Am I creative? I don’t know. Depends on the definition. Can I and should I try to increase my creativity? Surely yes. Who would say no to that? And there are videos, books, seminars, all ready to help you unleash your creativity to a new you, a better life, or whatever promises are out there. Is creativity a new thing? Or is it just a new name of an old thing? That’s what author Samuel Franklin explores in his new book: The Cult of Creativity, A Surprisingly Recent History.
The word creativity turns out to be relatively new, gaining traction in the 1950s and continuing its boom trajectory to the present day. It also tries to occupy a new space. Geniuses are few and far between, but we don’t have to be genii to be creative. Humans are intelligent beings, but that doesn’t mean we’re all creative. But we can be. And that’s a space you should want to be in. So say advertisers hawking their wares. So say businesses looking to hire employees. So say self-help gurus who want to help you reach your potential.
Franklin situates the rise of creativity post-WWII in the United States. Business is booming. The menace of the Cold War threatens. Huge investments are made in science and technology. Fears of being conformists in a mass society stuck in a bureaucracy of technocrats rub against Romantic ideas of losing the individual and the narrowing of an open frontier. Psychology pivots into this space, designing tests to identify creative individuals. Ideals of the fine arts are co-opted. Franklin writes that for a “professional to be creative was not simply to be productive, though it was that, but also to model oneself not on the machine but on the artist or poet. It was to pursue work with an intrinsic motivation, a passion for the act of creation. It was to be more human.”
Chapter 1 of The Cult of Creativity is titled “Between the Commonplace and the Sublime”. That’s the protean space creativity is attempting to occupy. But it’s slippery. The psychologists were attempting to sort “human resources around a new notion of excellence for the postwar world. Creativity signified something more democratic than genius, yet more heroic than intelligence; more whimsical than mere inventiveness or ingenuity, but more useful than mere imagination or artisticness.” To solve the world’s thorniest issues, creative minds needed to be nurtured. Both art and science were needed to play an integral role in creative acts: to “approach technologies with wisdom”. And now creativity is imbued with moral weight, as if it were an imperative.
Franklin discusses and dissects the fad of Brainstorming starting in the 1950s. He then tackles the incorporation of self-actualization promoted by Carl Rogers & Co. Maslow is quoted discussing the freedom of the creative act, to become “our Real Selves”. Then Synectics makes its appearance in the 1960s. This opens the door to the marketing and advertising industries, which Franklin dubs “redeeming the manufacture of desire”. Education isn’t left out of this revolution and the Torrance Tests for Creative Thinking are still with us, even though longitudinal studies indicate a dearth in predictive ability of so-called creative ‘talent’. And thanks to the popularity of Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, creativity has become an overused word. We still don’t know what it means. The fusion of brainstorming, artisticness, usefulness, technology, has now morphed into “Design Thinking”. We still don’t know what it is, but it occupies that liminal space between the common and the sublime.
I spent a number of years reading the psychology literature on creativity research. I blogged about creativity multiple times. I even attempted to start up a creative cluster with student participants. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I gave up after a while to focus on more mundane concerns. I suspect that I exhibit some of the traits associated with creativity: divergent thinking, coming up with novel yet practical solutions, and I’m a bit of an iconoclast. I can move fluidly between big-picture strategic thinking and localized detailed tactics. I go my own way, in a different direction from the majority, and I’m mostly happy not to be bothered so I can just do my shtick. I’m not an evangelist of my methods (although I will share if asked). I don’t worry about whether I’m living up to my potential – I don’t even know what that means. Am I creative? I still don’t know nor do I care. And maybe it doesn’t matter. But regardless, I appreciated the lens of history that Franklin provides. It goes some way to explain my present nonchalance about creativity.
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