Worldmaking: Psychology and the Ideology of Creativity

Michael Hanchett Hanson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137408044
• eBook ISBN: 9781137408051
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

Michael Hanchett Hanson weaves together the history of the development of the psychological concepts of creativity with social constructivist views of power dynamics and pragmatic insights. He provides an engaging, thought-provoking analysis to interest anyone involved with creativity, from psychologists and educators to artists and philosophers.

1

Creativity at Large: Functions and Controversies

Defining creativity has been a daunting challenge for psychology. The concept originates in culture, and it brings to research the breadth of meaning that it occupies in larger cultural discourses. Social scientists must operationalize a definition in order to use their empirical methodologies, which is a reductive process. Even as the researchers work to define their topic, however, the everyday use of the term can expand, making it a moving target. Creativity has been addressed as a component of philosophy (for example, Bergson, 1907/1998; Nietzsche, 1882/1910), economics (for example, Christensen, 1997/2003; Schumpeter, 2008), psychology (see Chapters 2, 4, 6 and 7), business management (for example, Osborn, 1948; Wright, Woock & Lichtenberg, 2008), education (for example, Beghetto & Kaufman, 2010), urban planning (Florida, 2005), artistic development, self-help (for example, Booth, 2001; Tharp & Reiter, 2003/2006) and spiritual practice (for example, Cameron, 2007). Furthermore, the social scientists’ research and theories contribute to the expansion of the idea, producing a complex set of looping effects (Hacking, 1995). Psychologists offer a particular operationalization, and their colleagues respond positively and negatively, expanding the idea. People then take on and apply the expanded set of ideas, integrating them into their current uses of the concept in ways that the social scientists may not have considered. Even among psychological constructs, which are often subject to this kind of looping effect, creativity stands out as particularly challenging.

Most of this book is about the contributions of creativity researchers to the expansion of their own topic, including their reactions to, and integration of, one another’s theories. To begin, though, this first chapter grounds the analysis of psychological contributions to the concept of creativity in the public functions of the concept, the cultural contexts where its use begins and ends.

2011

Two years into his first term as president of the United States, with the American and global economies in a slow recovery from the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression and little hope of further government stimulus, Barack Obama (The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 2011) pleaded for unity and cooperation. He began his State of the Union address in 2011 by asking for prayers for Representative Gabby Giffords of Arizona who had been shot at a political event days before and evoked the concept of national family around the tragedy. The bonds that held the nation together and defined America were the common ‘dreams’ of children across the nation, dreams that ‘deserve the chance to be fulfilled’ (para. 5). He also acknowledged the highly charged battles he had with Congress over the previous two years – ‘our differences’ (para. 3) – and called for better cooperation, which would be key to his policy recommendations later in the speech.¹

First, though, the president introduced the framing theme of this State of the Union address, a call for Americans to meet the challenges of the new economic conditions. That task was linked to the concepts of progress and success: ‘We are poised for progress ... . We measure progress by the success of our people’ (para. 10–11). Then the president, who had campaigned on the slogan ‘Change We Can Believe In’, talked about a less appealing kind of change: ‘That world has changed. And for many, the change has been painful. I’ve seen it in the shuttered windows of once booming factories, and the vacant storefronts on once busy Main Streets’ (para. 16). The changes from the economic crisis came in a broader context of rapid change:

In a single generation, revolutions in technology have transformed the way we live, work and do business. Steel mills that once needed 1,000 workers can now do the same work with 100. Today, just about any company can set up shop, hire workers, and sell their products wherever there’s an Internet connection. (para. 17)

And America did not have a monopoly on change: ‘Meanwhile, nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world ... . So, yes, the world has changed. The competition for jobs is real’ (para. 18). In this worldview, change was a pervasive fact and real, not an illusion masking deeper realities. Remember those points. President Obama then turned to self-determination:

What’s more, we are the first nation to be founded for the sake of an idea – the idea that each of us deserves the chance to shape our own destiny. That’s why centuries of pioneers and immigrants have risked everything to come here. It’s why our students don’t just memorize equations, but answer questions like ‘What do you think of that idea? What would you change about the world? What do you want to be when you grow up?’ (para. 20)

Then came tomorrow’s possibilities:

The future is ours to win. But to get there, we can’t just stand still. As Robert Kennedy told us, ‘The future is not a gift. It is an achievement.’ Sustaining the American Dream has never been about standing pat. It has required each generation to sacrifice, and struggle, and meet the demands of a new age. (para. 21)

