"They reported that, on tests, creative people preferred abstract art and asymmetrical images. ... [T]hose preferences also happened to match up with the tastes of the mid-century educated classes. To put it a little more cynically, the tests seem to have been designed so that the right people passed them.... [In '
The Cult of Creativity,' Samuel W.] Franklin argues that the appeal of workplace creativity was that it addressed two anxieties about modern life: conformity and alienation. Postwar intellectuals worried about the 'organization man' (the title of a book by the journalist William Whyte) and the 'other-directed' personality (diagnosed in the sociologist David Riesman’s 'The Lonely Crowd'). These were seen as socially dangerous types. People who did what they were told and who wanted to be like everyone else, who were not 'inner-directed,' were people easily recruited to authoritarian movements...."
You might wonder how Menard argues his way to the notion that "now we're stuck with" individualism and nonconformity. I can't quote the whole article, but it has to do with capitalism capitalizing on the concept of creativity. As Franklin puts it: "The concept of creativity never actually existed outside of capitalism."
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“The concept of creativity never actually existed outside of capitalism."
I find that hard to swallow. Did they just call it something else, like “inspiration?” And when exactly did capitalism start?
'The lonely crowd' has always been dangerous to the establishment at all places and at all times. Whether as a result of asking too many questions, or a secret need to enlist society's assistance for their survival without tripping any alarms as to dangers posed.
It's one of the things they look at when they do a TS security clearance. It's also difficult to ascertain based on the intelligence of the examinee. But friendship and the quality of those friendships is a difficult thing to fake. Always has been.
As Franklin puts it: "The concept of creativity never actually existed outside of capitalism."
Stunningly apt ending. I’ll take it a step further. Socialism can’t exist outside of capitalism, and China’s experiment proves it.
As Franklin puts it: "The concept of creativity never actually existed outside of capitalism."
Hmmm. One has to distort the notion of "creativity" and "capitalism" to make that case, particularly if one is using the 19th-20th century Marxist critique of contemporary Capitalism.
Take a look at the ancient Minoans, the bare-breasted snake handlers in colorful patchwork outfits 4,000 years ago:
https://www.elissos.com/fashion-in-minoan-crete/
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/89/05/22/8905229f11ef3e12fb82e7878afec163.jpg
What about the ancient Indians, Egyptians, Chinese, etc.?
https://livesinasia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/sculptures.jpg
https://i.etsystatic.com/8729767/r/il/a47f1b/1689720080/il_fullxfull.1689720080_2gza.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/31/aa/9e/31aa9e93cfafda008cc823c406dc1ab7.jpg
Everyone must live in a real world with real food and houses and clothes. Everyone must make decisions about what to wear and how to build your house. Your choices will be different than the culture next door, and this greatly predates Capitalism as a formal concept.
Marxists have a only one intellectual tool -- a hammer fixated on early Capitalism -- so they see a world full of nails.
"The concept of creativity never actually existed outside of capitalism."
Even if that is true, which I very much doubt, so what? Also, the premise that capitalism is a recent historical development is ahistorical. Those amphora found in shipwrecks all over the Mediterranean and the copper and tin trade routes didn't result from socialism.
CCT?
In David Mamet's "The Secret Knowledge" he describes how he converted from a progressive to a conservative. Part of this reasoning was that he got due to capitalism. Because of copyright law and our very sophisticated capitalistic system, he was able to convert his creativity into money. In a communist or socialist society, that doesn't happen. Also, until recently, the USA was the home of Free Speech. Many of Mamet's plays and movie never would have been produced in a socialist or communist country.
When was the last time a Russian or Chinese movie broke through to the US?
I watched some of India's "RRR." One good dance scene. The rest was unwatchable. And way too long.
Another Perception problem. Creativity is also in the mind of the beholder.
Sounds to me like the eternal tug of war between the Free Will pushers afraid of any Authority, and the chosen and selected characters predestined for being in authority over us. The American Experience demands the free will analysis to perceive reality. The European Empires Experience demands the Roman Empire’s authority rule over us.
