Watching Ideas Die

How does an idea die? When people cease to believe in it, or think about it, or write about it. Some ideas are quite durable -- liberal democracy is in its third century and still growing, cash-based market economics is about 500 years old (and despite recent events, doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon), and Judaism is three or four millennia old and doing fine.

Other ideas blossom and then fade, sometimes within a single human lifetime. The always crunchy Gene Expression web log has a fascinating post analyzing the frequency of certain academic buzzwords over the past few decades. It appears that a clutch of monumentally Bad Ideas (including academic Marxism, Deconstructionism, and allied concepts) are finally dying out, even in academia, which too often functions as a wildlife preserve for bad ideas.

The article also grapples with the rather humbling thought that individual human scholars don't seem to have much of a role in the birth or death of ideas in the academic world -- they flourish and die according to a mathematical model. Shades of Hari Seldon!