“This is your day,” says Zion Bar-El, beaming like a proud father from the podium of the Waterford Room at the Sheraton Tara Hotel in Nashua, N.H. His audience of about two dozen scientists, educators and engineers, clad in casual-Friday wear, strain to make out his words over the drone of liturgical chanting emanating from somewhere nearby. Out in the hall, an endless procession of New Hampshire Knights of Columbus in full regalia — bearing pennants and wrapped in sashes — is making its way to the Sheraton’s Grand Ballroom for a weekend of fraternal high jinks.
Bar-El, chief executive of Ideation International, rambles on, introducing chief technology officers, professors and a handful of journalists from Japan. He is apologetic about gathering his audience in this out-of-the-way New England burg, and promises that “next year will be Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Hawaii, one of those.” None of the places he names seems any more fitting a venue in which to discuss a revolutionary new science, but to the tenacious little group at the Sheraton, that’s exactly the point. They’ve descended on Nashua for the weekend — about 100 of them, all told — to confer on a discipline whose basic tenets include the notion that the best ideas are often to be found in the least likely of places.
The “science of inventive problem solving,” which they’ve come to discuss, is certainly one of those unlikely places. Originally developed in 1940s Soviet Russia by Genrich Altshuller, a young naval patent agent, TRIZ, as it’s known by its Russian acronym, seems at first nothing more than another tired exhortation to think outside the box. But closer inspection reveals a highly refined set of tools and patent and technology databases in use by engineers in some of America’s biggest companies. Ford Motor Co. used the “science” to solve an idle-vibration problem, resulting in a handful of new patents for the company. DaimlerChrysler looked into the future of steering column technology. Johnson & Johnson developed new feminine hygiene products.
While it’s a source of pride for any inventor to see the fruits of his labor in use around the world, friends and associates say that Altshuller, who died in 1998, had loftier intentions for his science. Having begun life as a scientist, Altshuller ended it as a visionary. His transformative experience was a stay in Joseph Stalin’s labor camps, where he watched the Russian intelligentsia imprisoned there die off practically unnoticed. But far from dousing Altshuller’s creative flame, the experience only fanned his idealism. He may have set out in his work to teach a shorter route to innovation, but he concluded with the idea that innovation might provide a surer road to a free society.
Altshuller saw TRIZ as nothing less than the solution to the world’s social ills, not merely a way to grease the wheels of technological progress. He hoped his work would liberate people’s minds. But thus far it has been used only as a problem-solving technique, albeit successfully: Engineers at companies like Boeing, Kodak, National Semiconductor, Northern Telecom and even NASA are applying the methodology with startlingly impressive results. It may be a low-tech solution for a high-tech world, but it may also be a more lasting answer than things like software agents and total-quality-management packages. In fact, TRIZ may be a solution that transcends technology altogether.
On an engineering level, TRIZ works, say those familiar with it, by breaking down the process of problem solving and innovation into discrete elements, each of which is expanded through concrete techniques to catalyze engineers’ thinking along specific lines. Nowhere in the methodology is there to be found so facile an instruction as “Let your mind roam free.” As Altshuller writes, “It is not enough to say, ‘Extend your imaginative thinking about something.’ The methods for achieving this must be explained.” Part of TRIZ’s task is to explain these methods by using the host of technical principles culled by Altshuller and his disciples through close examination of innovations gone by.
It was Altshuller’s stroke of brilliance to view the problems of engineering and innovation in terms of technical contradictions, the concept around which TRIZ pivots. “An invention is the removal of technical contradictions,” Altshuller writes, and a moment’s reflection proves him correct.
Even the incandescent bulb, perhaps the world’s most famous invention, was made possible by the resolution of a technical contradiction. Electric current passing through metal filaments produced light as early as 1801, but the filaments burned themselves out too quickly to be of use. The contradiction: The filaments must burn hot enough to produce light but not so hot as to consume themselves. It was not until the late 1870s that Sir Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Alva Edison resolved the contradiction. Placing the filaments in a vacuum allowed them to produce light without burning themselves out too quickly.
One contradiction that TRIZ has not managed to resolve is that between Altshuller’s idealism and the current rush to commercialize his work. Though Altshuller was no doubt aware there was money to be made through the application of TRIZ, he insisted that the science itself remain in the public’s hands — just as biology and mathematics, say, are the property of anyone who can grasp them. Altshuller certainly would have been startled to find someone hawking the movie rights to TRIZ.
“I’m looking to go after [Steven] Spielberg for a movie,” Bar-El tells me in Ideation’s hospitality suite, as the New York Knicks squeak past the Toronto Raptors on a muted television nearby. The idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds, given Altshuller’s harrowing life story. Born in 1926 in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, Altshuller was awarded his first author’s certificate (the Soviet-era equivalent of a patent) when he was just entering high school, according to Victor Fey, a former student of his. By 1946, the 20-year-old Altshuller, with several more patents under his belt, was working as a Soviet navy patent examiner and, according to Boris Zlotin, a longtime associate of Altshuller’s, planned a career as a military engineer.
It was in the naval patent office that Altshuller first discovered the tenets that would lead him to TRIZ, discerning a common pattern of solutions to technical problems across a diversity of fields. The first thing he did with his theory, however, was find a new way to put his foot in his mouth. Concerned over the dismal state of the Soviet Union after World War II, Altshuller and an associate, Rafael Shapiro, wrote an earnest letter to Stalin.
“They wrote a letter that stated that the country was in ruins after World War II, and that there were not many resources to recover it,” says Fey. “He suggested to use TRIZ. Of course he had to prove this, so Altshuller put together a graph of innovation, and found there were two valleys in the graph. One was in 1937, with Stalin’s first pogrom, and the other was in wartime.” In 1949, Altshuller was arrested, interrogated and tortured. Finally, he “confessed,” as had so many other “dissidents” before him, and was sentenced to 25 years in the infamous Vorkuta labor camp, at the northern tip of the Ural Mountains, above the Arctic Circle.
“He was in jail because, No. 1, he was Jewish,” says Bar-El in his thick Israeli accent, “and because it’s against the law to make the Russian people creative.”
