework. In terms of intellectual rigor, this tends to be the ideal situation - it requires the most thought to take an idea and determine where it fits within an existing framework of principles and how that structure must change to accommodate this new idea. Overbalancing this approach leads to a bureaucratization of the mind in which everything must fit within a system. This is problematic since many truths of the world are context dependent and paradoxical in nature - you are not smart enough to create a system or model that the world will 100% mold to. Integration into a centralized thought system isn’t always valuable as well: it led to the erasure of certain cultures and their histories on a macroscopic scale as it did with the Incas. I will leave it to Peruvian locals to speculate on whether the region is better off with the syncretization of Spanish and Incan cultures and values, but I will say the erasure of any culture’s history is a net negative for all of humanity and its intellectual development.

The eclectic is someone who accepts information without integrating it into a holistic worldview. This can lead to a perception that the eclectic is intellectually dishonest or missing a moral backbone, which can certainly be the outcome if this approach is followed mindlessly. However, this approach is intellectually sound when we remember and respect the paradoxical nature of truth.

The curator’s job is to shift us out of a dormant state of passivity or reflexivity and into the role of a cultivator watching over the garden of our beliefs. Those that subscribe to each philosophy tend to have different approaches to cultivating what enters their garden. The eclectic chases his interests as they appear. If the history of Southeast Asia stokes a flame within him, he will pursue it immediately after he unabashedly explores the scientific art of freediving. Where the eclectic is committed to chasing his fleeting interests as they come and go, the syncretist displays an equal commitment to a surgical dissection of one topic before moving to the next - perhaps he is interested in a vocation in governance, so he studies history to explore the rise and fall of different civilizations and the moral, cultural, and linguistic context they operated within to understand what has worked and failed in the past and why. He will not study the next civilization until he has sufficiently devoured the literature and impact of one. 

Like the Great Khans and our dear friend Natural Selection, how can you be a curator of your own world? Would you study the different religions of the world to build your own code of conduct or will you subscribe to exclusionary dogmatic belief systems? Would you spend time weeding your garden of beliefs or let whatever seeds are sown reap what they may? Would you prefer to spend your time curating or creating for others?