The
writer had a problem. Books he read and people he knew had been warning
him that the nation and maybe mankind itself had wandered into a sort of
creativity doldrums. Economic growth was slackening. The Internet
revolution was less awesome than we had anticipated, and the forward
march of innovation, once a cultural constant, had slowed to a crawl.
One of the few fields in which we generated lots of novelties —
financial engineering — had come back to bite us. And in other
departments, we actually seemed to be going backward. You could no
longer take a supersonic airliner across the Atlantic, for example, and
sending astronauts to the moon had become either fiscally insupportable
or just passé.
And yet the troubled writer also knew that there
had been, over these same years, fantastic growth in our creativity
promoting sector. There were TED talks on how to be a creative person.
There were “Innovation Jams” at which IBM employees brainstormed
collectively over a global hookup, and “Thinking Out of the Box” desktop
sculptures for sale at Sam’s Club. There were creativity consultants
you could hire, and cities that had spent billions reworking
neighborhoods into arts-friendly districts where rule-bending
whimsicality was a thing to be celebrated. If you listened to certain
people, creativity was the story of our time, from the halls of MIT to
the incubators of Silicon Valley.
The literature on the subject
was vast. Its authors included management gurus, forever exhorting us to
slay the conventional; urban theorists, with their celebrations of
zesty togetherness; pop psychologists, giving the world step-by-step
instructions on how to unleash the inner Miles Davis. Most prominent,
perhaps, were the science writers, with their endless tales of creative
success and their dissection of the brains that made it all possible.
It
was to one of these last that our puzzled correspondent now decided to
turn. He procured a copy of “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” the 2012
bestseller by the ex-wunderkind Jonah Lehrer, whose résumé includes a
Rhodes scholarship, a tour of duty at The New Yorker and two previous
books about neuroscience and decision-making. (There was also a scandal
concerning some made-up quotes in “Imagine,” but our correspondent was
determined to tiptoe around that.) Settling into a hot bath — well known
for its power to trigger outside-the-box thoughts — he opened his mind
to the young master.
Anecdote
after heroic anecdote unfolded, many of them beginning with some
variation on Lehrer’s very first phrase: “Procter and Gamble had a
problem.” What followed, as creative minds did their nonlinear thing,
were epiphanies and solutions. Our correspondent read about the
invention of the Swiffer. He learned how Bob Dylan achieved his great
breakthrough and wrote that one song of his that they still play on the
radio from time to time. He found out that there was a company called 3M
that invented masking tape, the Post-it note and other useful items. He
read about the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and about the glories of Pixar.
And that’s when it hit him:
He had heard these things before. Each
story seemed to develop in an entirely predictable fashion. He
suspected that in the Dylan section, Lehrer would talk about “Like a
Rolling Stone,” and that’s exactly what happened. When it came to the 3M
section, he waited for Lehrer to dwell on the invention of the Post-it
note — and there it was.
Had our correspondent developed the gift
of foresight? No. He really had heard these stories before. Spend a few
moments on Google and you will find that the tale of how Procter &
Gamble developed the Swiffer is a staple of marketing literature. Bob
Dylan is endlessly cited in discussions of innovation, and you can read
about the struggles surrounding the release of “Like a Rolling Stone” in
textbooks like “The Fundamentals of Marketing” (2007). As for 3M, the
decades-long standing ovation for the company’s creativity can be traced
all the way back to “In Search of Excellence” (1982), one of the most
influential business books of all time. In fact, 3M’s accidental
invention of the Post-it note is such a business-school chestnut that
the ignorance of those who don’t know the tale is a joke in the 1997
movie “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”
*
These
realizations took only a millisecond. What our correspondent also
understood, sitting there in his basement bathtub, was that the
literature of creativity was a genre of surpassing banality. Every book
he read seemed to boast the same shopworn anecdotes and the same
canonical heroes. If the authors are presenting themselves as experts on
innovation, they will tell us about Einstein, Gandhi, Picasso, Dylan,
Warhol, the Beatles. If they are celebrating their
own innovations,
they will compare them to the oft-rejected masterpieces of
Impressionism — that ultimate combination of rebellion and placid pastel
bullshit that decorates the walls of hotel lobbies from Pittsburgh to
Pyongyang.
Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words,
almost never do so themselves. Year after year, new installments in
this unchanging genre are produced and consumed. Creativity, they all
tell us, is too important to be left to the creative. Our prosperity
depends on it. And by dint of careful study and the hardest science —
by, say, sliding a jazz pianist’s head into an MRI machine — we can
crack the code of creativity and unleash its moneymaking power.
That
was the ultimate lesson. That’s where the music, the theology, the
physics and the ethereal water lilies were meant to direct us. Our
correspondent could think of no books that tried to work the equation
the other way around — holding up the invention of air conditioning or
Velcro as a model for a jazz trumpeter trying to work out his solo.
And why was this worth noticing? Well, for one thing, because we’re talking about the literature of
creativity, for
Pete’s sake. If there is a non-fiction genre from which you have a
right to expect clever prose and uncanny insight, it should be this one.
So why is it so utterly consumed by formula and repetition?
What
our correspondent realized, in that flash of bathtub-generated insight,
was that this literature isn’t about creativity in the first place.
While it reiterates a handful of well-known tales — the favorite pop
stars, the favorite artists, the favorite branding successes — it
routinely ignores other creative milestones that loom large in the
history of human civilization. After all, some of the most consistent
innovators of the modern era have also been among its biggest monsters.