Stalin’s most brutal despotism, though, couldn’t dim Altshuller’s creativity. Until his death in 1998, Altshuller burned as brightly as any of Edison’s filaments, and often in just as rarefied an environment as a vacuum; much of his work was done while he was imprisoned in the gulag.
“Altshuller was in the labor camp along with many other representatives of the intelligentsia,” says Fey. “He realized that in order to survive, not physically but mostly spiritually and mentally, he had to ask these people to teach him. Every night after they went back to the barracks, they would teach him: physics, math, art history, literature, whatever was available. This allowed these people to survive longer than they would have without Altshuller.”
Zlotin, who worked with Altshuller in Russia for nearly two decades, relates his surprise at discovering Altshuller’s vast knowledge of Verdi operas: “I said, how do you know these? You had time to go to opera? He said, ‘Never, but my neighbor in the barracks was the world’s best specialist on Verdi’s music, and he would sing me all his operas at night.’
“For Altshuller, this camp was first a place of education,” Zlotin says in his heavily accented English. “He studied 14, 16 hours per day, and in this way he had huge knowledge in pretty unexpectable areas.”
It was this wide-ranging knowledge across “unexpectable” areas that allowed Altshuller to develop a problem-solving methodology applicable to just about any discipline you’d care to name. Inventor David Levy, whose portfolio includes work on the functional layout of the Apple PowerBook, calls the methodology “tremendous.” (Though he does not use TRIZ formally, Levy says his practices naturally echo those found in the discipline.) “The most exciting part about TRIZ is, it’s not limited to how to make a widget,” says Levy. “It’s how to approach problem solving, it’s how to approach relationships, it’s how to approach societal problems. It’s really how to be creative and to observe the world and solve problems.”
TRIZ leads engineers to generate potential solutions at a much faster rate than mere brainstorming would. “I’m used to seeing novel ideas once every six months — if your engineer wakes up on the right side of the bed,” says David Patrishkoff, chief technology officer and head of R&D at Dura, a maker of specialty automotive parts. With TRIZ, “we’re seeing dozens and dozens of novel ideas. I am totally excited.”
Patrishkoff believes Altshuller’s science — and some “very interesting” patent strategies — can help him “control the competition” through technology forecasting. “TRIZ is high-speed R&D, generating ideas at least 20 times faster than normal R&D groups,” Patrishkoff says excitedly. “Do we patent them all?” Patrishkoff is considering a form of “patent fencing” in which high-level innovations developed through TRIZ might be published as a “trap” for competitors. Broader ideas, meanwhile, on which the published concepts depended, would be pushed through the patent process. “Even if we don’t get market share, we’re going to pick up on royalties,” he grins.
Altshuller, if he’s listening, must be spinning in his grave. He was probably among the first to mine patent files — his original theories were based on a survey of more than 40,000 patents, and current databases used by computer-based TRIZ programs cover millions — but he is more the Charles Ives of science than an early venture capital cowboy. Just as Ives refused to copyright his musical compositions, Altshuller always insisted that his ideas remain in the public domain, say those who knew him, and he was not particularly happy when TRIZ’s stateside commercialization began.
“Altshuller said TRIZ is not for this,” says Zlotin. “TRIZ should be only for all human beings to get.” Now chief scientist at Ideation International, a TRIZ consultancy, Zlotin describes Altshuller as “Communist, but not idiotic Communist like people who like power. He was Communist in the sense of Jesus Christ; he wanted to make, for all people, something good.”
“Altshuller wasn’t interested in designing another gadget or another gizmo,” says Fey, who runs a consultancy called the TRIZ Group and teaches TRIZ at Indiana’s Wayne State University. “TRIZ was perceived by him as a way to develop creative people.” To that end, a large part of Altshuller’s efforts in Russia consisted of establishing education programs in schools and colleges throughout the country. According to Ideation’s Bar-El, there are similar programs at universities in 25 countries around the world.
Bar-El, perhaps more than anyone else, is responsible for bringing TRIZ to the United States in an organized fashion. A former microchip engineer and marketing manager, he was semiretired when TRIZ was first brought to his attention by a friend, in early 1992. “I was ready to move to Las Vegas and buy a 7-Eleven,” he says, graying curls peeking from his open shirt collar.
By 1993, he and two partners had tracked down TRIZ scholars in Israel and Russia, including Altshuller, and had hired two of them, Zlotin and his wife, Alla Zusman, as the core of a new company. With aerospace and automotive engineering concern Allied Signal (now part of Honeywell) as its first customer, Ideation set about solving problems that had stumped the company’s top engineers. By 1994 it was pulling down more than a million dollars a year in revenues, a figure that’s expected to approach $10 million by the end of 2000 — not bad for a company promoting the “new science” of an obscure Soviet-era inventor who spent some of his best years in a labor camp.
“Altshuller was never broken by the camps,” says Fey. “On the contrary. He had no tolerance for stupidity or arrogance in authorities. Altshuller was the only guy I knew who not only had certain principles, but he lived by those principles.” And, inventor that he was, “he wouldn’t adjust to the world around him; he would change the world to adapt to his needs.”
People, as well as technology, were affected by Altshuller’s “superstrong” charisma. “It was dangerous,” says Zlotin. “After our first meeting [at a monthlong TRIZ seminar], when I returned to St. Petersburg, my friends start laughing because I start moving like him, my gesticulation became close to him, my smile became like Altshuller’s. Not because he wants this. He was a very good person. But such incredibly strong character, such strong influence, such strong brain.”
Though Altshuller was freed after Stalin’s death in 1953, it would be several more years before he felt safe in publishing his theories. To support himself in the meantime, he turned to writing science fiction, under the pen name Genrich Altov. English translations of three of Altshuller’s stories, collected in a book called “Ballad of the Stars,” reflect not only Altshuller’s views of the inventive process but his struggle to maintain his scientific faith amid crushing adversity and solitude. Science fiction, to Altshuller, was more than just a way to put bread on the table. Despite the fact that the ideas contained in sci-fi tales are often completely outlandish, as he writes in his exegesis of TRIZ, “The Innovation Algorithm,” they remain useful for catalyzing research and inventiveness: “SF helps overcome psychological barriers on the road to [the] ‘crazy’ ideas without which science cannot continue its development.” Altshuller even went so far as to catalog these concepts in a “Registry of Contemporary Science Fiction Ideas.”