President Obama was referencing a well-established line of thinking for Americans, one in which the future is not a given, not foreseeable or inevitable. Instead, the future was an opportunity, something to be ‘won’ or ‘achieved’ through action – not ‘standing pat’. A few moments later he referenced other familiar themes about how the uncertain future would be won:

The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation. None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be or where the new jobs will come from. Thirty years ago, we couldn’t know that something called the Internet would lead to an economic revolution. What we can do – what America does better than anyone else – is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We’re the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation does not just change our lives. It is how we make our living. (para. 23)

This passage may seem inspiring but probably not controversial. In spite of any claims about creativity being universal, today’s concept of creativity has a distinctively American flavor. Current concepts of creativity, after all, took much of their form during the twentieth century, a time of growing American economic and geopolitical dominance. Earlier influences, counted among the roots of the modern idea, include the ideas of Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James (Weiner, 2000).

The underlying assumptions of this part of President Obama’s argument could be disorienting, however. The Internet, which earlier in the speech he had implied was shuttering storefronts, was now cited as an inspiring achievement. More generally, global economic changes had contributed to today’s challenges in the first part of the speech, and now America’s professional identity was described as being about periods of history marked by extraordinary change in all areas of life – the industrial and technological revolutions. The key link was a particular use of the concept of progress, which will be discussed later.

Note that President Obama used both the terms ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’. A technical point here: meanings of these terms tend to overlap, and distinctions have been defined in variety of ways. For some, creativity is the skill or ability, and innovation is the outcome (Wright, Woock & Lichtenberg, 2008). Creativity can also imply emphasis on highly original ideas in a wide range of contexts, while innovation implies effective implementation of somewhat novel ideas, usually in businesses or other organizations (Runco, 2007). In the 2011 State of the Union address, coupling creativity and innovation implied the full breadth of the concept of creativity: revolutionary ideas, like the Internet, were linked to an emphasis on new business applications that could contribute to economic growth.

In creativity studies, however, the distinction between creativity and innovation is not often made because ideas continue to evolve from inspiration through articulation, application, refinement and interpretation. Indeed, how to define an idea is an issue underlying differences in creativity theories. As we will see, theorists who define an idea as a bullet on a flip chart have different views of creativity from those who view creative ideas as complex and distinctive points of view and different from those who see creative ideas as defined by the historical recognition of such perspectives. In keeping with much of creativity research, then, the current analysis will use ‘creativity’ as a general term that encompasses what might be distinguished as innovation in other contexts.

After equating American identity with innovation, President Obama next linked the imperative of winning the future to the policy topics that would constitute the core content of the speech, emphasizing the historic role of government in spurring innovation. Anecdotes about individuals or companies succeeding through innovations accompanied some of the proposals. President Obama then reviewed the state of international engagements and ended with a return to the framing theme, a call to ambition and an affirmation of faith in progress:

We do big things.

From the earliest days of our founding, America has been the story of ordinary people who dare to dream. That’s how we win the future.

We’re a nation that says, ‘I might not have a lot of money, but I have this great idea for a new company.’ ‘I might not come from a family of college graduates, but I will be the first to get my degree.’ ‘I might not know those people in trouble, but I think I can help them, and I need to try.’ ‘I’m not sure how we’ll reach that better place beyond the horizon, but I know we’ll get there. I know we will.’

We do big things.

The idea of America endures. Our destiny remains our choice. And tonight, more than two centuries later, it’s because of our people that our future is hopeful, our journey goes forward, and the state of our union is strong. (para. 109–14)

This is, of course, just one speech by one politician, albeit the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Its analysis here is not a political critique – the president was not saying anything unusual. Official responses from opposing parties, the Republican Party and Tea Party, took President Obama to task for many of his claims but not his beliefs in the potentials of creativity and innovation.² Indeed, that is the point. The 2011 State of the Union address was a rich concentration of themes that are deeply embedded in the current concept of creativity. Those themes are widely assumed without question. Change is constant and real. Yes, change poses problems, but the solution is more and even bigger change. Potential (dreams) should be fulfilled. People can create themselves and choose their destinies. Risks, though, are necessary for achievement and fulfillment. Education is important, but received knowledge alone is inadequate. Even though the future is nominally uncertain, progress may be expected. Competition will be a determining factor. Creative work can answer almost any problem, and it is linked to identity, high aspirations, optimism and action.

The speech was also an example of some of the many functions of creativity: a placeholder for hope in the face of an uncertain future; a directive to shift focus from the past (causes, blame) to the future (resolutions, opportunities); a call to action for everyone (a national family of dreams to be fulfilled) with heightened competitive motivation (winning the future); a simultaneous aggrandizing of aspiration (‘We do big things’) and individualizing of responsibility (addressing a systemic economic collapse by calling for the innovations of individuals and corporations), accompanied by inspirational role models (Edison, the Wright brothers, Google and Facebook). As diverse as these functions are, they reflect a relatively coherent set of philosophical convictions and related controversies.