He thought back, in particular, to the diabolical creativity of Nazi
Germany, which was the first country to use ballistic missiles, jet
fighter planes, assault rifles and countless other weapons. And yet
nobody wanted to add Peenemünde, where the Germans developed the V-2
rocket during the 1940s, to the glorious list of creative hothouses that
includes Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Belle Époque Paris and
latter-day Austin, Texas. How much easier to tell us, one more time,
how jazz bands work, how someone came up with the idea for the Slinky,
or what shade of paint, when applied to the walls of your office, is
most conducive to originality.
*
But as any creativity
expert can tell you, no insight is an island, entire of itself. New
epiphanies build on previous epiphanies, and to understand the vision
that washed over our writer in the present day, we must revisit an
earlier flash of insight, one that takes us back about a decade, to the
year 2002. This time our future correspondent was relaxing in a
different bathtub, on Chicago’s South Side, where the trains passed by
in an all-day din of clanks and squeaks. While he soaked, he was reading
the latest book about creativity: Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the
Creative Class.”
Creativity was now the most valuable quality of all, ran Florida’s argument, “the
decisive source
of competitive advantage.” This made creative people into society’s
“dominant class” — and companies that wished to harness their power
would need to follow them wherever they went. Therefore cities and
states were obliged to reconfigure themselves as havens for people of
nonconformist tastes, who would then generate civic coolness via art
zones, music scenes, and truckloads of authenticity. The author even
invented a “Bohemian Index,” which, he claimed, revealed a strong
correlation between the presence of artists and economic growth.
Every
element of Florida’s argument infuriated our future correspondent. Was
he suggesting planned bohemias? Built by governments? To attract
businesses? It all seemed like a comic exercise in human gullibility. As
it happened, our correspondent in those days spent nearly all his time
with the kinds of people who fit Richard Florida’s definition of the
creative class: writers, musicians, and intellectuals. And Florida
seemed to be suggesting that such people were valuable mainly for their
contribution to a countercultural pantomime that lured or inspired
business executives.
What was really sick-making, though, was
Florida’s easy assumption that creativity was a thing our society
valued. Our correspondent had been hearing this all his life, since his
childhood in the creativity-worshipping 1970s. He had even believed it
once, in the way other generations had believed in the beneficence of
government or the blessings of Providence. And yet his creative friends,
when considered as a group, were obviously on their way down, not up.
The institutions that made their lives possible — chiefly newspapers,
magazines, universities and record labels — were then entering a period
of disastrous decline. The creative world as he knew it was not
flowering, but dying.
When he considered his creative friends as
individuals, the literature of creativity began to seem even worse —
more like a straight-up insult. Our writer-to-be was old enough to know
that, for all its reverential talk about the rebel and the box breaker,
society had no interest in new ideas at all unless they reinforced
favorite theories or could be monetized in some obvious way. The method
of every triumphant intellectual movement had been to quash dissent and
cordon off truly inventive voices. This was simply how debate was
conducted. Authors rejoiced at the discrediting of their rivals (as poor
Jonah Lehrer would find in 2012). Academic professions excluded those
who didn’t toe the party line. Leftist cliques excommunicated one
another. Liberals ignored any suggestion that didn’t encourage or
vindicate their move to the center. Conservatives seemed to be at war
with the very idea of human intelligence. And business thinkers were the
worst of all, with their perennial conviction that criticism of any
kind would lead straight to slumps and stock market crashes.
*
Or
so our literal-minded correspondent thought back in 2002. Later on,
after much trial and error, he would understand that there really had
been something deeply insightful about Richard Florida’s book. This was
the idea that creativity was the attribute of a
class — which
class Florida identified not only with intellectuals and artists but
also with a broad swath of the professional-managerial stratum. It would
take years for our stumbling innovator to realize this. And then, he
finally got it all at once. The reason these many optimistic books
seemed to have so little to do with the downward-spiraling lives of
actual creative workers is that
they weren’t really about those people in the first place.
No.
The literature of creativity was something completely different.
Everything he had noticed so far was a clue: the banality, the familiar
examples, the failure to appreciate what was actually happening to
creative people in the present time. This was not science, despite the
technological gloss applied by writers like Jonah Lehrer. It was a
literature of superstition, in which everything always worked out and
the good guys always triumphed and the right inventions always came
along in the nick of time. In Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come
From” (2010), the creative epiphany itself becomes a kind of heroic
character, helping out clueless humanity wherever necessary:
Good
ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse,
recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual
borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to
compete.
And what was the true object of this
superstitious stuff? A final clue came from “Creativity: Flow and the
Psychology of Discovery and Invention” (1996), in which Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi acknowledges that, far from being an act of individual
inspiration, what we call creativity is simply an expression of
professional consensus. Using Vincent van Gogh as an example, the author
declares that the artist’s “creativity came into being when a
sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something
important to contribute to the domain of art.” Innovation, that is,
exists only when the correctly credentialed hivemind agrees that it
does. And “without such a response,” the author continues, “van Gogh
would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange
canvases.” What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very
faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise.
Consider,
then, the narrative daisy chain that makes up the literature of
creativity. It is the story of brilliant people, often in the arts or
humanities, who are studied by other brilliant people, often in the
sciences, finance, or marketing. The readership is made up of
us —
members of the professional-managerial class — each of whom harbors a
powerful suspicion that he or she is pretty brilliant as well. What your
correspondent realized, relaxing there in his tub one day, was that the
real subject of this literature was the professional-managerial
audience itself, whose members hear clear, sweet reason when they listen
to NPR and think they’re in the presence of something profound when
they watch some billionaire give a TED talk. And what this complacent
literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property,
their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they
bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and
it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the
world.
An edited version of this essay originally appeared in Harper’s magazine
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