By generalizing from a few data points without looking for other examples, you come to a false conclusion. The fight against both communism and fascism was helped greatly by fighting for ideals like democracy, individual freedom, and the right of peoples to avoid oppression.

What we should learn from this isn't that ideas are bad. It's that ideas are very powerful, and that we need to be extremely careful with the ideas we support. That in turn argues for the sort of careful thinking that the article recommends.

Actually what we should learn is that ideas are powerful and especially dangerous if they are combined with a general lack of information and alternative viewpoints as was the case in the first half of the 20th century.

You are incorrect in stating that Nazism was not primarily idea driven. The whole "nationalism" thing started off as a powerful idea in the early 19th century spearheaded by the Romanticist zeitgeist. Previously, people imagined their "tribes" as consisting of their immediate family, relatives, and perhaps friendly neighbors. Europe consisted of multiethnic empires at the time. With the rise of nationalist ideas, people started to imagine their tribes as all people speaking the same language and being of the same "race". Also, don't forget the "socialist" part in Nazism, which was also idea-driven. I recommend watching "The Goebbels Experiment" (IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458375/) to get a hint on how significant the idea-driven propaganda/brainwashing was in the rise of Nazism.

The nationalist wave started off somewhere in Central Europe and reached other parts of the continent much later -- it is still causing trouble in Russia (the surprising rise of neo-Nazi skinheads there with the fall of the USSR), Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and the Basque Country in Spain, for example.

Also, nationalism isn't a big idea in the same sense that communism or western democracy are. Communists and democrats of many nations work in common cause for their ideals, but nationalists of many nations are by definition opposed. What they share isn't so much an idea as a set of behaviors and a style of thinking. In Gabler's framework, nationalism is more an observation than it is a big idea.

The problem I have with the article is that many of the "big" ideas that happened during past history were only big and influential because they were absorbed by vast numbers of ill-informed people. In other words, it wasn't so much that an idea itself was big, but that most people didn't have alternative sources of information and therefore were ripe material for absorbing the given idea. Totalitarianism thrived on persuading people through clever control of the (new at the time) mass-media channels to believe into this or that idea.

> nationalism isn't a big idea in the same sense that communism or western democracy are.

You are equating "big" with "well-intentioned," which I believe are different things. There can be no doubt that nationalist ideas had a major impact on modernity, from Nazism to Balkans to post-colonialism. Regarding tribalism, it can take many forms, not just nationalism. One of the channels which the early USSR used to spread communist ideas was precisely tribalism. Russians were imagined as good and communitarian "by-nature" while people from Western countries were portrayed as more mean-spirited and selfish.

Sure, and I think Gabler would agree. He is, after all, arguing in favor of "rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate". He doesn't want people to have a single big idea; he wants lots of them to be discussed.

Your basic argument is that if X sometimes causes problems, we should be glad to see X gone. On its own, it's a weak argument, because it ignores the positive side of the ledger, and it supposes that the problems you associate with X won't occur in the absence of X. Neither looks true to me; big ideas also have plenty of benefits, and a vast number of ill-informed people isn't going to get any less dumb or manipulable if Enlightment culture dies out.

> You are equating "big" with "well-intentioned,"

Not at all. American nationalism isn't the same idea as Chinese nationalism or Indian nationalism. Nationalism is an observation about ideas (or perhaps a meta-idea), not an idea in the sense that the author is talking about.

That's not my basic argument. My basic argument is that the very concept of "big" ideas as defined by Gabler is fundamentally flawed because: (1) the "bigness" factor of an idea he uses is a measure of how influential the idea is; (2) ill-informed people (think children, some rural communities etc) are much, much easier to influence than well-informed ones; and finally (3) there were proportionally many more ill-informed people in the past than there are today.

So we might as well be in the golden age of ideas but neither one of them ever becomes "big" because they are all in fierce competition with each other. Or perhaps not -- but the basic point is that the way we measure this "bigness" is flawed.

> American nationalism isn't the same idea as Chinese nationalism or Indian nationalism.

Of course it isn't. America was founded before the wave of nationalism took over Europe. American nationalism is to European nationalism as ham is to hamster -- only the name is similar. Nationalism in most countries in the world was modeled on European nationalism. Examples: Lebanese nationalist Kataeb party was modeled on Spanish and Italian Fascist parties (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kataeb_Party). Pakistani nationalism stems from utopian visions of Muhammad Iqbal, an idealist poet influenced by Romanticism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Iqbal). Ukrainian nationalism holds as holy populist-Romanticist ideas of Taras Shevchenko (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taras_Shevchenko) and owes its ideologic form to Dmytro Dontsov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmytro_Dontsov).

One of my biggest realization in the past years has been that nationalism isn't some "natural" tribal tendency but an ideology like any other that only uses ("perverts") the tribal tendencies for its own purpose and which was built and formulated nearly exclusively on a populist form of Romanticism that spread throughout Europe in the middle of 19th century (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_nationalism).

You could say the same for plenty of folks in the tech scene. I'd say it's a pretty sweeping generalization, no?

The concepts of capitalism & free markets that were incorporated into the framework of the United States as a governing body were pretty big ideas as well; heretical by the standards of human civilization at a period of time which knew nothing but monarchy & tyranny.

Some "big ideas" turn out to be cynical, evil and horrible for society. Doesn't mean thinking big (politically, business-wise or otherwise) should be discouraged or driven away from our collective consciousness.

That's true for a lot of people. Most people don't want to think for themselves, they want to fight for an idea that makes sense for them, and they lack the mental tools to actually think or challenge the idea.