The question of how that creativity is employed is a good one to ask. Quality matters here and I suspect that a number of principles currently relied upon by the culture will be either outright thrown away or seriously (hopefully) reconsidered. What replaces these abandoned notions will spring from the understanding and interpretation of events applied to our individual and collective actions. Ideally, actions have thoughts attached to them, and it is the thoughts I want to address and, more specifically, how those thoughts are formed.
So, if a creative, imaginative response to the ongoing, staged crises of civilization is to successfully minimize and contain the likely stupidities people will generally engage in, like, say...violence, it will have to begin with the individual mind. A good individual mind to start with on the subject, truly, of creativity is that of Igor Stravinsky, if for no other reason than I know a little something about it. In "Poetics of Music", a series of lectures he gave at Harvard University in 1939-40, he describes his observations made on the workings of his individual creative imagination. He is, of course, the only witness to this process. What makes it interesting is that he is a good observer, something he believes all good artists are and need to be.
In this sense, what's good for the artist is good for everybody. A good artist renders a faithful version of reality. Faithful to the subjective view of reality, that is, but still has to be set against real reality, however you want to look at that. But observation as a necessary component to being a good artist also means depth of observation and not contenting oneself with the frivolous or fantastical. Of course, that, too, is a subjective judgement, and rather than embark on some philosophical journey into the heart of the reality question, Stravinsky's observations of the workings of his own mind I think has to be considered truthfully rendered. So what am I talking about?
It is the blank page problem for the writer, the block of stone problem for the sculptor, or any other condition of absolute freedom that, in truth according to Stravinsky, is paralyzing for an artist. At least, that is Stravinsky's understanding. He is pointing to a common misconception, even in his day, about what an artist truly does and faces in the use of the creative imagination. For those who are not artists, the misconception lies in the sense that artists do whatever they want to do in absolute freedom. This is the paralyzing condition and not the condition which allows for, in Stravinsky's case, a ballet to be invented. This happens through imposing limits, or recognizing the limits of the form. In music it's useful to limit yourself to a scale or a key and discover that within this constraint at least one can begin to create and discover the inexhaustible possibilities even a simple seven note scale offers.
But to create means to impose, or to realize, a progressive series of limitations on the work and ultimately is what distinguishes the work from incoherence or chaos. In contemporary America, I suggest there's something to learn from this. We here have an incoherent and overly democratized ideal of what creativity means and how it functions in the mind and in the culture. In other words, creativity is a word largely functioning without a clear meaning, having been degraded by marketing campaigns based on "innovation" and "creative solutions made easy" to cover everything from office supplies to child rearing to portfolio management. Underlying this is a message of limitless potential for the individual and society. Anything is possible, and don't even talk about constraints. Against this is a backdrop of national misdirection and incoherence regarding our own state of affairs and even who we are as a people.
The misconception of the popular notion of creativity is echoed in the general use of the word freedom. There are two primary sources for the misconception of what we think of as freedom in our public understanding. The first I think emerged from the intellectual leftovers from the Blank Slate conception of the human mind coming out of mainly the political left and embodied in the now largely defunct nature/nurture argument. The left took the nurture side which I summarize, not too simplistically, as meaning a child's mind can be, given the proper environment, infinitely elastic and that each child has an equal opportunity to be whatever he or she determines if raised accordingly. Given enough Baby Mozart, well, each child can be a Mozart? How about a Stravinsky?
This may sound like a gross oversimplification, but I am stating it's ultimate implication. In practice, of course, it never works that way and most people see this. But why? In terms of a broad based public discourse charged with ideological implications, it is what I call, as of about an hour ago, an eroded binary*. I think this is a good name and what I mean by it is that, in the course of defending one position or the other, the limitations of each view are exposed. Not to mention that new research has defeated the primacy of one over the other. Neither is wrong, but neither is correct. The memo, however, takes some time to be delivered to everybody. The problem is, the true mechanism girding all the feedback loops between the human brain and the environment it lives in is a terribly complex research activity and many more billions of dollars would need to be spent to figure it all out. Maybe Lamar Smith (R-Tx.) has a burning passion to get to the bottom of it.
Stravinsky's description of the workings of his own brain jives more with the latest brain research than the Blank Slate. He does not consider himself free to do what he does, but instead is fortunate to be free to be what he is. It's out of compulsion that he composes, and many, many artists (artisans?) say the same thing. For that matter, so do so many others who sit at the top of their fields, and even some who don't. From this angle, we make allowances in our lives, make decisions according to what we are in the first place driven by an internal force we don't really control. What is that force? Stravinsky called it a compulsion. We don't all feel compulsion probably in the same way he did, but we all have our own respective interests in something.
Another majorly confused notion of freedom is emitted from the imaginary and rather adolescent view of political freedom coming from both the libertarian and the constitutional fundamentalist perspective of the right wing. This is what's called negative freedom, or freedom from something, i.e. government. Where ever adherents to this way of thinking believe humans are or should be going, they posit an ahistoric, idealized place ruled almost purely by market principles and laws around private property. That they have no sensible answer to why government in any form is a feature pervasive throughout human history is enough to cast it as a medium brow attempt at a comprehensive philosophy. What they don't include in their world actually accounts for much of what constitutes the world.
These two can ironically be traced to the same person in it's origin, John Locke. Locke devised the Blank Slate in his epistemology, or study on the way the mind learns. This seems to be the state of paralysis Stravinsky described, eh? On a blank slate slate can be written anything. Who does the writing in this instance? The private property fetish of the right wing springs from Locke, as well, whose philosophy hugely informed the founding fathers. Private property is the basis of individual freedom, says Locke. All well and good, but the fight between Marx and Locke has the same eroded binary effect on the national conversation that the Blank Slate has.
In order for there to be a rejuvenated cultural creativity these arguments have to be superseded. How that happens who knows but I would start with the possible informed by a realistic notion of limitations on what is possible. A lot can be done with that in mind, even if it's not fully understood. That's a part of the creative process, after all, trying to find the possible. What is sorely needed in the U.S., and what I think should inform our actions is the re-establishment of artisan traditions. What is a hobby now could well become the job of the future. People's hobbies and amateur efforts reveal something in line with who they really are in the Stravinsky sense. The path to happiness is paved with those stones. In the face of declining world trade, and the high cost of globalization can no longer be covered, economies will have no other option than to re-localize. This means smaller scale production to replace all the stuff, crap, and junk we buy at retail stores or on the internet. Now is the time, while there still is time, and, well, there still is time, to be creative in this regard.
Because, as the Minutemen understood so well, these things do take time. So I will leave you with d. boon's authoritative tenor on the subject.
* The bathroom shower is a great place to think.
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