Philosophical implications

Most research since the mid twentieth century has agreed on a consensus definition of creativity as producing a thing or an idea that is novel and valuable in its context. Different theorists may use somewhat different terms, such as ‘original’ instead of novel or ‘useful’ or ‘adaptive’ instead of valuable. Some add criteria, such as generative (Stokes, 2006), purposeful and difficult (Gruber & Wallace, 1999), or heuristic (not algorithmic, Amabile et al., 1996). On the whole, though, this basic definition of a novel idea that is valuable in its context has stuck. Many explicit controversies within creativity theory have arisen from there, as will be described in coming chapters. The concept of creativity itself, along with its consensus definition, also carries implicit underlying philosophic convictions with accompanying controversies that are not usually articulated. We now consider the deeper implications of the belief that our creativity can define ourselves, our world and our future.

What is the nature of change?

Ontology of the new (and old). If creativity plays a crucial role in defining the world and shaping the future, then change is important and real. That statement may seem obvious today, but remember that there are other ways to understand existence.³ Cyclical or stable views of the world in which change is ephemeral or inconsequential call for attention to constants and to enduring aspects of human nature, social interactions and individual personalities. Instead, today’s concept of creativity assumes engagement and promotion of change at all levels of life, from continual reinvention of self to market-driven determination of values and truth. The world is change. The future will be substantially different from today. Furthermore, the imperative to ‘think outside the box’, so often associated with creativity, does not discriminate as to which boxes to breach. Anything can change. Even if some things are assumed to be immutable in principle, like the laws of physics, our understanding of them can change radically, as illustrated by the shift from Newtonian physics to relativity and quantum physics. That may be a shift of knowledge (epistemology) not being (ontology), but practically speaking, the line between the two is often not distinct. The theory of relativity changed what Goodman (1978) would call the world of physics, what the scientists conceived as their object of study. That change, in turn, had a very real impact on the physical, geopolitical and emotional worlds of almost everyone on earth, as evidenced by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear arms race, and the advent of nuclear energy.

A world in which change is ultimately more important than constants brings with it a number of implications and controversies. In this world profundity looks forward into uncertainty and possibility, not backward to experience or history. Most crucially, the particular value of the new makes its ontological status important. What is ‘new’? And what are its relationships to the ‘old’?

Duration. One of the key figures in the history of the concept of creativity was the philosopher Henri Bergson (Pope, 2005). Early in the twentieth century Bergson was famous worldwide. He formulated a particular view of change, science and metaphysics in his concept of creative evolution (Bergson, 1907/1998) and the related idea of the vital impulse (élan vital). More fundamentally than evolution or species variation, Bergson was concerned with the concept of time and its relation to life. As pragmatically useful as mechanistic views of evolution might be, Bergson argued that they were only partial. The theory of natural selection explained mechanisms of change but not the thing that changed: life.⁴ According to Bergson, such theories cannot discuss life because they eliminate time. ‘All is given’ (p. 39) within the present, which is composed entirely of the past. Also within the present is the specific potential of the future. In theory, with enough information, the future can be predicted. Alternatively, teleological finalism, in which change was unified by inevitably moving toward specific ends, also eliminates the future. Everything can be foretold, again ‘all is given’. Attraction to the end replaces the mechanistic impulse of the past, but in both cases life is devoid of a meaningful concept of time and, therefore, originality.

Instead, Bergson argued for a concept of life, including consciousness, as continuity. His concept of duration was a vision of change in which the breaking of time into units – for instance moments of old and new – was not in keeping with how the world continually came into being. The duration of being, in his view, was indivisible. To be was to be new, always, and the process of coming into being was creative. Even circumstances that might...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Our Concept of Change
• 1  Creativity at Large: Functions and Controversies
• 2  Ideation: The Box and Its Discontents
• 3  Worldmaking: Functions and Technologies of the Creative Box
• 4  Self-Actualization: The Pursuit of Potential
• 5  Worldmaking: Functions and Technologies of Actualization
• 6  Development: Lifelong Journeys
• 7  Sociocultural Dynamics: Changing Worlds
• 8  Worldmaking: The Emerging Participatory Synthesis
• 9  Worldmaking 2.0: Our Evolving Ideology
• Final Note: The Year We Killed Creativity
• Notes
• References
• Index