In 1959, Altshuller published his first paper describing the process at the core of “classical” TRIZ: the algorithm for inventive problem solving (ARIZ). Since its initial publication, ARIZ has undergone an almost constant process of revision at the hands of Altshuller’s disciples. In its essence, ARIZ consists of three phases: problem definition, identification of technical contradictions and exploration of possible solutions.
“In many ways, the ability to ask the right questions is more powerful than the ability to answer them,” says inventor Levy. “It’s the difference between knowledge and wisdom.” Other auditors of the methodology agree. Mike Weiner — who is consulting for Ideation on the licensing of several inventions developed through the TRIZ process, including a “next-generation” electric razor whose blades revolve as well as rotate, and a newfangled diaper fiber said to dramatically increase absorptive capacity — likens inventive thought to an unlikely pursuit: “People are very inventive, and most people don’t understand that they are. They don’t know how to discern potentially valuable and creative thoughts from all the other thoughts and noise of the day. I equate it to comedy. If you want to be a comedian, you have to learn the process of thinking up and telling funny jokes, an important component of which is not telling the nonfunny ones.”
Though initially impressed by TRIZ’s results, Weiner relates his surprise at finding that Bar-El and Ideation seemed to be unaware of the huge moneymaking potential at their disposal. “It’s the old story — the shoemakers’ children have no shoes,” says Weiner in frustration. “These people are very devoted to this thing, whereas they probably could make a considerably greater amount of money if they did what they’re now beginning to do a little more of, which is to offer invention-for-hire services, with royalties. But they’re doing this to change the world for the better.”
Despite their hopes for a blockbuster biopic, Altshuller’s disciples seem to have inherited much of his zeal. For Altshuller, who never set foot in a free society, “TRIZ was not a goal in itself,” says Fey. “He had a very strong philosophical belief that the degree of welfare in society largely depends on the number of creative individuals in society. He held that if any society had even 5 percent of people like Einstein, it couldn’t be a fascist society.”
Even Edison scowlingly admitted that though he could improve machines, he could not improve men. But perhaps he had too little faith. Altshuller, having come through the gulag with an intensified commitment to freedom and society, spent his life wondering not how to build better inventions but how to build better inventors. In the process, he may have invented a science that will allow us to do both.
Donald Ervin Knuth is trying to explain what has delayed work on Volume 4 of his magnum opus. “I’ve never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take,” he says.
Coming from someone who’s been writing one book on and off for the past quarter-century, this seems a bit of an understatement. But when you consider that most of Knuth’s work has been devoted to just that — figuring out how much time things like computer programs take — and the statement takes on new (and slightly disingenuous) meanings.
“I’m getting toward being able to take up Volume 4 full time,” Knuth says. “I’m writing little snippets. I wrote a sentence just the other day.”
“Volume 4,” of course, refers to the long-awaited next installment of Knuth’s masterwork, “The Art of Computer Programming.” Less a set of instruction manuals than a kind of analytic philosophy of programming, the books — which first appeared in the 1960s — lay out principles both broad and specific to guide computer programmers toward greater efficiency. So comprehensive are the texts that the Jargon File of hacker slang offers a definition of the word “Knuth”: “Mythically, the reference that answers all questions about data structures or algorithms,” and goes on to recommend a safe response to any question for which you don’t have a ready answer: “I think you can find that in Knuth.”
Time was when such a comment would have the curious programmer dusting off “Fundamental Algorithms” and “Sorting and Searching” (Volumes 1 and 3 of “Knuth”), which were required reading in computer science courses for decades. But modern keyboard jocks no longer worry about things like saving 11 microseconds in each iteration of a binary tree search (if they even know what a binary tree is). Instead, they spend their time assembling prefab software components and designing graphical user interfaces to wow clients. Some “write” whole systems having never even seen a line of code. To them, Knuth, now professor emeritus of the art of computer programming at Stanford University, is irrelevant, abstruse and bothersome because he illustrates concepts in machine code, the lowest-level programming language and the hardest to read.
If his attention to the minutiae of programming has earned the annoyance of a younger generation of programmers, though, Knuth remains the iminence grise of algorithm analysis, and one of the leading thinkers on programming in general.
“I think of him as sort of a godfather,” says software engineer Ellen Ullman, author of “Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents.” “It would be very difficult these days to take a job and approach programming in that sort of algorithm and design sense, [but] it’s a solace to think that there are places where people think deeply about algorithms in a general and abstract way and have notions of elegance and beauty.”
Of course, other computer scientists have made contributions to the field that are every bit as substantial (most notably Edsger Dijkstra, Tony Hoare and Niklaus Wirth). But Knuth’s work brings to life the complex mathematical underpinnings of the discipline, and deals with the logistics of programming on all levels, from the conceptual design of solutions to the most intimate details of the machine. The fundamental elements of any computer program are, perhaps not surprisingly, time and space. (In programming terms, time describes the speed with which a program accomplishes its task, while space refers to the amount of memory a program requires both to store itself — i.e. the length of the code — and to compute and store its results.) But Knuth is concerned not only with bytes and microseconds, but with a concept that has come to be known in coding circles as “elegance,” and that applies to programming at any level.
Elegance takes in such factors as readability, modular coding techniques and the ease with which a program can be adapted to other functions or expanded to perform additional tasks. (Knuth’s broader ideas about documentation and structured programming are laid out in his 1992 book, “Literate Programming.”) Though rarely mentioned, “sloppy coding” often costs companies a great deal in terms of time and money; programmers brought in to update the code of consultants gone by must spend hours or days deciphering a poorly documented program, or hunting down bugs that might have been caught easily had the initial programmer simply been a bit more conscientious in the practice of his craft.
Ullman points out that “the practice of programming has moved very far away from the notion that the professional programmer considers algorithms in a deep way. Of course,” she adds, “it would be impossible if every bit of code had to go through that kind of deeply professional process. On the other hand, the code that we have would be better. There’s no doubt in my mind that it would be better and more long-lasting code.”