And by the way, the Globalist Europeans want their North America real estate back. Which is why confiscating American’s military style rifles is always goal#1. The entire American Revolution was about that issue. And it’s back.
From the article;
"People who did what they were told and who wanted to be like everyone else, who were not 'inner-directed,' were people easily recruited to authoritarian movements...."
And yet, the hippies of the Sixties and the freethinkers of successive generations have morphed into the totalitarian scolds of the present. Hmm.
He's disparaging creativity because it disappeared at the New Yorker.
Bring back "The Mysterious East" column fillers.
"The concept of creativity never actually existed outside of capitalism."
Our ruling class is trying to do the same thing ruling classes have done throughout history, to freeze the hierarchy in place for the exclusive benefit of themselves, their cronies, and their descendants. Nobody in power wants the populace to start getting ideas: "Do what you're told, and when we decide to fight a war, you be sure to drag your sons by the ear down to the recruiting station."
Capitalism isn't really an "ism" It is simply the way that free individuals behave when left to their own devices. Creativity has existed all the way back to prehistory if you consider cave paintings to be creative. How about fashioning novel new weapons? I'd also call that creative. My god there is so much gussied up nonsense written as though it was clever and thoughtful when it is really just blather. See also, the article about 19th century drug use...
"The concept of creativity never actually existed outside of capitalism."
Does he explain what he means by this? Superficially, it's obviously not true. Creativity pre-dates civilization. Pre-dates commerce. Hints of it exist in other animals so it likely pre-dates modern humans.
But, of course, he does not say creativity never existed outside of capitalism, he says the concept never existed. What does he mean and what is his evidence?
Political psychology, or the psychology of political attitudes, is a zombie science littered with concepts from long ago that go unchallenged in academia. The pure types developed in the early and middle 20th century don't fit the complexities of today's political environment, but they aren't questioned and don't go away. The old concepts may be too flattering to liberal or progressive academics to be examined and debated.
Perhaps the same thing is true of other branches of psychology, like personality and social psychology. There don't seem to be any really innovative or "creative" thinkers in psychology nowadays -- or they are all in the harder branches of neuroscience, which have left other, less rigorous branches behind.
I have written four books on creativity of which the best known is "A Whack on the Side of the Head."
Here is my long ago rendezvous with Karl Marx:
When I was a college student, I went to Karl Marx’s tomb in Highgate Cemetery in London a few months after I had read his Communist Manifesto. This work stirred up all kinds of ideas in my head — many of them irreverent and offbeat.
As a lark, I decided to climb up on the eight foot high block of marble to pose for a photo next to Marx’s giant sculpted head. Just as I did so, in came a cadre of uniformed Chinese Red Guards (a student paramilitary group formed during China’s Cultural Revolution).
We had quite different motivations: they were there to pay homage, and I was engaged in a bit of irreverent fun — “praxis with a smile” as Marx might have put it. I got my photo taken, smiled at the scowling Red Guard members, did a playful jig, hopped down, and moved on.
So back in the 15th century Leonardo da Vinci was not creative? I’m surprised, to say the least.
If Menard were right, wouldn't that be yet another reason to like capitalism?
Remember when the "Eisenhower '50s" were seen as the quicksand of stultifying conformity? Now we're stuck with the NYer and the NYT arguing for censorship, with them as the gatekeepers (duh).
Historically, "innovation" led to starvation and death, when farmers or others decided to be creative and try something different.
In some sense, 'creativity' is allowed to flourish only when there is a surplus of capacity to allow it to develop. So in that sense, yes, capitalism or more accurately the free-ish market, created the surplus to create the atmosphere to allow creativity without consequences.
I read the article. It seemed a bit fuzzy and buzzy to me. I don't think any of us understand the culture we inhabit but there's an irresistible urge to figure out the hidden and true meaning of all this crap that we pass through. Menand's observations don't seem any more valid than those of Rollo May or William Whyte....Freud and Marx offered convincing explanations of what it all meant. I would, however, put their works in the creative fiction category than the creative non-fiction. They took more liberties with the basic facts than Shakespeare took with Holinsheld's Chronicles.
