I liked the remark quoted by US President Bill Clinton in Dundalk on Tuesday night about why the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had chosen Ireland as a European location.

It was because of "the Irish anti-establishment attitude", the head of MIT had said.

I have to admit I am quite taken with anti-establishment attitude - not in the sense of destruction but in questioning, creativity and wonder. It means non-acceptance of the way things are, of a dominance of the past way of doing things, and of limiting the future to a small variation of the present.

What business cliche calls "thinking outside the box" has an inherent appeal to me, because it forces the mind back to basic principles, and because it enables the building of new scenarios and new solutions. People say the Irish have this germ of creativity and anti-establishment thinking, which translates into benefits to technologies, like software design and programming.

I think they are right, even though hard-nosed economists and political scientists challenge so-called "cultural" explanations for phenomena, such as why Ireland attracts institutions like MIT. Unfortunately, once one enters the lions' den of economists and political scientists, one has to come armed with numbers and data to win arguments. And culture isn't really open to measurement.

So, let's assume (an economist's device) Ireland has some cultural assets and they have a real, though unquantifiable, effect. The first thing to be said is that recognising that one's own cultural assets is not the same thing as asserting cultural superiority. The next thing is to ask if we are doing all we can to safeguard and promote a key cultural asset. The anti-establishment attitude shouldn't be assumed to have arisen solely from centuries of dispossession and oppression, so that it is merely anti-authoritarianism.

For if we assume this, then we will have to live with its fading as a force, as we develop into a more prosperous society and as civic compliance becomes more valued. Anti-establishment, creative thinking can live even in a civically-compliant society.

It is important that one large root of this valuable cultural attitude, an education in the liberal arts of literature, philosophy, languages and history, is not downgraded in a rush to build technical skills.

I have echoed Chris Horn of Iona Technologies on this before, but it remains very important. Our education planners, educationalists and students must be encouraged to have patience and not look for immediate paybacks from the study of Greek and Roman civilisation, Shakespeare and Irish.

The anti-establishment attitude must be practised in big and small ways. Today I'll highlight some public policy areas for practice.

On a micro level, it is useful that initiatives are taken like the recently established Digital Hub in the Liberties near MIT's MediaLab Europe. If this project brings to bear the creative attitude essential to advanced technology development on local community regeneration, it can become a showcase of new solution-making in the social and business spheres at the same time.

It is clearly experimental and, precisely for that reason, worth trying. On a macro level, our antiestablishment cultural asset should enable us to think that the future for the Republic is not just a small variation on the present. Rather, this attitude would suggest that entirely new ways of doing business, of organising ourselves and of living together can be achieved, especially now we can generate the money. The Ireland of 10 or 20 years time can be very, very different from the Ireland of today.

Does that sound airy-fairy? No problem. The opening of space for creative thinking and new solutions always does.

If you accept that this cultural asset exists and can be maintained and fostered, then the worry that we face inevitable emasculation into some globalised, amorphous industrialised living driven by mass-media culture, should be assuaged.

Furthermore, a debate as to whether we should follow the continental European model or the US one will be seen as missing a key point - we need be neither. Indeed, if our cultural asset is strong enough, then we couldn't be either, even if we wanted to.

It would mean that Irish people would not behave and make choices like Swedes, Germans or Americans. The culture would be strong enough to differentiate us, even in the areas that are measurable by those hard-nosed economists and political scientists.

Oliver O'Connor is contributing editor at Finance and Finance Dublin.

E-mail: ooconnor@indigo.ie