Creativity (42 page)

Common Cause, which Gardner founded and chaired for many years, was an instant success: In the first six months, it attracted one hundred thousand members. He eventually resigned the leadership of this organization for the same reason that Hazel Henderson passes on leadership as soon as possible to someone else: “With every year that passed, I became more certain that I had the answers. I had a Gardner answer for everything.” Knowing all the answers is nice, but it
has two disadvantages: It makes the job boring, and it stifles the initiative of one’s collaborators.

So Gardner moved on to found another organization called Independent Sector, to provide a forum for all the nonprofit agencies around the country. And he continued lecturing and writing. Approaching his eighties, he also returned to his first career and went back to teaching college with renewed verve. His current interest is the study of community, because he feels that neither the fulfillment of one’s potentialities nor the self-organizing power of groups can be achieved if people live in anomic neighborhoods that lack the values and inner rules that make a community an org
anic, self-correcting system.

Living with a Sense of Responsibility

What made Gardner able to put aside the power and success he had achieved and devote his energies to helping re-create forms of representative government? Obviously, a superior intellect helped; he blazed through school always a few years ahead of his agemates. But being very smart doesn’t explain his intrinsic motivation. He could have used the same intelligence to make money on Wall Street, or to advance even higher in government. Instead, he chose to do whatever helped most the common good—not so much out of a sense of obligation, but because he genuinely believed that thi
s was the best thing he could be doing:

Of course, this still does not explain where these values came from and why Gardner accepted their priority over the usual ones with such gusto. By now it should be clear that there is no single explanation for his life choices, but several leads contribute parts of the answer. Gardner himself suggests one obvious reason he has lived with such a strong sense of responsibility: the influence of his parents.

Because his father died when Gardner was only a year and a half old, he could have exerted no direct influence. But as we saw in chapter 7, being orphaned early is a frequent occurrence among creative men, and in such cases the absent father appears to have a lifelong effect, asking, as it were, very high standards of achievement from his son. Gardner’s mother had a more direct but also powerful influence on his values:

The implicit demands of an absent father and the mother’s uncompromising fairness and independence left their mark on Gardner’s character. Another influence was the childhood spent in a booming, optimistic California. While he felt elated at the buoyancy of this environment, he also regretted that, because of frequent moves and his own precocity in school, he didn’t develop a sense of community or a network of friends. This early sense of marginality also contributed to his own independence and, perhaps as a compensation, to his later concern with the importance of community:

It is not that Gardner was born with a great sensitivity to social wrongs and grew up with a goody-goody wish to help his fellow men and women. He discovered how enjoyable helping others could be as he discovered he had a knack for doing so:

The same thing happened again twenty-four years later, when as the new secretary of HEW he was thrown in the midst of tumultuous political battles: He discovered that he had the skills of a fighter and that he enjoyed a good fight for a good cause. A few year later, when the urban riots forced him to start the grassroots organization Common Cause, he found he was able to communicate with a wider public and discovered he enjoyed that. In fact, it was these personal experiences that confirmed Gardner in the belief that we all have much deeper reserves than we know we have and that ge
nerally it takes an outside challenge or opportunity to make us aware of what we can actually do. A lot of our potential, he believes, is buried, hidden, imprisoned by fears, low self-esteem, and the hold of convention.

Gardner has kept learning and growing. He started out reserved, aloof, and detached. This persona worked well as long as he was an academic researcher, but as the head of a large foundation it was intimidating, so he developed a more friendly demeanor. Similarly, the highly rational approach to problems that is appropriate in academic settings is not as effective when it comes to motivating large groups of people:

In other words, Gardner realized that to influence the new fields in which he was operating, he needed to develop new strategies and rebuild his own personality in the process. This required a great deal of openness and flexibility on his part. “To get the things done that I had to get done, I had to be more open and more interested. I enjoyed it, and the fruits of it.” The ability to discover what one can do well, and enjoy doing it, is the hallmark of all creative people. It is particularly fortunate when this also happens to be something that benefits the community, as it has been in Gardner’
s case.

T
HE
D
OMAIN OF
G
LOBAL
R
ESPONSIBILITY

What Commoner, Henderson, Boulding, and Gardner have in common is that they have realized the systemic interconnection among the events that happen on the planet, and they are struggling to act
on this realization. One way of saying what they are trying to do is that they are attempting to develop a domain of global responsibility and a field to implement it. Commoner emphasizes our uses of energy and resources; Henderson, our lifestyles and consumption patterns; Boulding, violence; and Gardner, the social effects of stunting individual potential. The focus of attention is different in each case, but the causal network they consider is interconnected. Any change in the pattern of energy use, of consumption, of peaceful spirituality, of personal fulfillment affects the oth
ers. The central message is that every action has a consequence, that in many important respects the planet is a closed system with fragile boundary conditions, and that unless we take informed action, these conditions may easily be violated.

