Creativity (13 page)

This is a typical reaction against a domain becoming too confining and its members mistaking the symbolic system in which they operate for the broader reality of which it is a part. Commoner’s feelings may be similar to those that young scholars in Byzantium must have felt when the church councils spent so much time debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. When a field becomes too self-referential and cut off from reality, it runs the risk of becoming irrelevant. It is often dissatisfaction with the rigidity of domains that makes great creative advances possible.

Of course, a person cannot be inspired by a domain unless he or
she learns its rules. That is why everyone we talked to, whether artist or scientist, emphasized over and over the importance of basic knowledge, of thorough familiarity with the symbolic information and the basic procedures of the discipline. György Faludy can recite long stretches of verse by Catullus that he memorized in Latin sixty years ago; he has read all the Greek, Chinese, Arabic, and European poetry that he has been able to find. He translated more than fourteen hundred poems from around the world to master his craft, even though his own powerful poems are simple, di
scursive, and based on personal experience. In science, mastery of the basic symbolic tools is equally important. Practically everyone echoes what Margaret Butler tells high school students:

You cannot transform a domain unless you first thoroughly understand how it works. Which means that one has to acquire the tools of mathematics, learn the basic principles of physics, and become aware of the current state of knowledge. But the old Italian saying seems to apply:
Impara l’arte, e mettila da parte
(learn the craft, and then set it aside). One cannot be creative without learning what others know, but then one cannot be creative without becoming dissatisfied with that knowledge and rejecting it (or some of it) for a better way.

The Pressures of the Human Environment

The third source of ideas and problems is the field one works in. All through life, a creative person is exposed to the influence of teachers, mentors, fellow students, and coworkers, and later in life to the ideas of one’s own students and followers. Moreover, the institutions one works for and the events of the wider society in which one lives provide powerful influences that can redirect one’s career and channel a person’s thinking in new directions.

Indeed, if we look at creativity from this perspective, personal experience and domain knowledge may pale in comparison with the contribution of the social context to determine which problems one tackles. What an artist paints is a response not only to the classic canon of art but also to what others are painting right now. Scientists don’t learn only from books or experiments they conduct but also from seminars, meetings, workshops, and journal articles reporting what is happening, or about to happen elsewhere. Whether one follows the crowd or takes a different path, it is u
sually impossible to ignore what takes place in the field.

Many people are introduced to the wonders of a domain by a teacher. There is often a particular teacher who recognizes the child’s curiosity or ability and starts cultivating his or her mind in the discipline. Some creative persons have a long list of such teachers. The critic and rhetorician Wayne Booth says that each year in school he idealized a different one and tried to live up to that teacher’s expectations. In his case, as in several others, the changes from one career direction to the other—from engineering to English—occurred in response to the quality of the teachers encountered.

For some, the introduction to the domain comes later. John Gardner started college intending to become a writer but found in the psychology departments of Berkeley and then Stanford an intellectual community that satisfied his curiosity as well as his desire for congenial company.

The field is paramount for individuals who work primarily in an organizational context. John Reed of Citicorp must constantly interact with several groups in order to assimilate the information that he needs to make difficult decisions. About twice a year he meets for a few days with the half-dozen heads of the national banks of Germany, Japan, and so on to exchange ideas about future trends in the world economy. At more frequent intervals he has similar meetings with the CEOs of General Motors, General Electric, or IBM. Even more often, he meets with the key executives of his own
corporation. His inner network consists of about thirty people whom he trusts to provide the input he needs to navigate a multibillion-dollar corporation through constantly changing times. Reed spends at least half of his mornings talking on the phone or in person with members of this network and never makes a major decision involving the company without conferring with at least some of them.

Another organizational approach is represented by Robert Galvin, president of Motorola. Galvin sees his company as a gigantic creative enterprise, with more than twenty thousand engineers anticipating trends, reacting to them with new ideas, creating new products and processes. He sees his own job as orchestrating all this effort, being a role model for everyone else. In cases when the responsibility is to lead a group of people in novel directions, work is usually dictated not by a symbolic domain but by the requirements of the organization itself. It could be said for them, to bo
rrow Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, that the medium is the message; what they accomplish within their organizational structure
is
their creative accomplishment.

Scientists also mention the importance of particular research institutions. The Bell Labs, the Rockefeller Institute, and the Argonne National Laboratories are some of the places that have allowed young scientists to pursue their interests in a stimulating and supportive environment. Not surprisingly, many of them feel strong loyalties to such institutions and are more than willing to follow their research policies. Many a Nobel Prize was won by tackling problems that arose out of such institutional contexts.

New ideas are also generated when someone attempts to create a new organization or perhaps a new field. Manfred Eigen founded an interdisciplinary Max Planck Institute in Göttingen to replicate experimentally evolutionary forces in the laboratory. George Klein built up the tumor biology research center at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and employs a large cadre of Ph.D.’s. Initiatives of this sort not only allow the principal investigator to pursue his or her research but also make it possible for a new discipline to emerge. If the lab is successful, entirely new sets of problems are
opened up for investigation, and with time a new symbolic system—or domain—may develop.