Ullman, however, admits she hasn’t revisited Knuth’s work in many years. Many people are put off on even a first reading by the “mythical” computer with which Knuth illustrates his concepts. MIX, “the world’s first polyunsaturated computer,” was designed by Knuth as a kind of ideal machine along the lines popular in the 1960s. (Knuth is now updating MIX to MMIX, a reduced instruction-set computing machine that more closely mimics computers in use today.) “The Art of Computer Programming” is filled with examples in MIX, Knuth’s fictional machine code and assembly language. In today’s world of natural-language compilers, pseudo-code and “click-and-drag” programming tools, though, learning a new assembly language is as attractive to most students of computer science as a visit to the dentist.
But programmers ignore “the very pulse of the machine” (a Wordsworth quotation found in Volume 1) at their peril. As Lyle Ramshaw, a former graduate student of Knuth’s, points out, “Don claims that one of the skills that you need to be a computer scientist is the ability to work with multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously. When you’re working at one level, you try and ignore the details of what’s happening at the lower levels. But when you’re debugging a computer program and you get some mysterious error message, it could be a failure in any of the levels below you, so you can’t afford to be too compartmentalized.”
“MIX was incredibly popular in the early ’70s,” Knuth says. “Right now there are a lot of comments on Amazon.com saying how it was my terrible mistake, and how am I ever going to recover from it? Well, some of those comments are right, but some of them are dead wrong. The people who say I shouldn’t have machine language and just go into high-level languages, they’re the ones I think are wrong.”
In fact, without machine code, it would be impossible for Knuth to even attempt the low-level analyses (like the time spent executing each instruction in a computer program) that are the backbone of his work. The same BASIC program, for instance, may run at different speeds and use different amounts of memory on different types of machine. In addition, such languages tend to go in and out of vogue faster than a Madonna single. If Knuth based his books on Java, C++, VisualBASIC or SNOBOL (remember SNOBOL?), they’d be obsolete in a matter of months.
And as Knuth points out, “People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.”
If Volume 4 has been a long time coming, Knuth has not been idle. Since finishing Volume 3 in 1973, he has written several academic works on computer science and mathematics, composed a novel (it took him one week), developed revolutionary and widely used desktop typography and font design systems (in which all of his books are now handsomely typeset) and engaged in a study of Chapter 3, Verse 16, of every single book of the Bible, which he published in 1991. (“It’s different from any other book, and that means it was either very necessary or never should have been written,” Knuth says.) He has also revised his earlier books, incorporating thousands of improvements, “including all the letters from people saying they had found errors.” Knuth offers a
href="http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/address.html">reward of “at least” $2.56 (a “hexadecimal dollar”) to anyone who points out a previously unsighted mistake in one of his books. To date, he has written more than $10,000 worth of such checks. “But I’m not sure how much of it has actually been cashed,” he notes.
Unlike most books, Volume 4 will not appear all at once. Instead, 128-page fascicles will be released more or less as Knuth finishes writing them. Though not scheduled for publication until 2000 or later, the fascicles are sure to begin circulating informally before then. (A fascicle describing the MMIX machine is already available on the Internet.) Knuth, now 61, hopes to finish the book around 2003 — though “that’s probably slipped by a year or two,” he admits. It could be a decade or two into the next millennium before he completes the set.
Peter Gordon, Knuth’s editor at Addison-Wesley, sounds wistful when asked about a due date for Volume 4 (which will actually be published as three “sub-volumes”). “From my 20 years’ experience in computer-science publishing, the most frequently asked question by far is, ‘Where is Volume 4?’” he says. “Nobody has to say more than that, who the author is, what book they’re talking about. Just ‘Volume 4.’”
Speaking with Knuth, one gets the impression of a man hard pressed to keep up with his mind’s high-speed output of ideas. His writing career dates back to 1957, when, as a 19-year-old freshman at the Case Institute of Technology, he earned $25 for the publication of his “Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures” in Mad magazine. His style has remained delightfully literate, featuring sly plays on the jargon of computing, as well as some that are not so sly: Chapter 2 of “Fundamental Algorithms” opens with “Hamlet’s” first-act resolution “Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records.”
Besides demonstrating the techniques of clear, efficient coding, Knuth has sought to bring a deeper sense of aesthetics to the discipline. “You try to consider that the program is an essay, a work of literature,” he says. “I’m hoping someday that the Pulitzer Prize committee will agree.” Prizes would be handed out for “best-written program,” he says, only half-joking. Knuth himself has already collected numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science from then-President Jimmy Carter and Japan’s prestigious Kyoto Prize.
And though it may take him another quarter century to complete his magnum opus, Knuth is already dreaming up projects to come — including the computer-aided composition of an orchestral piece based on the Book of Revelations.
At Stanford, Knuth no longer teaches, though he occasionally lectures on whatever happens to interest him at the moment. (This fall will find him at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, talking about “Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About.”) When he has the time, Knuth reads four-hand piano music with friends on his Bosendorfer grand, or plays the
href="http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/organ.html">16-rank organ that stands across from it in the music room of the Palo Alto, Calif., home he shares with his wife, Jill. Otherwise, his days are spent sifting through scientific journals, research papers and pages on pages of notes for his next books. “I’m obsessively detail-oriented,” Knuth says. An example: During the 10 years or more in which Knuth was occupied designing the TeX typesetting system and revising Volumes 1 through 3, he accumulated a 270-inch stack of such correspondence. Twenty-two and a half feet of heady research may be daunting, but more revealing is the fact that Knuth actually measured it.
Though the world of programming may have little time these days for Knuth’s rigorous analytical style and painstaking attention to low-level detail, his work remains an indispensable contribution to the body of knowledge that is computer science. He will perhaps one day be remembered as programming’s Dr. Johnson, but the label would do him a disservice, for Knuth’s ideas of elegance can be applied to more disciplines than simply the digital realm. Knuth hesitates at this suggestion, then demurs: “Everyday life is like programming, I guess,” he says. “If you love something you can put beauty into it.”
Everybody’s doing it, from Beijing to Brooklyn and beyond. It has more adherents — 100 million, if its founder is to be believed — than the Chinese Communist Party. And though it promises happiness and fulfillment, its popularity has led to its condemnation as a doomsday cult and made it the target of a massive government crackdown.