In a sense, this emerging realization is not so novel. Many simple cultures have developed a systemic view of their cosmos. It is implicit in many of the great world religions. In Judeo-Christian faiths, it is expressed obliquely in the belief of an omniscient God who sees and evaluates even the most minuscule event, such as the fall of a sparrow from a tree branch. It is implicit in the Eastern beliefs in karma, in the endless consequences of each action rippling down the ages toward infinity. According to the ancient Zoroastrian creed, each person was expected to pray forgiveness
of the water for having polluted it, of the earth for having disturbed it, of the air for having filled it with smoke. But with the glorious advance of science in the last few centuries, these intuitions of a network of causes and effects binding on individuals were discredited as superstition. The human species was seen as all-powerful, its actions above the laws of nature.

What people like the ones described in this chapter are doing is rediscovering, within the domains of different sciences, the grounds for taking these intuitions seriously. Biochemistry, economics, sociology, and psychology come to the same conclusion: It is dangerous to proceed within the rules of an isolated domain without taking account of broader consequences. It is dangerous to build nuclear devices unless we know that we can dispose of their wastes safely; it is dangerous to waste food and energy when most of the world is cold and starving; it is dangerous to ignore the spiri
tual needs of people; it is dangerous to underutilize human potentialities.

But how to formulate these isolated bits of knowledge into a coherent symbolic domain? Scientists in the West started to study
systems only recently; we still have no way to represent the kind of problems these four creative people are struggling with in any manageable way. To a large extent, we are still at the prescientific, metaphorical stage. The myth of Gaia, which describes the planet as a living, self-correcting organism, is one of them. The anthropic principle, which claims that our thoughts and actions actually make the existence of the universe possible, is another. Commoner, Henderson, Boulding, and Gardner appear to be poised at the threshold between metaphor and natural law; ready to move from
poetic insight to systematic understanding.

They share some common traits appropriate to intellectual pioneers. They all felt marginal as they grew up. Commoner because he was Jewish, Henderson because her loyalties were split between a loving mother and a powerful father, Boulding because her Norwegian-American upbringing gave her two different perspectives for interpreting experience, and Gardner because he lost his father, never felt that he belonged to a community, and was always the youngest boy in class. This feeling of marginality caused them never to take orthodox ideas for granted. It helped them break away from dom
ain-bound constraints on their thinking when real-life experience conflicted with them.

All four mentioned repeatedly their constant shifting from action to reflection, from passion to objectivity. In each case, this alternation allowed them to keep learning, to keep adjusting to new situations. Their creativity unfolded organically from idea to action, then through the evaluation of the outcomes of action back to ideas—a cycle that repeated itself again and again.

None of them seems to be motivated by money and fame. Instead, they are driven by a feeling of responsibility for the common good, a feeling that sometimes borders on traditional religious values but more often seems to depend on a spiritual sense for the order and beauty of natural phenomena that transcends any particular creed. It is a contemporary formulation of that most ancient awe that prompted our ancestors to develop images of the supernatural in the first place. But they wear this feeling of responsibility lightly, as a privilege rather than a duty. Although they work hard
to help improve our lives, they claim that they never did anything they didn’t want to do. Like the other creative persons we studied, flow is the typical state of their consciousness.

T
he world would be a very different place if it were not for creativity. We would still act according to the few clear instructions our genes contain, and anything learned in the course of our lives would be forgotten after our death. There would be no speech, no songs, no tools, no ideas such as love, freedom, or democracy. It would be an existence so mechanical and impoverished that none of us would want any part of it.

To achieve the kind of world we consider human, some people had to dare to break the thrall of tradition. Next, they had to find ways of recording those new ideas or procedures that improved on what went on before. Finally, they had to find ways of transmitting the new knowledge to the generations to come. Those who were involved in this process we call creative. What we call culture, or those parts of our selves that we internalized from the social environment, is their creation.

C
REATIVITY AND
S
URVIVAL

There is no question that the human species could not survive, either now or in the years to come, if creativity were to run dry. Scientists
will have to come up with new solutions to overpopulation, the depletion of nonrenewable resources, and the pollution of the environment—or the future will indeed be brutish and short. Unless humanists find new values, new ideals to direct our energies, a sense of hopelessness might well keep us from going on with the enthusiasm necessary to overcome the obstacles along the way. Whether we like it or not, our species has become dependent on creativity.

To say the same thing in a more upbeat way, in the last few millennia evolution has been transformed from being almost exclusively a matter of mutations in the chemistry of genes to being more and more a matter of changes in memes—in the information that we learn and in turn transmit to others. If the right memes are selected, we survive; otherwise we do not. And those who select the knowledge, the values, the behaviors that will either lead into a brighter future or to extinction are no longer factors outside ourselves, such as predators or climatic changes. The future is in our h
ands; the culture we create will determine our fate.

