A Brief and Romantic Account of our Relationship with Creativity throughout History
A prelude to Habitual Creative Acts - Good for You, Good for Society...
How can we accomplish our best work and discover our greatest strengths and genius along the way? This is something I’m sure we’d all love to know the answer to.
Before we dive in, why not press play for some musical accompaniment…
There is perhaps a commonly held belief that Creativity, with a capital C, has been a part of human history since the dawn of time. Since the days of cavemen, people have encountered problems as they go about their day and have then tried to create tools or new ways of doing things that would hopefully lessen these problems or remove them all together. This type of thinking is highly creative since it requires bringing an idea to life that never existed before, and in the modern age there is nothing particularly revelatory about this statement.
The evidence that this line of thinking is true is all around us, it is how the world as we know it today came into being, one idea at a time. However, it is also a notion that is easy to romanticize:
“Since the dawn of time, we’ve been solving problems with technology to rid ourselves of robotic and time-consuming labor work so we can pursue self-actualization and transcendence” - Dan Koe
In terms of how we think about creativity today I don’t disagree with this, but I do wonder if this has always been the driving factor behind creative innovation or if it is actually the other way around. We initially solved problems simply because it was necessary for survival, we needed to find ways to consistently find food and sleep safely, so we figured out how to do that and this slowly freed up more and more of our time for a new concept called “leisure.” (I mean, I’m technically still trying to find this one but I digress…)
As we were able to spend more and more of this leisure time on things not directly required for survival, we learned more about the world around us and ourselves - because what else was there to do - and soon this type of thinking became a past-time of its own. Surely the members of the group who were able to spend the most time on this kind of thinking, observing the world around them and how they responded to it, would appear to have tremendous and advanced insights about life compared to someone who was still running around all day chasing rabbits, quite literally stuck in survival mode.
So did we have a desire to spend more time in transcendent contemplation, then go about finding ways to build tools that help make this happen, or did we build things just because we thought it sounded like a good idea at the time, and then find ourselves with extra time on our hands and out of boredom we turned our computer brains to other thoughts?
So did we initially desire to spend more time in transcendent contemplation, leading us to create tools that helped make this happen? Or, did we construct things purely out of necessity, only to later, out of boredom with our newfound free time, direct our growing brains elsewhere?
I think presenting these ideas as opposites is not entirely correct - they are more like a self-perpetuating loop. We may have always made things, but the idea that Creativity is a key component of human thinking is a surprisingly recent belief.
Let’s explore… In Part 1 we’ll review the history of our relationship with Creativity as an idea and then, in Part 2, we’ll discuss how we can each harness this knowledge to improve our own lives.
The History of Creativity
First, I am in not implying that people didn’t do creative things throughout most of history. Though society may not have had a specific word for it until recently, creative endeavors have always existed, but human culture has not always placed the same value on these endeavors. Until the modern age, Art was not seen primarily as a vehicle for self-expression (though of course any artist will tell you it has always served that purpose indirectly) and was often highly intellectual and state influenced. Our comfort with Creative Acts, big and small, is a relationship that has influenced much of human progress.
For much of history, a criteria for Art to be “great” was that it had to look realistic - or, said differently, it had to resemble nature and it’s proportions. If it did not in some way reflect the perfection of the Natural World, this was a failure of the artist’s skill or knowledge, not a willful act of creativity. The idea of abstract or impressionistic artwork is a modern invention.
This also meant that Art was much less subjective, since a piece either did a good job representing what was intended or it did not. Through the Middle Ages, Art was highly symbolic and often used as a tool by the Church to imply natural order and a prosperous society, and absolutely not valued as the idiosyncratic ideas of an individual artist (though I’m sure those subconsciously slipped in nonetheless.)
Here I am using words like “Creativity” and “Art” interchangeably, and it is also worth noting that the modern concept of applying “creative thinking” to solve any problem is just that, extremely modern. The Greeks saw Art (τέχνη) as more of a technical skill or craft, something someone did according to a certain set of rules in order to achieve an expected outcome.
The idea was that Nature was clearly perfect and governed by a certain set of laws, so the better a person is at understanding these laws, the more able they will be at imitating them and creating the most “optimal” Art. A desire to “put your own spin on things” was essentially sacrilege, as it implied the artist thought they knew better than Nature, and if Nature was already perfect, why would anyone deviate from its guidelines?
"Will we say, of a painter, that he makes something?"
... "Certainly not, he merely imitates."