Yesterday we were told parents didn’t fret about their kids until Anita Bryant came along in 1977. Today we’re told creativity didn’t exist until American capitalism invented the concept, which means Bernini and Caravaggio must have been Yankee time travelers to an earlier age.
Alternate explanation: American journalists are increasingly dopey.
Gauss on reviewing and accepting Riemann's dissertation, “a gloriously fertile imagination.” Sounds like creativity to me, although "fertile" and "imagination" are probably better words for the phenomenon.
"The concept of creativity never actually existed outside of capitalism."
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
Sorry. Someone had to.
"And yet, the hippies of the Sixties and the freethinkers of successive generations have morphed into the totalitarian scolds of the present. Hmm."
They were never inner-directed, and that movement was never organic. Sexual politics and telling your mom and dad to fuck off makes people special the way being a liquor-store robber with a 'born to lose' tattoo on your chest makes them special. Being aberrant is the creativity of the unsophisticated...it's the reason tattoos are scuzzy.
"People who did what they were told and who wanted to be like everyone else, who were not 'inner-directed,' were people easily recruited to authoritarian movements...."
Yes, like the Germans of the pre-WWI Youth Movement who went on to be devoted slaves of Hitler then Stalin. Oh, wait, they were also the creative types, just bereft of original ideas and easily recruited. (See Mises 'Bureaucracy' (1945))
2. THE FATE OF THE RISING GENERATION WITHIN A BUREAUCRATIC ENVIRONMENT
The youth movement was an impotent and abortive revolt of youth against the menace of bureaucratization. It was doomed because it did not attack the seed of the evil, the trend toward socialization. It was in fact nothing but a confused expression of uneasiness, without any clear ideas and definite plans. The revolting adolescents were so completely under the spell of socialist ideas that they simply did not know what they wanted.
It is evident that youth is the first victim of the trend toward bureaucratization. The young men are deprived of any opportunity to shape their own fate. For them there is no chance left. They are in fact "lost generations" for they lack the most precious right of every rising generation, the right to contribute something new to the old inventory of civilization. The slogan: Mankind has reached the stage of maturity, is their undoing. What are young people to whom nothing is left to change and to improve? Whose only prospect is to start at the lowest rung of the bureaucratic ladder and to climb slowly in strict observance of the rules formulated by older superiors? Seen from their viewpoint bureaucratization means subjection of the young to the domination of the old. This amounts to a return to a sort of caste system.
von Mises, Ludwig (1945). Bureaucracy
As for capitalism being aligned with creativity, well, you need to be able to deviate from the majority.
All mankind’s progress has been achieved as a result of the initiative of a small minority that began to deviate from the ideas and customs of the majority until their example finally moved the others to accept the innovation themselves. To give the majority the right to dictate to the minority what it is to think, to read, and to do is to put a stop to progress once and for all.
Mises, Ludwig von (1927). Liberalism
A more significant example was when the Case of the Monopolies created patents and that permitted those in the workshops of England to create the Industrial Revolution despite the technophobic universities of Oxford and Cambridge that controlled the "official" opinion.
My experience with family members with bipolar disorder makes me believe that creativity is highly related to mania. Brain regulation is supressed and neurons trigger barely related pathways. Sometimes, there’s a true undiscovered connection but often it’s just noise. We call it creativity when the spurious connections are filtered out and mania when they aren’t. Kanye West is a perfect example in my opinion. His strokes of genius are also combined with stuff that’s just off the wall.
""The concept of creativity never actually existed outside of capitalism."
The Muses would beg to differ. Gracefully, of course.
Franklin does not say creativity does not exist without capitalism. He says the concept never actually existed outside capitalism.