This is the evolution that Jonas Salk calls metabiological, or E. O. Wilson and others call biocultural. The idea is the same: Survival no longer depends on biological equipment alone but on the social and cultural tools we choose to use. The inventions of the great civilizations—the arts, religions, political systems, sciences and technologies—signal the main stages along the path of cultural evolution. To be human means to be creative.

At the same time, it does not take much thought to realize that the main threats to our survival as a species, the very problems we hope creativity will solve, were brought about by yesterday’s creative solutions. Overpopulation, which in many ways is the core problem of the future, is the result of ingenious improvements in farming and public health. The loss of community and increasing psychological isolation are in part due to the enormous advances in mobility, brought about by the discovery of self-propelling vehicles such as trains and cars. The loss of transcendent valu
es is the result of the success of science at debunking beliefs that cannot be tested empirically. And so on, ad infinitum. This is the reason, for instance, that Robert Ornstein calls human inventions “the axemaker’s gift,” referring to what happens when a steel axe is first introduced to a preliterate tribe that knows no metals: It leads to easier killing, and it shreds the existing fabric of social relations and cultural values. In a
sense, every new invention is an axemaker’s gift: The way of life is never the same after the new meme takes hold.

It is not only the clearly dangerous discoveries—distilled alcohol, tobacco, firearms, nuclear reactors—that threaten to wipe out entire populations. Even apparently beneficial inventions have unintended negative consequences. Television is a fantastic tool for increasing the range of what we can experience, but it can make us addicted to redundant information that appeals to the lowest common denominator of human interests. Every new meme—the car, the computer, the contraceptive pill, patriotism or multiculturalism—changes the way we think and act, and has a potentially dark si
de that often reveals itself only when it is too late, after we have resigned ourselves that the innovation is here to stay.

The development of nuclear energy promised both military and industrial advantages to those countries that were able to seize the opportunity. It was a chance none could refuse. Yet only half a century into the nuclear age, it seems that the toll we must pay for this particular Faustian bargain is so high that it could bankrupt us. Recent estimates are that it will cost the United States more than $300 billion to safely dispose of nuclear waste. Many other countries, like Russia, may not be able to start cleanup operations in time. In a twinkling of planetary history, human ingenui
ty has succeeded in making a good fraction of Earth unfit for habitation.

There is a basic law of human ingenuity that we try very hard to ignore: the greater the power to change the environment, the greater the chances of producing undesirable as well as desirable results. About four thousand years B.C.E., the discovery of large-scale irrigation in Mesopotamia made that country fruitful and rich beyond anything its neighbors could dream of. But each year the currents of the Euphrates and the Tigris removed a fraction of an inch of the rich topsoil and deposited salty minerals in its place. Slowly the bountiful garden between the two rivers has turned in
to a desert where almost nothing grows.

To take another example from the other end of the world, the great Maya civilization collapsed about 800 C.E. not because it could not cope with adversity, but because it was destroyed by its own success. There are contending explanations of why that complex culture was reabsorbed by the jungle. Perhaps too many families became wealthy and powerful. These elites felt that they should not work any
longer, yet each generation expected to be more comfortable and have a higher standard of living than the one before. With too many chiefs per Indian, inner conflicts finally erupted in murderous civil wars. Another hypothesis is that to build their magnificent temples and palaces, the Maya had limestone stucco, which had to be melted in very hot furnaces. To feed the furnaces they cut down much of the surrounding forest, which resulted in erosion of the soil; the topsoil was washed away and silted up the marshes that the Maya had used to irrigate their terraced fields. Deprived of
fertilizer, the fields yielded little food, and the ensuing famines fueled civil disorder that led to chaos and eventual oblivion. The power to create has always been linked with the power to destroy.

A similar pattern of initial success leading to eventual failure holds for memes that shape human energy through ideas. The promises of Nazism, Marxism, and the various religious fundamentalisms give people a simple set of goals and rules. This liberates a wave of psychic energy that for a while makes the society that adopted the creed seem purposeful and powerful. In Germany, Hitler eliminated unemployment when the rest of the industrial world was still in the throes of the Great Depression. In Italy, Mussolini for the first time made the trains run on time. Stalin transformed a b
ackward rural continent into a leading industrial giant. Soon, however, the downside appears: Intolerance, repression, rigidity, and xenophobia usually leading to wars or worse are just some of the usual consequences when social energies are focused by memes that promise superiority to one group at the expense of the others.

But even when the fruits of creativity produce no external damages, their very success can sow seeds that are dangerous to the survival of the culture that has adopted them. The Romans were able to fashion a rich and stable society through the invention of a viable system of laws, administrative arrangements, and military practices. But after a while, Roman patricians saw no reason to exert themselves. The inertia of their success lulled them into a false sense of security. Cheap slave labor made them indifferent to new labor-saving devices. As in the slave-holding American South,
fatal complacency appeared as the inevitable dark side of the coin of material comfort.

