Why do bad ideas last so long?

At one time, it was common to compare ASEAN with the EU. Scholars and practitioners then started disputing such simple comparisons, so the trend was questioned, and the academic commentary (largely) moderated. But the invidious comparisons were still alive, as I’ve already noted, at least until very recently. What had already been nuanced in the literature was still starkly there in the classrooms of Southeast Asia. And despite Europe’s current woes, I’d not like to bet the comparisons won’t resurface once the dust has settled, and a new way forward has been found. Europe has a powerful propaganda machine, after all.

“Failed” states, that’s another one. There have been plenty of critiques, from academics and practitioners, of the deficiencies of this concept. Yet here we have UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, just yesterday, referring to Somalia as “the world’s most failed state”. Yes, Somalia faces a heap of problems. But is this the best standpoint from which to address them? As Gerry van Klinken and Joshua Barker so rightly point out (page 5), “A language of failure does not help us much to understand why things work the way they do.”

We could go on. The disparaging ideas that animated colonialism have long been discredited. Yet my email updates only today noted how they still found their way quite explicitly into an extraordinary speech by French President Nicholas Sarkozy in 2007. And many of the same assumptions – along the lines that we, rather than you, know the best way to do things, and we will force you to do them if necessary – still linger close to the surface in many of the world’s current debates.

And what is usually called the “essentialist” approach to culture and identity – the notion that these things are fixed, bounded, innate, and immutable – has been refuted almost ad infinitum, but it is still alive and well in everyday political talk, from ideas of the “clash of civilizations” to the ways ethnicity is discussed in many places in Southeast Asia.

Creators and formulators and disseminators of ideas bear a huge responsibility. The starkest formulations of those ideas will still be out there, doing damage, long after subsequent debate has nuanced their contours, and moved them on…