I think he is doing the usual, boring thing where one says that an organic, wonderful bit of culture gets noticed, labeled, and marketed by capitalism. And now it's ruined. Appropriated, if you will.
Because capitalism spoils everything it touches. The World is so much better off, overall, if authentic culture is only available to the elites, who alone have the time, wherewithal, and mind, to really appreciate it.
(This, by the way, is the anti-thesis of the wonderful french movie "Delicious". 4.5 stars, would watch again.)
Frank Zappa swam against the current his whole life and in no way could be called a conservative, but he was absolutely and unapologetically a capitalist. Socialism is stupidly naive.
White hole or back... black hole... whore h/t NAACP? Creative or consumptive destruction?
Bullshit!
Communist and Socialist countries require enormous amounts of creativity to simply survive.
Today's conformity within the "creative class" is causing some dissonance it seems.
The concept of creativity never actually existed outside of capitalism.
Too unequal to be allowed.
Blogger rhhardin said...
He's disparaging creativity because it disappeared at the New Yorker.
And "Equity" will finish off the last remnants of creativity.
"Workplace creativity" is the phrase used in the excerpt (which is all I will read). In the narrow sense of creativity as a concern for psychologists--an uncreative parasitical set of lunks, most of them IMHO--there may be something to the thesis.
As a broad historical statement, it is rubbish pur et dur.
Capitalism is not a system imposed by a government - it is a description of how wealth is created. Socialism is a religion that believes that man can be perfected by propaganda to become part of a social organism that is totally fair. Pie in the sky before you die.
Meant to say "propaganda and coercion"
I'll just wait until AI tells me what creativity is and when it started.
"When was the last time a Russian or Chinese movie broke through to the US?"
It's wild to think that this was made in Cuba under the Soviet film system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=646Rcnb9ujs
Not a breakthrough, but quite a creative feat given how Soviet art worked at the time.
Wait ... the Whack Pack guy comments here?
"So back in the 15th century Leonardo da Vinci was not creative? I’m surprised, to say the least."
Was patronage capitalism? Hmmm.
I like the idea that noone talked about creativity until fairly recently. Possibly artists used to see themselves connecting with, reflecting upon, something outside themselves, something bigger. Maybe gods of some kind, maybe an empire, maybe nature and beauty. By comparison creativity seems to come from inside the artist, maybe something you're born with, maybe something like "will" that you have to have guts to exercise. It is my vision and noone else's. Maybe Nietzsche would say now that we know about will, we can re-interpret past acts of creativity as acts of will.
Does show business require creativity to be successful? Being aware of what's already been done, pushing the envelope, trying something different, (another cliche) thinking outside the box? The movie within a movie, constantly being pitched in "The Player": it's important that the male and female leads be played by completely obscure actors, never heard of before. Whispered conversation: Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts.
P.T. Barnum before movies? Many kinds of shows including "freaks" and wild animals, music (Tom Thumb could really sing), curiosities, finally Jumbo the Elephant? Advertising in the 50s and 60s? We don't want straight-laced guys, we want guys who are a bit wild. Cocktails, sexual harassment, a lot of laughter. The dotcom companies became famous for childlike, disordered workplaces with lots of play. Was this for creativity? Relief from the monotony of submitting to digital tools?
When the English watched "Punch and Judy" shows for many centuries, was the goal to make is as much as possible the same as ever, or to add innovations? Did innovations come more or less inadvertently?
People who did what they were told and who wanted to be like everyone else, who were not 'inner-directed,' were people easily recruited to authoritarian movements...
Ah, you mean like girls who are being "social contagioned" into being "non-binary" or "trans"?
The trans movement, with its assault on TERFs like Rowling, is clearly an authoritarian movement
News flash, all those sad losers who "preferred abstract art and asymmetrical images" are "doing what they're told" by the "creative class", which is just as mind-numbing and thought destroying as the 1950s corporations ever were.