Similarly, American ingenuity has produced a standard of living and a political stability that are the envy of the world. The result is
that Americans—as well as most Europeans—see no reason to work long hours at cheap wages. And who can blame them? But much of the rest of the world is eager to toil hard in undesirable conditions. As a result, productive activity increasingly shifts into the hands of people who have the lowest expectations. When was the last time that you wore clothes made in the USA? Or used domestic TV or video equipment? The reason why the number of immigrants keeps growing is that they are the only ones left willing to do menial jobs.

But even engineers and technically trained workers are steadily getting scarcer in the industrialized nations. Everyone wants to be a professional, or at least a clerical worker sitting behind a desk. The optimists argue that our children are preparing themselves for the jobs of the future, based on information and creative flexibility. But the fact is that the number of new patents being taken out in the United States is also decreasing, and computer literacy is more a question of learning to be a consumer of information than knowing how to generate or use the information acquired
. If necessity is the mother of invention, secure affluence seems to be its dysfunctional stepparent.

So through history we see an ironic process that Hegel or Marx would have appreciated: a dialectic whereby the success of a culture develops within itself its own antithesis. The more well-off we become, the less reason we have to look for change, and hence the more exposed we are to outside forces. The result of creativity is often its own negation.

It is true that in the past a society that had advanced far in creating complex memes could survive for hundreds or even thousands of years more or less unchanged, living on its initial cultural capital. The Egyptians were able to do so, and so were the Chinese. But such a luxury is no longer available, in part because of the very advances made in the past few centuries. Communications have improved to the point that information, technology, and access to capital are almost evenly distributed across the globe. Those who use these resources most efficiently and with greater determin
ation are likely to control the future. No society can any longer enjoy the splendid isolation of the Nile’s empire, or even that of Victorian England.

So what is the verdict in this tangled tale? The current fashion is still to acclaim creativity without reservation. People deemed to be creative can do no wrong; they will save us from past mistakes and
lead to a bright future. Of course, occasionally there are dissenting voices. The psychoanalyst Géza Róheim wrote that the whole enterprise of life, and especially its latest conscious episodes, amounts to a huge mistake. The ideal state of matter is inorganic; life is just a feverish sickness, a passing cancer on the serene stage of a crystalline universe.

More to the point, the general public also seems to be getting second thoughts about the value of the culture that our ancestors have created. It is not only in Russia, Iran, India, or Brazil that people’s faith in science, democracy, and many of the other good things humankind has fought so hard to achieve is shaken. Spasms of traditionalism run through gleamingly modern Japan, and forces groping toward a return to simpler times are gathering strength in the United States. Recovering shared values, a sense of community, and a more serene lifestyle would be great accomplishme
nts. Unfortunately, turning back is more likely to involve a renewed belief in magic, astrology, the supernatural, and the superiority of one’s ethnic traditions relative to all others.

Neither uncritical acceptance nor wholesale dismissal of human creativity will lead us far. It would be so nice if we could look at culture and determine objectively: This is good, that is bad. But history does not unfold in black and white. Each great advance contains within it a new vulnerability. Some memes are indispensable today but a hindrance tomorrow. It is as absurd to believe that progress is always desirable as to reject it out of hand.

Creativity in the Context of Human Evolution

The argument so far has tried to establish two points: that creativity is necessary for human survival in a future where the human species plays a meaningful role and that the results of creativity tend to have undesirable side effects.

If one accepts these conclusions, it follows that human well-being hinges on two factors: the ability to increase creativity and the ability to develop ways to evaluate the impact of new creative ideas. Let’s focus first on the second requirement.

Why can’t we leave the evaluation of new ideas to their respective fields, or to the “invisible hand” of the marketplace? Unfortunately, neither of these two institutions is well equipped to cope with the task. Almost by definition, the members of a field are devoted to
advancing the hegemony of their domain, without much regard for the rest of the culture. Although a few physicists banded together after World War II to alert society to the dangers of nuclear proliferation, the field as a whole could not resist lobbying for expanded research and applications of high-energy physics. Similarly, a few physicians have sounded the alarm about high-tech medicine interfering with progress in public health, but the majority of the field, led by the American Medical Association, sees its duty as endorsing the proliferation of expensive equipment and procedures.

Left with carte blanche, every field naturally wants to control as many of the resources of society as possible, and more. The American Psychological Association would be happy if every school, business firm, and family had its own resident psychologist. The interest of artists is to convince the rest of society that things would be better if everyone became a collector of art, while the interest of dentists is to assure us that we would be happier if we devoted most of our free time to oral hygiene. Each field welcomes any new idea that promises to expand its hold on societal resources.