“Individual creativity is almost always stimulated by the work, ideas and achievements of other people.”

THE LONE GENIUS?

A POPULAR IMAGE OF CREATIVITY is of the lone genius swimming heroically against the tides of convention, pursuing ideas that no one has had before. There are numerous examples of iconic figures who’ve made groundbreaking contributions in their own areas of work. I’ve mentioned some of them in previous chapters, including Galileo, Isaac Newton, Martha Graham and others. But the image of the lone genius can be misleading. Original ideas may emanate from the inspiration of individual minds, but they don’t emerge in a cultural vacuum. Individual creativity is always stimulated by the work, ideas and achievements of other people. As Isaac Newton famously said, if he saw further than others, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Even when working alone, as some people do, there is an unavoidable cultural context to their creative efforts.

In practice, our own ways of seeing the world are deeply influenced by our dealings with other people, not least by using shared forms of representation that we have created together, such as the languages we speak. We each have our own lives, but much of what we create is with each other. What we create together is culture. To use a phrase from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, all human lives are suspended in “webs of significance” that we ourselves have spun. Creativity is how these threads are formed and woven into the complex fabrics of human culture.

Since the late eighteenth century, culture, in one sense, has meant a general process of intellectual or social refinement. It is in this sense that a person might be described as cultured. Being cultured is associated particularly with an appreciation of the arts. By extension, culture also means the general field of artistic and intellectual activity. A distinction is often made between high art and popular culture. “High art” normally means opera, classical music, ballet, contemporary dance, fine art, serious literature and cinema. “Popular culture” means commercial music, popular cinema, television, fashion, design and popular fiction and other forms that have mass appeal. It is this meaning of culture that economists usually have in mind when they talk about the cultural industries.

The term “culture” is also used in a more general social sense to mean a community’s overall way of life; its patterns of work and recreation, morality, intellectual practices, aesthetics, beliefs, economic production, political power and responsibility. It’s this broader social definition of culture that I have in mind here: the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social communities. I argued in Chapter 5 that human intelligence is diverse, dynamic and distinct. So too are the cultures we create.

A MATTER OF TIME

I said in Chapter 5 that our physical senses affect what we can perceive of the world but there are other factors that influence what we do perceive. Many of these factors are cultural. Different cultures perceive the world in radically different ways. Some cultural differences are obvious, such as the languages people speak, the clothes they wear, the food they eat and the sorts of dwellings they inhabit. Other differences are harder to detect because they are embedded in basic ways of thinking. One example is cultural variations in the sense of time.

In 2001, my family and I moved from Stratford-upon-Avon in England to live in Los Angeles, California. In Europe, a century is not a long time; in Los Angeles it is. Our home in Stratford-upon-Avon was built in 1870 and was one of the newer properties in the area. It was too soon to know if the neighborhood would really catch on. Our house in Los Angeles was built in 1937. In LA terms it is a heritage property. Europeans don’t think that ten years is a long time. Americans do and use the word “decade” a lot: I think to convey a sense of instant tradition. Just after we relocated to LA, I was driving on the freeway listening to the radio and heard a commercial for a local car dealership. I missed the name of the company but caught the slogan: it was, “Proudly serving Los Angeles for almost half a decade.”

By way of contrast, in Asia, a millennium is not a big deal. On my first visit to Beijing, I had dinner, perhaps unsurprisingly, in a Chinese restaurant. It was a memorable meal. As a starter I chose “black chicken soup.” I’d assumed that “black” was a figurative term that referred to the style of cooking, rather than the condition of the chicken. I was wrong. The pieces of chicken were black all through; a color in meat that I usually associate with putrefaction. I was not wrong about that. For my entrée, and to the warm approval of the waiter, I chose a steamed garoupa fish. He took the order to the kitchen and came back a few moments later with a bamboo basket. Inside was the fish in question, alive and flopping around with a look of panic in its eyes. I knew if I approved, I’d be passing a death sentence. I know that animals do need to die if we are to eat them and that being squeamish like this is a feeble hypocrisy. Some cultures, including China, do not indulge in these ambiguities. Even so, I’m not used to meeting my entrée. I nodded weakly and 15 minutes later the fish was back in front of me: steamed, garnished and reproachful. To delay eating it, I said to the waiter how much I like Chinese food. I do, particularly if I’ve not been socializing with it beforehand. He thanked me but said that this was not really a Chinese dish. The Mongols, he said, had introduced this method of cooking fish into China 900 years ago. That’s barely a millennium. In Asian terms, this could be a fad.