Falun Gong is a quasi-religious “cultivation system” introduced seven and a half years ago by Li Hongzhi, the 47-year-old son of two doctors from a remote city in northeastern China. Since making his teachings public, Master Li, as he bills himself, has seen his following grow into what could now be the fifth-largest organized religion in the world. Even if the Chinese government estimate of a mere 2 million “practitioners” is more accurate, Falun Gong, in less than a decade, has managed to outstrip rival start-up Scientology by more than two to one.
What accounts for such widespread appeal? Most of Li’s followers come to his teachings through two books, “Zhuan Falun” (“Rotating the Law Wheel”), and “China Falun Gong” — tracts that set established religious tradition on its ear by dispensing with concerns of reincarnation and the afterlife and promising salvation to individuals while they’re still walking this earth (a journey, by the way, that Li promises to prolong).
Loosely based on an ancient Eastern school of breath control and Tai-Chi-like exercise known as qigong, Falun Gong combines elements of Buddhism, Taoism and other Eastern philosophies with a strikingly Western sensibility that requires believers to do little more than simply lead conscientious lives and turn the other cheek. By “cultivating” truth, compassion and forbearance, practitioners are told, they may increase their “cultivation energy” (a measure of enlightenment), reap physical benefits like long life and a reversal of the aging process and begin to open their Celestial Eye, through which they will be able to see into other planes of being.
Though “China Falun Gong” describes a set of exercises associated with the faith, Li makes clear that there are few requirements as to how often these must be performed, if at all. “We do not pay attention to the time necessary for practice,” he writes. Instead, Li seems to require only an attitude adjustment from his flock. “True cultivation entails the cultivation of your heart, which is called the cultivation of Xinxing,” he tells us. And while there is a system of “energy mechanisms” and other trappings that help define Falun Gong, all of that takes a back seat to the cultivation of one’s Xinxing, without which none of the faith’s benefits can be derived.
The well-developed Xinxing requires a willingness to endure suffering (common to faiths of both East and West), the embracing of humility and virtue and the surrender of all but the most modest earthly ambitions. The faithful need not don sackcloth and ashes, though, as Li makes clear (“All of our practitioners should always remember never to behave abnormally among ordinary people”), the desire for worldly gain must be left behind. “In human society,” Li says, “one vies with the other, tries to cheat or outwit the other, and hurts the other for a bit of personal interests. All these attachments must be done away with.”
In other words, all you have to do is lead a good life, be willing to endure the tribulations that will pay off your karmic debt and keep yourself free of most material ambitions, and peace and increased “cultivation energy” are granted you.
This peace is bestowed upon your “Main Consciousness,” keep in mind, not the “Paraconsciousness” that enjoys the benefits of Buddhism (and that can’t really take advantage of them in this world). And that’s peace right now, let’s be clear — not in the next life or the one after. The method for achieving all this has been kept secret for thousands of years, Li writes. (“It took us a lot of trouble to have the permission to tell you about this issue.”) Here lies the kernel of Falun Gong’s appeal. I’d take cultivation energy in this life over enlightenment in the next one any day, wouldn’t you? Especially if I didn’t have to alter my lifestyle much in order to get it.
“I am the only person genuinely teaching the gong in high dimensions,” Li tells us in the series of lectures that make up “Zhaun Falun.” Of course, it is not uncommon for ambitious men and women of whatever stripe to claim possession of the one true line on happiness — whether they’re trying to sell enlightenment or eyeliner. And as religions go, Falun Gong has all the hallmarks of a faith designed to sell, sell, sell. “We are offering salvation to all sentient beings,” Li says. (Bad credit? No credit? No problem.)
Falun Gong also hews closely enough to religious schools of both East and West to make it attractive on any continent. Besides the yoga-like movements, the Celestial Eye and an “energy yardstick” that grows atop followers’ heads, Li speaks of humanity’s fall from grace and briefly mentions “the last days of Last Havoc,” elements that have their analog in traditional Western religions. Li’s teachings also offer a simple morality, with Zhen Shan Ren (truth, compassion and forbearance) as “the sole criterion used to judge a good person from a bad one.”
Though Falun Gong, like most Eastern teachings, includes no mention of an omnipotent god, Li’s messianic requirement that his followers put their faith in him and only in him harks back to Christianity’s early days. Also reminiscent of Western religion are Li’s accounts of his own miracles — though much of “Zhuan Falun” is devoted to why such things cannot be displayed to the faithful, and why the “supernatural powers” that can be achieved through high-level cultivation are never to be used.
“Zhuan Falun” opens with an endearing disclaimer as to its style, which remains plain and largely comprehensible throughout, if a bit idiosyncratic. (The lectures were composed originally in Chinese.) “Zhuan Falun is not flowery in its language and even does not conform to modern grammar,” Li writes. “If I try to use modern grammar to polish this book of the Great Law, there would arise a serious problem: the language and grammatical structure of the writing might be standard and beautiful, but they will not be able to impart deeper and higher implications, because it is completely beyond the capability of contemporary standard vocabulary to express the Great Law.”
“Zhuan Falun” is also filled with quirky — if not always decipherable, even in context — turns of phrase (“the gigantic dye vat of ordinary human society,” for instance). And some of the concepts with which Li illustrates Falun Gong may sound at bit outlandish to Western readers (well, and to Eastern ones, too, probably). One of the first steps required of the faithful is that their bodies be “purified” by Li so they may receive Falun, a Buddhist swastika of energy transformation that rotates constantly within a disciple’s abdomen. We are told of Yinghai, or “subtle babies,” that appear all over the bodies of high-level Falun Gong practitioners; of ancient cities on ocean floors; of a 2-billion-year-old nuclear reactor in Gabon, Africa; and of the fact that civilization has been left “in complete destruction” 81 times in its history — a fact Li discovered only after “a meticulous check which I once did.”
But despite Li’s own bold claims, he is not one to tolerate any rival theories that might come down the pike. “Do not read those heterodox qigong books,” he warns. “Do not even open them at all.” And despite the role the Internet has played in spreading Falun Gong, he isn’t likely to argue that information wants to be free. “Zhuan Falun” is filled with demur explanations of why acolytes may not be told of this or that aspect of what lies behind his teachings.
