This interesting book is categorized as evolutionary psychology. I like reading these types of books, on occasion. This book’s authors pose an unusual theory for the future of first America and then perhaps the world. The unusual part of this book is that they place the role of Descartes in human history to help plot a possible jump forward for humanity. Greenspan and Shanker say that they provide not a theory but a lens for looking at human history. That lens is structural in shape.
There are a lot dots to be connected here but basically they want to propose a society where all people are at home with emotional intelligence and especially autistic children. They say that autistic children can suffer from “mental deficits” but that is older terminology taken from developmental capacities. In any case their cognitive skills are so valuable, the authors posit, that they need to be nourished within environments that will not overlook their higher-level abilities. They say that these children/adults should be put in positions of global independent authority to be the launch point for innovations for the future since their way of seeing the world is not limited to ways normal people within the societal structure apprehend things. The future of the whole world depends on these problem solvers to keep us all from intellectual stagnation as had occurred with rational dichotomies (solved by Kant, they say). This arrangement is something like we see in a science fiction film Minority Report by Phillip Dick who used “Precogs” to engage the future by their mental powers and used that knowledge to intercept crimes before they happened in real time. This “First Idea” concept is a Utopian fantasy but the authors try to base it in developmental psychology, autism, sociology of Navajos, abstract symbolic thinking, and history of philosophy.
This book is very entertaining but would be hard to follow for most people. I like theories of the world, and theories of future worlds, so this appeals to my speculative nature. Many of the great works of literature also have theories of human nature embedded in them such as More’s Utopia, Plato’s Republic, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. The First Idea is a long work (456 pp) but is filled with a kaleidoscope of sources for their lens on humanity. It probably isn’t worth the effort to read for most people, but I found it clever enough to keep on toward the final conclusion which seems to pull back at the end.
The most striking thing I found in this book was its placement of Descartes and his thought. Most writers in our time will dismiss Descartes as part of the obsolete medieval tradition and who only inserted a now worthless distinction between soul and body. Descartes, to post-modernity, is normally considered a relic of a bygone era where deconstruction had yet to play out its part.
The authors laud Descartes as a beacon of rationality who challenged the Christian cosmology of the Great Chain of Being (p. 411). This is a kind of midpoint between sheer rejection and acceptance of the medieval tradition. I accept the medieval tradition as valid and Descartes as key to Modernity but I can also understand the critical view of rationality that flows from Nietzsche and existentialism into deconstruction.
This is a good quotation to see how Descartes is a champion of higher reflective capabilities: “The human body, according to Descartes, is a machine (which was itself a heretical view) but, unlike animal humans also possess the capacities to reason, speak a language, control their actions, and be conscious of their cognitions and sensations. The reason we are said to know that animals don’t have minds is because they lack the ability to describe their thoughts. For us to say an animal is capable of speaking, the animal would have to respond appropriately in varying situations, acquire words spontaneously, and combine words creatively. Only humans, according to Descartes, are born with such a capacity.” Descartes used here use as an example of an intellectual breakthrough which must happen if humans would continue advancing and become even more integrated and self-reflective, so they say. Of course, animals can and do communicate at a high level just not at a level equal to that which most humans experience with other humans. That’s not required at every instance, but Descartes was here defining what was distinctive about humans.
Great bibliography, Notes ( )

Chapter 1: Origin of Symbols
p. 17-41