Cultural differences in the sense of time affect how people live their lives and their political outlook too. In 1972, President Richard Nixon was preparing for his historic visit to China. Evidently, his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, told him that the Chinese Premier and Foreign Minister, Chou En-Lai, was a student of French history. During his trip, Nixon asked Chou what he thought had been the impact of the French Revolution in 1789 on Western civilization. Chou En-Lai thought for a few moments and then said to Nixon, “It’s too soon to tell.” To an American President concerned about the next day’s headlines, this panoramic sense of cause and effect could hardly be more different.

Human cultures are shaped by many factors, including geography, patterns of population, access to natural resources and technology; and by political events, wars, invasions and conquests. They all interact with the ideas and values that communities evolve over time to make sense of their lives. All cultures consist of multiple elements within themselves: systems of government, of justice, education, social class, occupations, economic production and the arts. Complex cultures house innumerable subsets and countercultural groups that hold alternative sensibilities within the dominant culture. Like intelligence, cultures are not only diverse: they are dynamic.

“Human cultures are complex and diverse because human intelligence is, in itself, both rich and creative; like intelligence, cultures are not only diverse: they are dynamic.”

DYNAMIC CULTURES

Culture, in the biological sense, implies growth and transformation. This is true of social cultures. The rate of change varies enormously in different cultures and at different times. In our own lifetime we are seeing exponential changes within many cultural communities across the earth, as culture becomes ever more globalized and connected.

Just as individual intelligence is dynamic and interactive, so too is cultural change. There are “hot spots” for certain brain functions: for language, recognition of faces and so on. In any activity, many different areas of the brain work in concert with each other. The same is true of the social culture. We can talk separately about technology, the economy, legal systems, ethics and work, but a culture can only be properly understood in terms of how all of these elements interrelate with each other.¹ One example is the interaction of the arts with technology.

Theory and ideology

A third example is the interactions of theory and ideology. I talked in Chapter 4 about the power of generative ideas. Common sense suggests that old theories are replaced as soon as better, new ones come along, which make more sense of the evidence. This is not always what happens. In practice, theories can be as subject to fashion as the length of skirts or the cut of lapels. A good deal of theory stays in relative oblivion. Throughout the world there are scientists, artists and philosophers producing new ideas of every sort. Yet certain ideas can suddenly capture the popular imagination. How do some rise to dominate the others? It’s not always because they are better thought out. Other factors are at work.

Theories are taken up not just because they are available but also because they meet a need. Intelligence testing has held the attention of politicians and many educators against all comers from the 1900s to the present day despite the many conceptual and methodological flaws and the high social costs of these systems. Naturalist theories of education were influential in the 1950s and 1960s, not only because they were consistent with the facts of education as they then appeared, but because they expressed a mood among a generation of teachers.

“Theories are taken up not just because they are available but also because they meet a need.”

Theories are intended to be explanatory. They are often taken up for other reasons too, and not simply as consequence of progressive development of better ideas. The significance of theory is not only explanatory: it is ideological. In an important sense, theory is expressive. It is part, but only part, of the complex, organic web of human culture.

DISTINCT DIFFERENCES

Culture consists of ideas and beliefs that constitute what philosophers call “Weltanschauung,” or worldview. Different worldviews give rise to different forms of behavior. You see examples of Weltanschauung in the discrete worlds that are portrayed in novels, films and theater. Within each play and every genre, only certain sorts of behavior make sense: the same behaviors in another context might be incomprehensible. The playwright, Nicholas Wright, argues that the job of the writer, director and actors is to define the world that the play inhabits and within which the action is plausible. In Middleton and Rowley’s Jacobean tragedy The Changeling, for example, the only alternative that the heroine Beatrice Joanna sees to marrying her unwelcome suitor is to murder him: “Today young women would see other possibilities. But these possibilities don’t have a place in a production of the play. It’s the job of the director to present a social world where no other choice is open to her, and it’s the job of the actress to present a woman who can’t imagine one.”⁴

Cultures are systems of permission. They have their own codes of behavior, forms of language, dress and observance. Rewards come for some forms of behavior and sanctions for others. Permission can be formal – enshrined in laws and enforced by judicial punishment; it may be informal – embedded in social attitudes and reinforced in tones of voice and body language. Breaking the conventions of the group can take courage and carry the risk of exclusion. If we look at the codes and conventions of other communities, especially those that are distant from us in place or time, we can easily see how different they are; it is more difficult to grasp how it must feel to be part of them. What strikes us when reading novels and plays written in other times is not only the different circumstances in which people lived but how they saw things, what mattered to them and why they felt as they did. Factual accounts of other cultures cannot capture these nuances. To do that, you must listen to their music, eat their food, absorb the imagery, hear their poetry and move with their dances. They are all manifestations of the sensibilities that make different cultures what they are.