Concerned with the sect’s growing popularity, the Chinese government recently revoked Li’s status as a qigong master, inspiring thousands of Falun Gong practitioners to show up in Beijing toting copies of “Zhuan Falun” in protest. The protests led to the largest government crackdown in China since Tiananmen Square, and resulted in the detention of more than 10,000 people across the country.
Why are the leaders of China — some of whom, at the lower levels of government, are also Falun Gong practitioners — so concerned? Other quasi-religious movements in China have nearly toppled governments in the past. But a closer reading of “Zhuan Falun” and “China Falun Gong” reveals that there is little in Li’s teaching that seems likely to encourage his followers to threaten established political leadership. In fact, quite the opposite is true.
“Anything that seriously disturbs human society is absolutely not allowed to exist,” Li says. Beijing, in fact, might be better served by embracing the young faith than by excoriating Li in its official press, where daily denunciations describe him as “virtually a Living King of Hell” and accuse him of harboring “wicked political ambitions;” they even dug up a former teacher of Li’s to discuss his lackluster early academic career: “We had never found that he was a person of extraordinary caliber.”
Judging by “Zhuan Falun,” Li is no political firebrand. By combining a noble complacency with a practice that seeks to maintain the societal status quo, Falun Gong is all set to serve up a following that is almost Orwellian in its malleability. It is hard to know, of course, whether this is what Master Li had in mind. The Chinese government alternately accuses him of being a CIA agent and of having only his personal gain at heart. More likely, it is an overweening desire for adulation that drives him. And it’s just possible that he has, in his studies, discovered the secret of eternal youth and supernatural powers. In any case, he has managed to design an apparently benign religious system that appeals to millions of people around the world. And if that’s the case, more power to him.
Why the state of Kansas is not more often recognized as a seat of 20th century American literature is a mystery to me. From Langston Hughes to Truman Capote to William Burroughs, authors have long found in its windswept towns and uncluttered reaches the perfect backdrop against which to conjure remarkable characters.
The most recent fiction to emerge from the rich soil of the Sunflower State (but by no means the least eyebrow-raising), though, takes the form not of a novel but of Kansas’s new science education guidelines. These were recently rewritten by a group of conservative theorists who apparently have a bone to pick with another great writer, Charles Darwin.
That virtually all mention of evolution has been excised from the Kansas testing standards must have Darwin spinning in his grave (provided he has not yet entered the fossil record on which he based his theories). Indeed, some readers will be startled to learn that the evolution debate has never really been conclusively settled. A return to its key books — as well as to one seldom referred to in this context — is therefore in order.
“The Voyage of the Beagle,” Darwin’s annotated diary of a five-year expedition to South America, published in 1840, careens from finches to tortoises, from wounded Argentine officers to barking plovers “wrongfully accused of inelegance.” Through all of it, from Patagonia to the Galapagos and beyond, Darwin maintains an almost ingenuous
curiosity, recording the countless observations that would lead to the theories set out 19 years later in “The Origin of Species.”
But, as Henry Morris and John Whitcomb point out in their 1961 treatise “The Genesis Flood” — a creationist classic and their counterthrust to “The Origin of Species” — Darwin’s theory remains just that: a theory. Since no one was standing around watching when primitive life first appeared on the globe, they argue, who’s to say when or how — or why — it got there? To explain the variety of life as we know it, one need reach no further back than the 35,000 or so animals that Morris and Whitcomb, after some painstaking calculations, have determined were sheltered on the ark, and from which all the beasts of the modern world are, naturally, descended.
Morris and Whitcomb trot out chemical, geological and meteorological evidence to support their contentions, though most of their arguments are of the somewhat shaky “cannot be disproved” variety. Despite the fact that there is much questionable science in their book, it can be entertaining to indulge theories about the “antediluvian vapor canopy” (see Genesis 1:6-7) and the geological changes wrought on the earth during “creation week,” as Morris and Whitcomb dub the six days in which God created “the heaven and the earth” (as well as a seventh day, on which it is commonly assumed He put His feet up in front of a Saints game).
Such oddities aside, a vast sea of conflicting arguments divides “The Voyage of the Beagle” from the story of Noah’s ark. There is, however a third voyage that may shed light on the debate, one first undertaken a century ago by another Kansas literary figure: a gingham-clad young girl known simply as Dorothy.
Yes, we are back in Kansas now, with Lyman Frank Baum and “The Wizard of Oz.” What have witches, winged monkeys and a heartless tin woodman to do with the creationism debate? Perhaps only the monkeys would have much to say about the descent of man. But the rest of the cast — not least Baum’s humbug wizard — might tell us that the conflict is less one of divergent scientific philosophies than of dissonant personal psychologies.
The wizard must be the first pop psychologist in American literature. Once revealed to Dorothy and company as “a little old man, with a bald head and a wrinkled face,” Oz, the (formerly) Great and Terrible, keeps a stiff upper lip. All set to deflate the travelers’ illusions of inadequacy, he has an aphorism ready for everyone. “You have plenty of courage,” he tells the lion. “All you need is confidence in yourself.” To the scarecrow he recommends experience, “the only thing that brings knowledge.” The tin woodman, on the other hand, is informed by the homesick wizard that he is better off without a heart at all.
But the travelers insist, and a simple bit of sleight-of-hand convinces them they have finally gotten what they were after. Only Dorothy must seek her salvation elsewhere, but here too it turns out that what was sought had all along been close at hand. Or, in Dorothy’s case, close at foot. The silver shoes she has worn throughout her adventure in Oz — transformed into ruby slippers only when Hollywood and Judy Garland stepped in — deliver her from the alien landscape only once she is informed by Glinda (the good witch of the south) of their “wonderful powers.”
Baum’s tale at first appears to be a very American fable of self-reliance, but it is really closer to an “authorization myth” of the sort so dear to Joseph Campbell. The land of Oz springs so fully formed from its author’s brow that it seems the quintessential creationist landscape (though Darwin could probably find some way to explain the plethora of “aboriginal productions” present at so remote a locale). Thus the solutions to its denizens’ problems — finding brains, a heart, courage or a way home — always lie with the local authorities.
No different from the creationists, really. But very different from Darwin, who finds his solution only after a long, hard look to nature.
