Why I Love PBS Idea Channel

Here’s an idea. The three glorious words that begin each episode to PBS Idea Channel, my favorite YouTube channel. The first year of my undergraduate, I had far too much time on my hands. I ended up spending a lot of time on my laptop, sitting on decrepit, formerly red armchairs in my freshman halls concrete box of a lounge. At first, I would scour the internet for whatever copies of fantasy novels I could get my hands on. I read some pretty great ones, like The Name of the Wind, but I soon found that the good ones were few and far between. This discovery lead me on two divergent paths. The first was to the literary classics and eventually to an obsession with Russian literature that continues to this day. The second was to YouTube.

YouTube is far too good at taking too much time on your hands and dissolving it into nothing. I watched ‘What does the fox say?’ way more times than was healthy. Fortunately, Vine was still extant, so the all consuming vortex of Vine comps had not yet made their way to YouTube. More fortunately, I eventually found my way to PBS Idea Channel.

PBS Idea Channel is created and hosted by Mike Rugnetta (who you may know from Crash Course Mythology), and every episode begins with him speculating: Here’s an idea. Usually, these ideas take something from “pop culture” and look at it through the lens of some “big idea.” For example, is Doctor Who a religion? Is Mario a surrealist masterpiece? Is Over the Garden Wall about having faith? Mike lays out why it may make sense to think of the pop culture object in light of the “big idea,” and often he’ll also lay out where the comparison comes up short, or other ways of thinking about it. Every episode ends with Mike asking what you, the audience, thinks of this idea, and he’ll address some of the comments in dedicated comment response videos. And tragically, PBS Idea Channel ended its run on August 31, 2017.

Retrospectively, I never got into the community of PBS Idea Channel as much as I would have liked. I’ve never commented on any YouTube videos and I don’t spend any time on Reddit or Tumblr. In many ways, Mike and I are very different people. I’m far more internet skeptical than he is. While he sees little or no meaningful distinction between internet and ‘meatspace’, I’m inherently dubious of our collective ability to forge relationships and communities on the internet. But that’s something that I came to really appreciate and love about PBS Idea Channel, it was a different perspective, from someone I respect and admire, which often challenged my own in engaging ways. PBS Idea Channel would start with often outrageous premise and do some of the research to back it up. The freedom and audacity of the ideas allowed me to think about them in new ways, which caused me to reflect on my own beliefs. Sometimes, it would help to further entrench what I thought was right (I still don’t really think that Bob Dylan is literature). Other times it would change my mind (I’d never thought about Ad Blocking as being a moral choice).

This way of thinking about ideas is something I love about PBS Idea Channel. The last scripted Idea Channel videos lay out the meta ideas that underlie the presented ideas. One of their guidestars is a principle called nomadic thought. As Mike says,

We move around a lot, often haphazardly, and we use whatever ideas are around or available, often in ways not intended or expected, but always, hopefully, while preserving some sense of dynamism, not building on those ideas so much as using them to unlock, and in some cases pry open, various parts of the world. 

I really love this way of thinking. It opens the door for me to put two things together in ways that I wouldn’t expect and see what happens. Like is Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen the Deadpool of 19th century English Gothic Romance? Does viewing reality as fundamentally our shared hallucinations make us all wizards? Does the Apostle Paul’s statement that “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some” mean Christians should be cannibals to win cannibals? I love this sense of using ideas, the playfulness, of constructing these seemingly ludicrous ideas and digging into them to see how long they might hold true or in what ways they come up short.

And even though PBS Idea Channel is no longer producing videos, I still go back and watch the (Arr!) content. As my perspectives change, and as I learn more, my take on the videos shift. The episode about Borges was very different after reading Borges, for example. Other times, it's interesting to see past visions of the future and how they may or may not have come to fruition.

And there is still more for me to learn from PBS Idea Channel. While I thrive in that environment of picking up ideas and smashing them together, I sometimes struggle with considering the impact that has on those who hold those ideas, and want them handed carefully. This is where another guiding principle of Idea Channel comes into play, one that I’m still working on, critical empathy. Critical empathy, to quote Todd Destiger, 

Refers to the process of establishing informed and effective connections with other human beings, of thinking and feeling with them at some emotionally, intellectually, and socially significant level. 

In the final episode, Thinking With Others, Mike summarizes this in Peter Elbow’s believing game, “the disciplined practice of trying to be as welcoming or accepting as possible to every idea we encounter… actually trying to believe them.” For me, the question about cannibalism is essentially an academic exercise to try to understand the heart of Paul’s message. For others in the room, it was abhorrent and almost blasphemous. Learning to try to believe ideas other than my own is an ongoing process.

This is why I love PBS Idea Channel. It endorses the freedom to use ideas as I wish, while reminding me that we also need to believe the ideas of others. And for five years, Mike Rugnetta showed us how to be humble and audacious, and when he came up short he showed us how to graciously acknowledge it.