I dislike this essay’s use of the concept of heresey. Heresy had force back in the day when religious orders had hegemonic control over society. That’s no longe

I dislike this essay’s use of the concept of heresey. Heresy had force back in the day when religious orders had hegemonic control over society. That’s no longer the case today. I know that’s not what PG means by his use of the term, but there’s no reflection in this peice about the metaphorical use of the concept. Furthermore, the argument is fundamentally flawed. What consitutes heresy is entirely contingent upon the prevailing societal order’s judgements. Let’s put aside the problematic use of heresey for a second and deal with PG’s actual argument—which is that it’s good to go after ideas that the majority of society either doesn’t recognize or sees as anathema. This quality alone doesn’t prove the marker of a good idea. For all the « heretical » ideas like Darwin’s and Galilleo’s that proved lifechanging, there are a horde that were useless of harmful. The value in these thinker’s ideas has almost nothing to do with their heretical nature, which is a politico-religious quality—that these ideas are felt as « life-altering » in history may have something to do with their heretical nature (since they necessarily flew in the face of the prevailihg order of the day) but their fame and historical import does not actually have anything to do with their theoretic rigor, scientific value, or general usefulness. I don’t really see the point of this essay other than to say « think outside the box » in a quite clunky way by arguing from history and making some dubious claims (e.g. the essay seems to suggest that chasing heresies is an operable method to make novel discoveries while neither of the examples it uses are evidence of this methodology—while the discoveries may have been heretical, its unlikely Darwin or Galileo chased the discoveries on account of their heretical status).