Given how a lot we obsess over it, the idea of creativity can really feel like one thing that has all the time existed, a factor philosophers and artists have contemplated and debated all through the ages. Whereas it’s an affordable assumption, it’s one which seems to be very improper. As Samuel Franklin explains in his latest ebook, The Cult of Creativity, the primary recognized written use of creativity didn’t truly happen till 1875, “making it an toddler so far as phrases go.” What’s extra, he writes, earlier than about 1950, “there have been roughly zero articles, books, essays, treatises, odes, lessons, encyclopedia entries, or something of the kind dealing explicitly with the topic of ‘creativity.’”
This raises some apparent questions. How precisely did we go from by no means speaking about creativity to all the time speaking about it? What, if something, distinguishes creativity from different, older phrases, like ingenuity, cleverness, creativeness, and artistry? Possibly most vital: How did everybody from kindergarten lecturers to mayors, CEOs, designers, engineers, activists, and ravenous artists come to consider that creativity isn’t simply good—personally, socially, economically—however the reply to all life’s issues?
Fortunately, Franklin affords some potential solutions in his ebook. A historian and design researcher on the Delft College of Expertise within the Netherlands, he argues that the idea of creativity as we now realize it emerged through the publish–World Conflict II period in America as a sort of cultural salve—a technique to ease the tensions and anxieties brought on by rising conformity, paperwork, and suburbanization.
“Sometimes outlined as a sort of trait or course of vaguely related to artists and geniuses however theoretically possessed by anybody and relevant to any discipline, [creativity] supplied a technique to unleash individualism inside order,” he writes, “and revive the spirit of the lone inventor throughout the maze of the fashionable company.”
INSTITUTE OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY/THE MONACELLI PRESS
I spoke to Franklin about why we proceed to be so fascinated by creativity, how Silicon Valley grew to become the supposed epicenter of it, and what position, if any, applied sciences like AI may need in reshaping our relationship with it.
I’m curious what your private relationship to creativity was rising up. What made you need to write a ebook about it?
Like quite a lot of children, I grew up considering that creativity was this inherently good factor. For me—and I think about for lots of different individuals who, like me, weren’t significantly athletic or good at math and science—being inventive meant you at the very least had some future on this world, even when it wasn’t clear what that future would entail. By the point I obtained into school and past, the standard knowledge among the many TED Discuss register of thinkers—folks like Daniel Pink and Richard Florida—was that creativity was truly probably the most vital trait to have for the long run. Principally, the inventive folks have been going to inherit the Earth, and society desperately wanted them if we have been going to resolve all of those compounding issues on the planet.
On the one hand, as somebody who preferred to think about himself as inventive, it was onerous to not be flattered by this. Then again, all of it appeared overhyped to me. What was being offered because the triumph of the inventive class wasn’t truly leading to a extra inclusive or inventive world order. What’s extra, a few of the values embedded in what I name the cult of creativity appeared more and more problematic—particularly, the give attention to self-realization, doing what you’re keen on, and following your ardour. Don’t get me improper—it’s an attractive imaginative and prescient, and I noticed it work out for some folks. However I additionally began to really feel prefer it was only a cowl for what was, economically talking, a reasonably unhealthy flip of occasions for many individuals.
