The affluent society

John Galbraith

To proclaim the need for new ideas has served, in some measure, as a substitute for them. 

At the highest levels of social science scholarship some novelty of formulation or statement is not resisted. On the contrary, considerable store is set by the device of putting an old truth in a new form, and minor heresies are much cherished. And the very vigor of minor debate makes it possible to exclude as irrelevant, and without seeming to be unscientific or parochial, any challenge to the framework itself. Moreover, with time and aided by the debate, the accepted ideas become increasingly elaborate. They have a large literature, even a mystique. The defenders are able to say that the challengers of the conventional wisdom have not mastered their intricacies. Indeed these ideas can be appreciated only by a stable, orthodox, and patient man --- in brief, by someone who closely resembles the man of conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom having been made more or less identical with sound scholarship, its position is virtually impregnable. The skeptic is disqualified by his very tendency to go brashly from the old to the new. Were he a sound scholar he would remain with the conventional wisdom.

At the same time in the higher levels of the conventional wisdom originality remains highly acceptable in the abstract. Here again the conventional wisdom often makes vigorous advocacy of originality a substitute for originality itself. P. 11, Chapter 2, Section II