News flash: you can't test for originality or creativity on a multiple choice test
And being "different from 'everyone else'" isn't always, or even often, a feature". See rapists, murderers, Nazis
I suppose what he means is creativity as a concept and a cultural value. An artist or writer might have been trying to make something. An administrator or a fortress or machine builder might be trying to solve a problem. But in their day, they wouldn't primarily have been thought of as "creative," just as effective.
But when did "capitalism" begin? It certainly must have been going when the Romantics were around, for what did they celebrate but the creative imagination? But maybe capitalism and the idea of creativity go back further than that. Back to the Enlightenment, the Baroque, the Renaissance. If Bach or Shakespeare were valued at all, wouldn't it have been for their great inventiveness, or in other words, their creativity? But maybe they weren't truly valued until the Romantics rediscovered them.
Mention of David Reisman takes us back to Nietzsche and forward to Allan Bloom. If I remember correctly, Reisman's dream was that we would move beyond tradition directedness, inner directedness, and other directedness and become truly autonomous and create our own values for ourselves. But how many people can actually to do that? And is it really a good thing?
From the book blurb:
Creativity is one of American society’s signature values. Schools claim to foster it, businesses say they thrive on it, and countless cities say it’s what makes them unique. But the idea that there is such a thing as “creativity”—and that it can be cultivated—is surprisingly recent, entering our everyday speech in the 1950s.
Yes. If you've ever worked for a large organizaiton (private or public) you will be constantly encouraged to "think outside the box", "be creative", "work smarter - not harder". Its all in sevice of the organization becoming more efficient or profitable.
The sad truth is that the vast majority people want to be "creative" but aren't. they come up with "new ideas", but they're just "new" Not "good". Its also created the "cult of the new" in the arts. And when art becomes "old" - it gets forgotten because "new" doesn't last, only "good" lasts.
Btw, i saw "Franklin" and I took that to mean Ben Franklin. LOL. But then Franklin never used the word "Capitalism".
rcocean said...
The sad truth is that the vast majority people want to be "creative" but aren't. they come up with "new ideas", but they're just "new" Not "good". Its also created the "cult of the new" in the arts. And when art becomes "old" - it gets forgotten because "new" doesn't last, only "good" lasts.
Correct.
The worst people in the world are the "creative" types who have to always pee on things to get their own scent on it.
One place where this is continually obvious is when a book is brought to threaten / movies / TV, and the people doing it make changes for no other reason than they want to be "different" or "new" or "original", and end up with scenes / dialog / etc that are far worse than what was in the original book.
Change for the sake of change is the domain of losers
psychiatric dysphoria: divergence, tolerance, creativity unbounded.
"The concept of creativity never actually existed outside of capitalism."
What an absolutely incorrect thing to say. The single most important thing that led to mankind developing and maintaining civilization is creativity. I cannot believe that there were countless examples in human history when someone did something creative and other people never recognized that as creativity before Capitalism.
Plus, why is the author linking the creative process to Capitalism in the first place? Apples and oranges.
Corporations are like colleges. They say they want creative disrupters who think outside the box, but they really don't.
Things we owe to creativity: the idea of chipping flakes off suitable types of stones, making sharp tools that could help kill game animals; figuring out how to control fire; using that fire not just to keep warm but to cook food; domesticating dogs; planting grain; houses; cities; domesticating cattle and other animals; clothing; textiles; boats; fish hooks; laws; alphabets … do I need to go on?
Once upon a time even capitalism was an invention. A damned good one.
"Plus, why is the author linking the creative process to Capitalism in the first place? Apples and oranges."
Capitalism allows more people to consume,(buy) art.
Capitalism gives more artists the time to do their art.
Art is hard work.
Modern times are awash in ad agencies, all of which contain Creative Departments - an endearingly optimistic nomenclature.
"The concept of creativity never actually existed outside of capitalism."
well, the The New Yorker doesn't exist outside of the pay wall
damn if I can read it!
oh wait, you can illegally immigrate over pay walls with a 12-foot ladder
that's handy!
and creative
not very capitalistic though
that's some Robin Hood theft of a New Yorker book review
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