Do we really hate creativity?

Do we really hate creativity? December 9, 2013

This piece in Slate argues that, for all of our societal glorification of creativity and creative minds, we are actually hostile to creativity, in school and the workplace, and that this is squashing our creative minds. The one bright spot is that rejection might actually be freeing for some square pegs, because it confirms their ‘otherness’ and allows them to stop trying to fit in a round hole.

Is our problem hostility to creativity? I think our problem is that we misunderstand what creativity is.

My school and coming of age experience wasn’t one where conformity was emphasized or creativity quashed. But it was one that made the same error this article does: conflating novelty and creativity, as though creative minds are trapped when given limitations and existing conventions. But what creative mind is really limited by convention? Can anyone transgress meaningfully a convention they haven’t first mastered? Could Picasso have bent perspective if he hadn’t first learned normative rules of perspective and realism? Convention is the breeding ground of creativity–first we learn the form, then we learn the limits of the form in attempting to broach or invert it, and when we really understand the purpose of the form, then we can take ourselves outside it.

We value the originality of the creations at the end of this process, and so we worry about squashing creativity.  But I think some of the loss of creativity we suffer comes from this over-emphasis on novelty. How many fledgling writers have their spirits squashed by the pressure to create something that doesn’t resemble any other created work? And how many teachers, faced with the question of how to teach originality, will throw up their hands and stick to teaching things that can be measured?

I had an English teacher who refused to grade our unit on poetry, and as a result managed to teach us absolutely nothing about verse. Dead Poet’s Society is a great movie, but if you want to teach kids to love poetry, you have to help them understand that those beautiful verses didn’t come out of the sky like lightning to strike only a few select original minds. Teach the conventions the poets knew, and learned, and created: teach children to use those rules, grade them for their success in incorporating specific elements. Have them ape the voices of geniuses until they have them so thoroughly mastered that they can burn those conventions as fuel for their own creative drive, feed their own muse.

Yeats wrote:
We sat together at one summer’s end, 
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, 
And you and I, and talked of poetry. 
I said, “A line will take us hours maybe; 
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, 
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. 
Better go down upon your marrow-bones 
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones 
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; 
For to articulate sweet sounds together 
Is to work harder than all these, and yet 
Be thought an idler by the noisy set 
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen 
The martyrs call the world.” 

                                         And thereupon 
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
 There’s many a one shall find out all heartache 
On finding that her voice is sweet and low 
Replied, “To be born woman is to know— 
Although they do not talk of it at school— 
That we must labour to be beautiful.” 
I said, “It’s certain there is no fine thing 
Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring… 

Even now, the biggest obstacle to doing what I love–writing–is the suspicion that I don’t have anything new to contribute. Never mind that I’ve been incredibly blessed by the writing of people who merely combine wonderful elements and ideas from our rich inheritance of human storytelling and human existence–like Yeats, who wrote (in rhyme) of love, women, fairies, and Ireland…not new topics at all. Still, in my head, I fear being ‘unoriginal’, to an almost paralyzing extent.

The ‘creators’ the articles cites aren’t, however, people who pulled original and unheard of innovations out of the air. They are people who took existing things and existing ideas and changed the context, changed the assumptions, looked at them a little differently. And while originality can’t be taught, creativity can, simply by encouraging people to make connections, to become generalists rather than specialists, to cross genres, to cross disciplines, to obsess a little (or a lot) when something is fascinating.

Do I doubt there are obstacles for creative minds on multiple levels? Not especially. Of course there will be people who are most comfortable with what they know, or who want the security if ‘proven’ ideas and methods, especially in business and economic contexts. But I don’t especially think this is the greatest obstacle to creativity, because I rather suspect that those creative minds whose ideas are rejected probably go on creating in whatever avenues they can…the internet provides evidence enough that humans still thrive most when we create.

I think the impulse to create is inborn and endemic. But if we disdain synthesis and imitation, we run the risk of so starving our creative minds that their fruits will only be anemic, at best.


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