Many people now live within interweaving cultural communities. Adult immigrants to a new country or region often find themselves culturally adrift. The lives of their children often become bicultural or multicultural. They may come to speak two or more languages: one at school or work, another at home. They need to shift their cultural sensibilities as they move between these groups and their different codes and customs.

The socialization of the young arises partly from the need in society “to reach a basis of stable expectation from today. That stability depends upon the same expectations being constantly realized despite changes in personnel.” This is not to say that these conventions do not evolve. They do, especially from one generation to another. Although each generation tries to pass on its cultural genes to the next, the new generation may develop its own ways of doing things, in reaction to their parents and in response to the world they inherit: reproducing many aspects of the culture “yet feeling its whole life in certain ways differently and shaping its creative response into a new structure of feeling.”⁵

“Human cultures are constantly evolving through the thoughts, feelings and actions of the people who live in them.”

LIFE IS NOT LINEAR

Culture is an organic term that suggests growth and development. Human cultures evolve through the thoughts, feelings and actions of the people who live in them. Like the course of each individual life, the dynamics of cultural change are neither linear nor easy to predict. They are organic and complex: hard to understand in hindsight and almost impossible to anticipate in advance.

In the 1950s and 1960s, rock and roll swept through the Western world like a shock wave. It galvanized a generation of baby boomers and outraged the sensibilities of many of their parents. The stars of rock and roll drew from a huge variety of cultural sources: the blues, country and western, jazz and swing, traditional folk music and many forms of dance. It is impossible to imagine the trajectory of rock and roll being planned by a government committee. No one did or could have predicted the cultural influence of rock and roll. On the contrary, the policy makers who thought about it at all tried to ban it. The phenomenon caught fire as it did because it fed on a highly combustible mixture of creative energy and cultural rebellion. You might say that rock and roll succeeded because it challenged the dominant Weltanschauung and expressed a new Zeitgeist: a new philosophy and spirit of the times. Or words to that effect.

Interestingly, the surge in rock music in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s owed little, if anything, to formal music training. Some of the most notable rock and rollers had gone to college but not to music conservatoires; they went to art colleges. The pedagogic traditions in art schools provided an atmosphere of experimentation, personal creativity and hip culture that was lacking in the more formal atmospheres of the music schools. The art colleges provided an unexpected breeding ground for rock culture: an example of the non-linear nature of cultural trends.

A second example of non-linearity is the explosive growth of social media. When Bill Gates and Paul Allen were developing their fledgling company, Microsoft, in the 1970s; when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were building their alternative personal computer in the 1980s; when Tim Berners-Lee was wondering in Switzerland if he could connect the databases of computers into a world wide web; not one of them had in mind the phenomena they would facilitate in the early twenty-first century. Google, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and thousands of other forms of social media are now spreading virally throughout global culture. They are fueled by a primal human impulse to connect with each other and share ideas and information. The most sophisticated technologies only change the world when they connect with basic human instincts. When they do, their impact is unstoppable.

A third example is the fate of the phone. In the last decade or so, the cell phone has become the dominant platform for digital communications. Since the advent of the smartphone, millions of applications have converted it into a digital cornucopia. The musical, visual, and gaming capabilities of smartphones leave little time or inclination for phone calls. Young people prefer to text each other. Since the smartphone hit the market, there has been a precipitous drop in voice calls and a corresponding fall in the revenues of the phone companies who were so keen to encourage the sale of the phones in the first place. As with many cultural trends, it was unanticipated and largely impossible to predict.

THE WEB OF KNOWLEDGE

Cultural knowledge is a complex web, about which each of us knows only a relatively small amount. We can all claim to be relatively well informed or even expert in something. In most areas, we are amateur or plainly ignorant. We depend on the knowledge of other people for much of our understanding of the world and it comes in many forms: stories, anecdotes, theories, systems of belief and so on.

“Creativity is about making connections and is usually driven more by collaboration than by solo efforts.”

