Every man is born when his parents decide to have a child. He is conceived and starts as an idea. We hear about accidental birth, which happens when conception comes against the idea not to have a child. Revolutions, wars, arguments, religions, relationships, innovations, discoveries and inventions, name anything, pick anything, and nothing happens without an idea first. One must think before one acts. Before one embarks on the journey, one must map out the path.

Hegelian dialectic argued that every thesis would be challenged by an antithesis, which would result in a synthesis. Karl Marx took that dialectic and turned it around with his own idea. He combined the philosophical materialism with the Hegelian dialect and formed the theoretical basis for Communism. The future lives in the folds of the present and it is unfolded under the force of ideas. The heathens tried to crush religion, the fanatics tried to destroy the heretics, the Luddites tried to resist the Industrial Revolution, the autocrats tried to prevent political freedom, empires tried to deter the liberation of nations, the Church tried to denounce the Reformation, and kings and monarchs tried to discourage the Renaissance.

But nothing could stop the ideas whose time had come. The idea creates its own labour pain and the individuals who conceive them go through that pain before that idea is born. Take the abolition of slavery in the United States, which took almost two centuries to happen. But those who fought for it suffered. They were attacked, humiliated, tortured, lynched, burned and shot, until the brutal killing of Dr. Martin Luther King brought the final awakening to the fundamental precept of the American Constitution that all men were created equal.

In the early 20th century a German schoolteacher-turned-philosopher Oswald Spengler wrote his celebrated book called The Decline of the West in which he described that every culture went through spring, summer, autumn and winter. He distinguished between culture and civilization, the former being the living body of a soul and the latter being the mummy of it. Culture-man lived inwards, he said whereas the Civilization-man lived outwards in space and amongst bodies and "facts". That which the former man feels as destiny, the latter man understands as a linkage of causes and effects, which turns him into a materialist.

Ideas build culture and cultures build civilization, and what works through all of these is the Spenglarian anxiety of decline and growth. What Spengler found in the United States was neither a real nation nor a real state. Instead he saw a "resemblance to Bolshevik Russia….far greater than one imagines" and a standardized political body "organized exclusively from the economic side" without any "depth".

If you look at it, ideas become thoughts when they spread their wings. Man creates ideas and then ideas create man. That is how cultures are born and civilizations are formed. Ideas are the spasms that run the blood of history, from age to age, century to century. Socrates, Shakespeare, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Watson, Marconi, not necessarily in that order, but these are not mere names of men but wellsprings of potent ideas which transformed humanity and changed the world.

Eric Bentley, who was born in 1916 and of whom nothing more is known, wrote in a sort of slanted tone that ours was an age of substitutes. Instead of language, we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas. Perhaps we live in an age, when there is the greatest ever emphasis on brainstorming, which is the cheap substitute of profound thinking. Ideas are forced out of an assembly line, instead of being produced in the context of time. What matters is the shine not depth, ideas, which make you think but not contemplate.

Perhaps this is also an idea whose time has come. Perhaps this is the ultimate contradiction in the human psychology when man is able to think without thinking. We talk about strategy a lot, about using ideas like weapons in a war to defeat our opponents, which makes us clever, not intelligent. We calculate more than we consolidate. We count more than we hatch.

Ideas are no longer the spark of a genius, but the art of a monster, and that art has destroyed the sanctity of thoughts by bringing hypocrisy into the game. It is for the same reason places of worship cannot double up as amusement centers. Churches, temples, synagogues and mosques cannot be used as movie theaters or vice versa. There is a chapel of purity inside the heart of every man, which must be always on line with the brain if ideas have to flow from the deep.

What we see now is ideas with many sparks but no fire as the civilization keeps heading for a slow-setting winter. People believe without conviction, think without understanding, and act without commitment. People belong to each other in a detached manner. They communicate without sharing or share without communication. They speak without listening or listen without speaking, between silence and monologue the conversation seldom turns into dialogue. What we see is sciolism not scholarship, ambition not hope, arrogance not austerity, the surface not the core.

We have lost sight of the wood for the trees, and the endless scouring for bright ideas has created hollow souls. It is like the darkness under the flame, a deep slumber beneath the spur of activities. Ideas are more prolific now, but hardly promising. We live in an era of thoughtfulness without thinking. We believe most in the power of ideas, yet we are making its weakest use. Our imaginations are shallow, our innovations are momentary, our dreams are materialistic and our minds are regimented. Ideas are like a bird, which is trapped, soaring only as high as we have raised the cage.

Now we need to ask each of us, what is an idea? A loosely standard definition would be that an idea is any conception existing in the mind as a result of mental understanding, awareness or activity. Ideas must therefore arise out of a situation. Newton came to his idea when he saw an apple fall from the tree. Archimedes had his eureka when he spilled water while taking a bath. Gandhi thought of freedom when he was thrown out of a train in the middle of the night in South Africa.

When are we going to get our idea, while so much is happening around us? Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. And when that idea has to come, it will come. But meanwhile, those of us who are bustling with ideas to strike the next business deal, or defeat a political rival, or cheat his partner out of business, they need to know that these are not ideas but impulses, leading to organised activities without any depth.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.