Finally, some creative individuals attempt to form entirely new organizations outside the pale of accepted scientific, academic, or business institutions. Hazel Henderson dedicates most of her time to developing groups that will further her vision; she sees herself as the progenitor of innumerable special interest groups united in their ecological consciousness. Similarly, Barry Commoner has purposefully positioned his center in a no-man’s-land where he can move unfettered by the pressures of academic or political conformity. When John Gardner founded Common Cause, he insisted on financing it
only through small independent contributions so as to avoid the major influences that come with large donations. By creating new forms of association, these individuals hope to see new problems emerge, leading to solutions that couldn’t be attempted through old ways of thinking.

But organizations are embedded in larger human groups and broader historical processes. An economic depression or a change in political priorities will stimulate one line of research and send another into oblivion. According to George Stigler, the Great Depression is what sent him and many of his colleagues to study economics in graduate school. The availability of nuclear reactors built to support World War II projects stimulated many bright students to major in physics. György Faludy spent many years in concentration camps for writing one poem critical of Joseph Stalin.

Wars are notorious for affecting the direction of science, and, indirectly, of the arts as well. Let’s take psychology as an example. The domain of mental testing, including the whole concept of the IQ test and its uses, owes much of its success to the U.S. Army’s need to have a way of selecting recruits for World War I. Afterward the testing technology was transported into the field of education, where it has achieved a prominence that many educators find disturbing. Creativity testing owes its existence to World War II, when the air force commissioned J. P. Guilford, a psychologist at the U
niversity of Southern California, to study the subject. The air force wanted to select pilots who in an emergency—the unexpected failure of a gear or instrument—would respond with appropriately original behavior, saving themselves and the plane. The usual IQ tests were not designed to tap originality, and hence Guilford was funded to develop what later became known as the tests for divergent thinking.

As mentioned earlier, World War II was especially beneficial for women scientists. Several said that they probably would not have been admitted to graduate school if so many men had not been drafted and the graduate departments had not been looking desperately for qualified students. After graduating, these same women found jobs in government-sponsored research labs involved with the war effort, or the later attempts to keep up scientific superiority fueled by the Cold War. Margaret Butler fondly recalls the early postwar years at Argonne, where she became involved with the birth
and the infancy of computer science. Those were exciting times, when outside historical events, technological advances, and new scientific discoveries fused into a single stimulus to work hard and tackle important problems.

The influence of historical events on the arts is less direct but probably not less important. It could be argued, for instance, that the breakaway from classical literary, musical, and artistic styles that is so characteristic of the twentieth century was an indirect reaction to the disillusion people felt at the inability of Western civilization to avoid the bloodshed of World War I. It is no coincidence that Einstein’s theory of relativity, Freud’s theory of the unconscious, Eliot’s free-form poetry, Stravinsky’s twelve-tone music, Martha Graham’s abstract choreography, Picasso’s deformed
figures, James Joyce’s stream of consciousness prose were all created—and were accepted by the public—in the same period in which empires collapsed and belief systems rejected old certainties.

The Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz has spent many decades chronicling imaginatively the forces that are tearing apart the ancient fabric of his culture: colonialism, shifting of values, social mobility that creates new wealth and new poverty, and the changing roles of men and women. His ideas originate:

For Nina Gruenenberg, associate editor and editorial columnist for the elite opinion-making weekly
Die Zeit
, unfolding world events provide a constant stream of problematic issues. Her challenge is to grasp the essential elements of the human conflicts involved, the sociocultural context in which the drama is played out, and then to report concisely her personal impression of the events. In the weeks prior to being interviewed, she had been in Texas covering the World Economic Summit, in London for the NATO summit, and in Russia for a meeting between German chancellor Helmut Kohl and
Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev.

The creative process starts with a sense that there is a puzzle somewhere, or a task to be accomplished. Perhaps something is not right, somewhere there is a conflict, a tension, a need to be satisfied. The problematic issue can be triggered by a personal experience, by a lack of fit in the symbolic system, by the stimulation of colleagues, or by public needs. In any case, without such a felt tension that attracts the psychic energy of the person, there is no need for a new response. Therefore, without a stimulus of this sort, the creative process is unlikely to start.

P
RESENTED AND
D
ISCOVERED
P
ROBLEMS

Problems are not all alike in the way they come to a person’s attention. Most problems are already formulated; everybody knows what is to be done and only the solution is missing. The person is expected by employers, patrons, or some other external pressure to apply his or her mind to the solution of a puzzle. These are “presented” problems. But there are also situations in which nobody has asked the question yet, nobody even knows that there
is
a problem. In this case the creative person identifies both the problem and the solution. Here we have a “discovered” problem. Einstein, a
mong others, believed that the really important breakthroughs in science come as a result of reformulating old problems or discovering new ones, rather than by just solving existing problems. Or as Freeman Dyson said: “It is characteristic of scientific life that it is easy when
you have a problem to work on. The hard part is finding your problem.”