Ideas are important matters, and the absence of creativity and originality is an aspect of life that demonstrates the tiredness of so many of those people who should be leading our arts and business. For those who are attentive to films, just in the past few months there have been numerous films that have been released–from Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantamania to Spiderman: Across The Spiderverse, to the Flash, released this weekend–that have beaten the idea of multiverses into the ground and shown a complete lack of interest in exploring something different than what everyone else is already providing. When this is combined with the general tendency to want to run franchises into the ground through endless sequels and reboots because one seeks reliable sources of income rather than breaking new ground with storytelling, or when our music makes endless sequels and samples of more familiar songs instead of breaking new ground in melody or composition, it is clear that people who should have ideas in general have no ideas at all aside from repeating what others have done before, with perhaps a few updates for modern audiences.

Yesterday, when I was at church services, the song leader asked a father and son to give the opening and closing prayer and had the idea to introduce them both just by their common last name rather than introducing them with the full name as before. When the two of them decided which of the prayers to give, the father, who had the closing prayer to end services, lamented that he had to listen to the messages (one of which, the sermonette, I gave), when he was told by a local elder that it was not necessary for him to summarize, much less add to the messages given. This led the prayer giver to decide to spend some minutes in his prayer in adding to my message in order to make explicit points that the person wanted to see given greater prominence, which I had merely left implicit in part because of a lack of time to say everything that I wanted to say or could say about the verse, which is a part of the limitation one has when giving a message that is supposed to last ten to twelve minutes or so. One might say that these were not necessarily good ideas as far as giving a prayer, but in the absence of any better ideas, even a bad idea seems to be worthwhile and will be pursued if one does not have an alternative idea in mind.

Joseph Conrad is recognized as one of the greatest writers in the late 1800s and early 1900s now, but he did not become well-known until very late in his career. Though English was at least his third language, his books, most notably Heart of Darkness but also Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Lord Jim as well, among others, remain in print and popular and well-known novels that reflect upon the relationship of people and their character and environment. The problem for Conrad is that when he finally became famous, all of his works were already written, and he had no ideas left to write in order to capitalize on his fame. Readers had to examine works that had already been written before when Conrad was a more obscure person, because there was nothing new left in the tank, and that is a great shame. Conrad himself is reported to have been particularly upset about not having new ideas, but when you don’t have ideas you don’t have ideas.

Why is it that a bad idea is better than no idea? The reason is that while a bad idea can be refined and worked with and improved, no ideas at all gives nothing for people to work with. As human beings, we tend to need something to work with or play with in order to better express ourselves. We can work with bad ideas. We can work with tired ideas that have been done over and over again. If we have nothing new to say at least we can try to put new costumes or new language to what has been done over and over again. It is at least something. To have no ideas at all, to be unable to put thoughts together and to express them at all, that is intolerable. Even the worst creations at all are preferable to people than having nothing at all to say. We might wish that people would confine their expression to good ideas, but it is understandable that bad ideas and old and stale ideas would be preferred to none at all.