Strikingly, Morris and Whitcomb seem to acknowledge as much in their introduction. “We believe that most of the difficulties associated with the Biblical record of the Flood are basically religious, rather than scientific,” they write. And here, at last, the true battlefield is identified — though Morris and Whitcomb go on to ignore their own admonition and spend nearly 500 pages advancing half-baked “scientific” hypotheses, as do those fighting the current creationist debate.
In the end, though, they tell us, it all comes down to this: Either you read the Bible as history (in which case, like the creationists, you draw your authorization from it), or you don’t (in which case, like Darwin, you look elsewhere). No amount of science can prove or disprove, say, Genesis 9:20-21, in which Noah gets drunk to celebrate the covenant God has just made with him and his descendants.
Creation, it seems, is not a scientific debate after all. Either the word of the Great and Terrible is all you need to dismiss Darwin’s theory — or you peek behind the curtain to discover it’s just a wizened, homesick humbug back there after all.
The reader will pardon me for beginning this essay with a book that discusses a “society of bladders” and blames war, bad marriages and totalitarianism on “lack of genital gratification in masses of people.” But it seems a fit place to begin. Psych majors may recognize the phrases as those of “sex-economist” Wilhelm Reich, one of the foremost of the theoreticians I would here dub the crackpot authorities. They can be found in Reich’s autobiographical treatise, “The Function of the Orgasm,” without which any survey of crackpot authority literature would be incomplete. But we will leave the bladders for now, although — as any good crackpot authority would put it — there will be more to say about them later.
“Reich was a brilliant psychoanalyst,” my own former analyst told me, “but he did go into a psychosis later in his life.” Substitute any discipline for “psychoanalyst” in the preceding sentence, and you have a fair description of the philosophers and scientists whose praises I hope to sing here. Brilliant theorists all, the crackpot authorities apply wide-ranging intellects to fascinating postulates that are, if sometimes out of left field, at least plausible enough to merit discussion. And though there is something a bit south-of-sane in the works on my personal summer reading list, most of them impart valuable insights — leavened, as well, with more than a few laughs.
As a crackpot authority, Reich is exemplary. Both readable and convincing, he is also, the reader suspects, more than a little confused about certain tenets of what constitutes reality. Take his 1939 discovery of “orgone energy.” This is the stuff responsible for the aurora borealis (at least, according to Reich’s theory), but it is also a form of measurable energy released by the body during sexual stimulation, which must be kept in balance if we are to lead happy, fulfilling lives.
What makes Reich’s book a pleasure is not that he might have stumbled onto some heretofore-undiscovered “biophysical” force in the world (he didn’t), but that he displays such genius in getting there. His psychoanalytic thesis holds that pent-up orgone energy is responsible for all manner of psychic disorders, from depression to anxiety to schizophrenia and so on. Only through achieving “orgastic potency” can one hope to cure one’s ills. Orgastic potency is different from “erective” or “ejaculative” potency. It means more or less the ability to surrender oneself to a full-body orgasm.
“The pleasure of living and the pleasure of orgasm are identical,” Reich says. No argument there. In fact, Reich’s early work is still taught to students of psychoanalysis. It’s only when he reaches the bladders that he starts to go off the rails. And when, in the last six pages of the book, he finally wraps his musings into his fully formulated “orgone theory,” you know you have a crackpot authority on your hands.
As Reich amply illustrates, the crackpot authority is no mere delusional theorist. Really, it’s the second term of the genre’s title that carries more weight. These are some heavy hitters, some really smart guys. It’s just that their genius has led them to some strange conclusions. “Orgone theory” itself may be outlandish, but there is clearly some wisdom in the thinking that preceded it. Forgive the crackpot authorities their foibles and they can provide quite an education — even if it is not always on the subjects they intend.
No crackpot authority I’ve come across makes so beautifully compelling a case for so cracked a theory as does Julian Jaynes. A psychology professor at Princeton from 1966 until 1990, Jaynes wrote the bestselling masterpiece “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1978 and is still taught to fortunate university students here and there.
Jaynes postulates that human consciousness as we know it — the ability to “metaphorize” in mind-space — is a relatively recent development. And we’re not talking geologic time here; we’re talking 1250 B.C. Until then, the two halves of the brain worked independently of each other. The motor centers in the left brain — which could not function on their own and needed to be told what to do — got their instructions in the form of “auditory hallucinations” (i.e., they heard voices), which emanated from the now-dormant speech centers in the right brain.
To help illustrate how this might have worked, Jaynes points to vestiges of the bicameral mind in modern life, and trots out some fascinating case studies of schizophrenics (who commonly hear similar voices) to back up his arguments. He also explains a surprising number of phenomena through his theory. Here, he argues, is the origin of the gods humanity has worshipped throughout history, including those we know today. To what else would early modern man ascribe such voices? And what other rational explanation is there for the belief in these beings, present in every civilization that’s ever existed? (Note how rationality slips in to support an irrational thesis.)
Jaynes displays a hallmark trait of the crackpot authority in drawing from widely disparate disciplines to back up a hypothesis that would never even occur to most scientists, let alone to laymen. Whether he’s right or not, though, his book is a fantastic tour of primitive societies, of the history of literature and of thought itself. In recounting the earliest examples of writing, from cuneiform inventory ledgers through “The Iliad” and the Bible (the Old Testament is really the story of the loss of the bicameral mind and its replacement by subjective consciousness), Jaynes shows that not until surprisingly late in the development of the written word do terms appear that even begin to describe consciousness. Why would humanity’s first authors omit those terms in describing the world, Jaynes asks, unless consciousness wasn’t part of the world they were describing?
Besides being a true joy to read (who else would refer to “the many-poemed comparison of love to a rose”?), Jaynes’ book is a marvelous example of inductive rhetoric. Few book-length essays surpass it in the elegance with which it lays out its material. And where else can you read the word “extispicy”? (No, it’s not on the menu at Kentucky Fried Chicken.)
The case of French theologian Denis de Rougemont, who, in 1938, answered just about every question you’d care to ask on the nature of romance, is more complex. The thesis of de Rougemont’s “Love in the Western World” is sound (sort of), but it’s in his singular explication of the myths and conflicts that have fed the modern conception of love — “formal” love ended with World War I, he asserts — that he ascends to the crackpot stratosphere.
