Today I’m going to share one of the most important Patrick Gunkel/ideonomy documents I’ve discovered to date. This has never been shared publicly before, so lucky you!
One important aspect of the document is that, as far as I can tell, Gunkel has recorded the first dated use of the term “ideonomy” (pronounced IDEA-onomy).
Another important aspect of the document is that it contains one of the earliest known substantive descriptions of ideonomy in language that Gunkel did not use anywhere else.
The document is a 2-page memo Gunkel provided to his friend and long-time MIT sponsor, Edward Fredkin, in 1981. It outlines a talk Gunkel was proposing to give at MIT.
As you can see from the date on the memo—September 9, 1981—this memo predates the Ideonomy Project by several years, demonstrating that Gunkel’s concept for ideomony was quite advanced even before he received his grant in 1984.
Gunkel must have been going around pitching ideonomy for many years before formally beginning his project.
Who knows how many people heard about ideonomy long before it came to the public’s attention on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in 1987?
I’ll let the memo speak for itself in a moment, but I did want to call attention to what I think is one of the most critical passages.
In this passage, Gunkel compares ideonomy to “the recombinant DNA industry,” providing a clear analogy that helps conceptualize his initial understanding of the science of ideas.
Crucially, from his position in 1981, Gunkel also identifies a number of convergent threads of knowledge that he believes makes a science of ideas “inevitable.”
These convergent threads of knowledge have continued advancing in the over 40 years since Gunkel wrote this memo.
But because Gunkel and ideonomy never achieved the widespread recognition they deserved, humanity continues dancing around the convergent threads without making a leap toward the central phenomena that ties them all together.
Again, this is why humanity desperately needs a Theory of Ideas, as I wrote several weeks earlier—to firmly link together all the convergent efforts that Gunkel identified way back in the 1980s.
Gunkel wrote:
I believe the emergence of something equivalent to ideonomy is inevitable in the course of the next few decades owing to a variety of developments in fields such as computer science and engineering, artificial intelligence and robotics, theoretical neuropsychology, mathematics and fundamental physical theory (a la J. A. Wheeler or E. Fredkin), theoretical linguistics, logic and “futurology”...
…ideonomy will lead, I believe, to ‘the industrialization of thought,’ or an ‘idea industry’ having considerable analogy to the new recombinant DNA industry, which seeks to generate new organisms by mastering and exploiting systematic laws of permutation, combination, and transformation of life’s fundamental elements and processes.
In the memo, Gunkel also mentions his “Charts for the Mind” idea and notes that he intends to bring some of these charts as part of his proposed talk.
I’ll have to write about “Charts for the Mind” another time, but this was a really important milestone in Gunkel’s evolution of the concept for ideonomy.
By linking his “Charts for the Mind” series with his ideonomy presentation in this memo, Gunkel is providing a crucial intellectual link between the material he produced for that effort and his science of ideas, meaning that the connection need not be speculative. (This is important from a scholarly perspective, as I will detail at some later point.)
Now here’s the memo in full:
Note: I have the right to disseminate this material. It may not be copied, stored, reproduced, or disseminated without express written permission. However, excerpts can and should be used for scholarly purposes.
So, did Gunkel ever give the talk?
My instincts say that he probably didn’t.
As with many academic lectures, the material was likely second to the financial support behind it. The academic circuit is like this. Although belts have likely tightened at almost all colleges across the country since the 1980s, in the old days when universities had more money, it was customary for academics to invite their friends to campus in order to give lectures so they could collect a speaking fee, sell copies of their books, hob-knob with other academics, and meet attractive young graduate students.
In my research, I’ve learned that Gunkel was brought to MIT for at least three lectures on ideonomy in the years after his grant was funded; this memo, however, was written during a time Herman Kahn was still alive and keeping Gunkel afloat via Hudson Institute contracts.
It was only after Kahn’s death in 1983 that Gunkel’s friends at MIT endeavored to support Gunkel through various arrangements, including speaking gigs. You could even argue that the Ideonomy Project itself, which came through for Gunkel in 1984 and was paid out through the Hudson Institute, was a more enduring form of this kind of support.
You have to understand that Gunkel was constantly on the ropes financially.
Money dripped through his fingers like water.
He lived a monastic lifestyle, but he was constantly impulse-buying books, records, movies on VHS, and making long-distance phone calls to friends or random scientists among many problematic spending patterns.
And he refused to “get a real job.”
He’d worked a string of minimum-wage gigs in his late teens, but he now felt such work was not suitable for his personality.
For most of Gunkel’s life, he was insistent on obtaining financial support either one of two ways: 1) based on his intellectual abilities or 2) simply being given the money by friends and family, no strings attached.
Thus, there are numerous proposal documents like this one among Gunkel’s papers.
He was often writing them in an attempt to unlock some financial support, although typically it never came through.
I hope you enjoy the memo.
It’s also a good set up for next week’s post, when I’ll take another step forward into explaining Gunkel’s majestic science of ideas, by discussing “idea combinatorics” or “idea chemistry.”
Until then!