Forensic predictive cultural longevity

I spent the day today at an all-day research symposium. Many great conversations, but one conversation in particular got me thinking.

We all know in retrospect that Shakespeare has lasted while many of his contemporaries have not. Likewise we know that the work of Goethe, Austin, Archimedes, DaVinci, Mozart, and an entire pantheon of geniuses has remained relevant down through the ages, even as the work of their contemporaries has faded to oblivion.

Among recent voices, we may strongly suspect that the work of The Beatles, Will Wright or David Foster Wallace might last through the centuries, while the work of, say, Madonna may not. But we can’t be sure.

Moreover, it would seem that this is impossible to know. Yet that might not be the case.

After all, we have all of history to sift through, when looking for patterns that lead to sustained cultural longevity. Perhaps there is a quality in Mozart’s music, as compared with his contemporaries, or a quality that distinguished Shakespeare from other playwrights of his day — other than “he was a genius” — that we can spot, if we sift through the massive data available to us from down through the centuries.

It would be interesting to take such studies seriously as a science — a science of forensic predictive cultural longevity. And in the course of looking for such patterns, of developing a systematic way of looking at these things, perhaps we might gain insight into the creative process itself.