What Western culture has inculcated in us, from the Tristan and Iseult legend through “Runaway Bride,” is that love is not worth having without passion, de Rougemont writes. And since marriage is not worth having without love, we are stuck searching for the “passionate marriage” — a condition known everywhere to be exceedingly rare.
Though less than optimistic, D. de R., as he signs himself, offers an eye-opening opinion as to just what we in the West should expect from romance. His book begins with a 12th century heretical sect in France whose desire to be united with God — a unity possible only in death, if then — gave birth to the idea of “passion” as distinct from “love.” In good crackpot-authority style, de Rougemont goes on to delve deeply into the arts, borrowing from Petrarch, the Marquis de Sade and Wagner to make his case, and even managing to conflate D.H. Lawrence and Hitler along the way.
Though it’s a pleasure to follow him through nine centuries of literature, war and trysting — right down to our penchant for “the slim lines of the open-air girl” — it is hard to fully credit de Rougemont’s contention that our desire for both heated passion and sublime love is really a death wish that is fallout from the Albigensian Heresy. On the other hand, if it’s true, as de R. seems to argue, that we subconsciously want marriage to lead to our deaths, that might help explain the high divorce rate. The solution? Disentangle passion from the idea of love and marriage, and lower your expectations, de Rougemont says. But before you do, enjoy his book.
On a close read, de Rougemont is almost too reasonable to be classed as a crackpot authority — though the way he appropriates everything from poetry to police tactics in support of his argument qualifies him in my eyes.
The genre, not surprisingly, suffers constantly shifting boundaries, and weeding the crackpot authorities from the mere cranks is no easy task. A good crackpot authority will have dreamed up a thesis that explains virtually all of our everyday experience at one shot. And he will manage to do it with style.
A favorite read that didn’t make the cut was “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” by Michael Baigent, et al. Though there is certainly an entertaining conspiracy theory here — that the history of Christianity is a big lie and that Christ’s descendants went on to form secret societies that exist to this day — the book is not ambitious enough in its scope to warrant inclusion as the work of a full-fledged crackpot.
Not all crackpot literature takes the essay form, however. Special mention must be reserved for an author like Henry Watson Fowler, whose efforts have led me to include a reference book on my crackpot bookshelf. His justly famed and quietly acerbic “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage” — not to be confused with the recently published “New Fowler’s,” which substantially waters down the original — has provided my circle of friends with hours of read-aloud fun, and not only because we are amused to find the word “otherwise” described as “now having very curious experiences.”
Both Fowler’s crackpot tendencies and his crackpot authority credentials can be seen in the intricate system of cross-references that pepper the book. “Love,” in contrast to de Rougemont’s treatment, is disposed of simply by referring us to two other articles: “hackneyed phrases” and “stock pathos.” A felicitous choice of entry can start the reader on a never-ending tour of Fowler’s nose-thumbing take on written English, as in the following example:
From the entry on whence, whither:
Why is it that substitutes apparently so clumsy as where … from & where … to, can be preferred? It is surely because the genius of the language actually likes the PREPOSITION AT END that wiseacres have conspired to discourage, & thinks ‘Where are you coming to?’ more quickly comprehensible in moments of threatened collision than ‘Whither are you coming?’.From preposition at end:
… In avoiding the forbidden order, unskilled handlers of words often fall into real blunders (see OUT OF THE FRYING-PAN) … From out of the frying-pan:
… the slapdash corrector, who should not be in such a hurry, & the uneducated corrector, who should not be writing at all, are apt to make things worse than they found them. Is that clear, you uneducated correctors and unskilled handlers of words? Happily, Fowler’s genius as an expert in the English language lies in his ability to become almost completely incomprehensible himself — and in his offhand dismissal of such beasts as “the scribbler who has reckoned on our having tastes so primitive.”
Among crackpot authorities, though, Fowler is a mere divertissement. At the other end of the spectrum lies one of the deepest and broadest thinkers of the 20th century, Elias Canetti, without whom no such list would be complete. Canetti’s “Crowds and Power” is one of the most fascinating critiques of modern culture ever composed. Like Jaynes, Canetti looks to ancient and aboriginal cultures to shed light on the course of humankind’s development. Like Reich, he maps onto human behavior a complex but internally consistent set of rules that may or may not have much to do with reality.
Nevertheless, Canetti’s observations are revelatory. His classification of human behavior into types of “crowds” and “packs” provides a nearly plausible explanation for much of modern culture and what Reich would call “the negation of life inherent in social ideology.” And the short passage tracing the origin of both words and artifacts back to the gestures of the hand is, by itself, the mark of a truly original thinker.
What drives the crackpot compulsion to deliver an exhaustive treatment of the unfathomable? For many of the great crackpot thinkers — Canetti, de Rougemont and Reich all fall into this category — it is the deep imprint of the 20th century’s unprecedented world wars. The effect of these cataclysms is apparent in the work of all three of these writers, and probably has much to do with their need to find a universal system to explain the goings-on of their lifetimes. Canetti’s Central European background plays a key role here. While he is a less forgiving writer than Jaynes or de Rougemont, he is perhaps more important than either. The epilogue of “Crowds and Power” is one of the great humanist cries in literature. It is only effective, though, with the weight of Canetti’s tome behind it.
Therein lies another secret of the crackpot authorities: They generally save the best for last. No dummies they, these writers are aware that a skeptical public may not be ready to buy the near-lunacy they seem to be serving up. It is only through the aggregation of facts and observations that they can hope to persuasively make their points. And it is in these facts and observations, if not always in the arguments they support, that the value lies. The reading of such authors should be approached as an exercise in the opening of the mind. Who among us, after all, has not suddenly been gripped by a flash of insight, only to scratch our heads later and wonder just what we were thinking. The crackpot authorities had the courage to follow their insights to their (il)logical ends. It is best, in such cases, to suspend judgment, and observe while a great mind works out the kinks of a questionable theory. Even if nothing is really “learned,” the reader will be greatly rewarded, and not a little entertained.
And then there’s the Fowler ampersand. Of this more will be said in a later work.
