I hang around with educators who talk about changing the world, and one way I think we might do it is finding Tolstoy -- that is, finding a person of immense capacity and appetite and helping that person to hook up with projects worthy of his or her talent, before the lesser projects eat him or her alive. Educating everybody is important, but finding Tolstoy might just close the hole in the ozone layer before the coeds of the world cancerize their navels.
There is a way to do it. Hypothesis: interesting people in the present are interested in interesting people from the past. If one had a list of all the interesting people who ever lived, one would have a perfect net to catch other interesting people, because one could simply go looking for who's thinking about the interesting people. And there are formulas for finding some interesting people, especially a couple of generations back: they are often just off to the side of famous people, slightly in their shadow (Benjamin Rush/John Adams?, Tesla/Edison?); they are people that inspire astonishing and long term devotion for reasons that nobody can quite pin down (Hamann?). And they are often interested in too many things to be able to package and market themselves very well -- or they burn out before they can get decent recognition (Simone Weil?). Also, they successfully protect their time and their privacy (Siddis?).
Of course, this strategy starts making sense only when people begin sharing their interests with the world over blogs and discussion groups and all sorts of other searchable entities. But most anybody interesting will be lured into doing that, these days.
Posted by shea0017 at September 24, 2004 12:33 PM