This was always the case, but the store of human knowledge is thought to be doubling every ten years and the rate of expansion is accelerating. One result is increasingly intense specialization: a tendency to know more and more about less and less. As knowledge expands, greater specialization is inevitable. The risk is that we lose sight of how ideas connect and can inform each other. The output of modern science is so fast, for example, that any individual can properly understand only small sections of it. Individual mathematicians can usually deal competently with only a small part of mathematics. It is a rare mathematician who fully understands more than half a dozen out of 50 papers presented to a mathematical congress. According to Michael Polanyi, the very language in which the others are presented “goes clear over the head of the person who follows the six reports nearest to their own specialty. Adding to this my own experience in chemistry and physics, it seems to me that the situation may be similar for all major scientific provinces, so that any single scientist may be competent to judge at first-hand only about a hundredth of the total current output of science.”⁶

Creativity is about making connections and, more often than not, as we will see in the next chapter, it is driven by collaboration as much as by solo efforts. Organizations that enforce strict boundaries between specialisms can inhibit innovation. The division of arts and sciences in education is a case in point. Artists and scientists can collaborate and discover common ground. Two examples are new methods in the social sciences and innovative schemes linking the arts and the natural sciences.

THE POWER OF IDEAS

As Victor Hugo said, “nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come,” and there is a powerful relationship between theory and popular culture. Most people do not have much time for theory, yet their lives are permeated by it. Ideas that originate in the laboratories of scientists, the studies of philosophers and the studios of artists can seep deep into the culture without our realizing it.⁹ Contemporary language is peppered with the jargon of psychology, for example. Bar room conversations refer to ego, sex drives, the Oedipus complex and other Freudian ideas as if these were simple facts of life rather than nineteenth-century theoretical propositions. Mothers bring up their babies according to the fads and fashions of developmental theories: breast-feeding or not, playing with them or not, stimulating them with music or pictures, depending on the seepage rate of theory into culture. Sometimes, the trickle becomes a torrent.

In the 1960s, a disparate group of women, including Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer, unleashed a tidal wave of change with a series of books on feminism. For very many people, not least men, feminism was a trauma. It tore at the foundations on which people had built their understanding of themselves, their families, their partners and their lives. It overturned cherished ideas about normal life: that men were the dominant sex; that a woman’s place was in the home; that sex was a male pleasure and a female duty; that men had great ideas and that women cared and wept. As generative ideas do, these coursed through every field of thought. They helped to recast the history of the arts and sciences, reframing the achievements of celebrated men and women and unearthing the work of others that history had obscured. Feminist ideas challenged the structure of working life that propelled men to the top and kept women at the fringes of corporate success; they affected attitudes to relationships in the community and at home.

Over the next 40 years, that wave of feminism followed the classic track of a great generative idea: initial exhilaration, followed by progressive refinement, to arcane debates about obscure points of interpretation. It gave way in the 1990s to a new phase of post-feminist thought in which some of the basic principles of the early writers were recast too. Along the way, the revolutionary ideas of the first wave had entered the mainstream of cultural thought. The word feminism itself, the need for equal rights and the concept of sexual harassment, are now part of the social and political lexicon. The battles are far from won, but the terms of engagement are much clearer.

New ideas are not always new, and rarely come out of the blue.¹⁰ In earlier times, others had expressed the core ideas of the feminist movement of the 1960s. From the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft in the eighteenth century, through the sacrifices of the suffragettes in the early twentieth, many had shaped the feminist perspective long before it galvanized the 1960s. The work of many women has been lost in the canons of the dominant male culture they set out to criticize. Feminist ideas took hold when they did because of the sensibilities and conditions of the time. They emerged from these conditions and helped to shape them. Feminism developed hand in hand with technological advance. Sexual liberty is a more practical principle when cheap and effective forms of contraception put women in charge of their own fertility. Previously, the advancement of women was held in check by the uncertainties of pregnancy and motherhood. But feminism was part, too, of the general politics of liberation of the 1960s and 1970s and interacted with the civil rights movement in Europe and the United States, with anti-authoritarianism everywhere, the need for self-determination and the emergence of the “me” generation. In presenting a powerful intellectual analysis, feminist theorists helped to articulate a new structure of feeling. What are the implications of 1960s feminism for civilization? Like the French Revolution, it is too soon to say.

A CULTURE OF CREATIVITY?

Culture is the efflorescence of creativity. Creative thinking thrives best in certain cultural conditions. What does this all mean for leading a culture of creativity in communities and organizations, including schools and businesses? What should leaders do to cultivate innovation? There is no single strategy or template, mainly because all creative cultures are unique; but there are principles that apply to the most effective creative organizations. The next chapter looks at the practical implications of the arguments I have presented throughout Out of Our Minds and identifies nine principles on which to develop a culture of creativity.