- The Republic, Book X, Section 595a-598e
The artist was at best a discoverer, never an inventor. To the Greeks, there was only one exception, the Poet, who at that time usually took the form of a wise bard who told stories of mythological history and accompanied it with music. Only the Poet brought new things into existence - all other arts specialized in imitation - and this was a role held with near divine reverence. Read any amount of Classical literature and you can see that the works of Homer are revered and discussed in much the same way the Bible would be 1000s of years later.
Here, the important distinction to note is the difference be
tween Creative Acts that bring forth something out of nothing vs. Creative Acts that are meant to represent something already observable in nature.
Things might’ve taken a step backwards with the rise of Christianity, as it became officially blasphemous to claim to be a “creator.” Creating - specifically out of nothing - was exclusively the domain of God. Human beings could “make” things but they could not Create. As the writer Cassiodorus put it in the 6th Century “things made and created differ, for we can make, who cannot create.”
Perhaps unbelievably to a modern audience, “Art” was specifically designated a non-creative activity1 - since it was just an attempt to make imitations of nature - and not even poetry was considered a creative act anymore. I wonder if there’s any connection between a historical epoch known as the Dark Ages and the fact that people were actively encouraged to NOT be creative at that time…
The word “creativity” would not be applied to human work until the 17th century, by the Polish poet and philosopher Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595–1640.) Here, though, it was again applied only to poetry, as Sarbiewski said “Other arts merely imitate and copy but do not create, because they assume the existence of the material from which they create.” Human creativity was a bit like a Frankenstein’s monster, merely an assembling of many pre-existing ideas and notions into some cobbled together “new” form.
The religious skepticism that grew out of the Renaissance played a large role in helping humans reclaim the concept of Creativity and facilitate the great 180 degree shift back to acknowledging that Art was indeed a conscious creative act. The shift did not happen overnight though and its only recently in the 20th century that we see the term “creativity” applied to any domain outside of the arts, like business and science. Some take J.P. Guilford’s address to the American Psychological Association in 1950 as the first scientific inquiry into the study of creativity, and charts like the one below give food for though. For a fantastic and far more comprehensive account of this line of thought I recommend Samuel W. Franklin’s great book The Cult of Creativity.
Whether this newfound appreciation for creativity was a conscious act though is hard to say, and in some ways this new line of thought could only be brought about by the changing needs of society. With the industrial revolution well underway, manufacturing at scale was no longer a pressing concern for economic prosperity and the business moguls of the age could turn their thoughts to wondering if “creativity” might hide some secret to further growth and profits.
It is valuable to note that this is where the more democratic notion of creativity first emerged as well - the idea that it was a trait everyone possessed, we just needed to access it. Additionally, the human psyche changed drastically in the aftermath of two World Wars and our driving concerns became more abstract and existential, far more complex than just survival and prosperity. A concept like creative thinking was ripe with potential to address these concerns.
As humanity fought to distinguish itself as something more than a machine of industrial labor, discussions arose around Creativity and Art being the mark of a more humane and civilized society, one developed to such a degree that it can now appreciate finer nuance.
“For an engineer or an advertising 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.” - Samuel W. Franklin
This more or less brings us up to today but I do need to include one more quote here from Mr. Franklin:
“These people hoped that automation and affluence would provide more opportunities for human flourishing, even a transcendence of traditional capitalist relations. Could we be headed, as Thomas Watson of IBM put it, for “a new age of Pericles,” our material needs met and our minds free to partake in higher artistic and intellectual pursuits? Or would it all lead to opulence and stagnation, dooming America, as the historian Arnold Toynbee had warned, to the fate of fallen civilizations past?”
I don’t think I’m crazy to say this EXACTLY echoes much of the discussion around AI today… The “Age of Pericles” reference is particularly apt, if perhaps inadvertently, as he too presided over a society that considered itself at the peak of human progress, and yet barely 30 years later it would cease to exist as Athens fell apart in the wake of the Peloponnesian War. (We’ll return to this AI comparison later as well…)
Now, personally, I do think it is a bit reductive to say the Ancient Greeks had no concept of “Creativity.” Rather, I think we should appreciate that the concept of Creativity took a long time to fully develop and come into focus in the human mind. The Greeks did have other words like μελέτη or εὑρετικός and of course ποίησις representing different facets of what we would now call “Creativity” and the historical record offers countless examples of things created in Antiquity that we would absolutely call Art in today’s world. Is it still Art if it’s creator didn’t think of it that way? Now there’s a good question… does DALL.E2 know that it’s creating Art?
We find ourselves at an interesting crossroads of history. We finally have the long-promised technology to alleviate many of the most tedious daily tasks and yet so far we seem obsessively focused on using that technology to make better Art than us, rather than utilizing it to, say, raise the global standard of living. At some point in the last 20-30 years we seem to have come to the agreement that “Creativity” is THE defining trait of humankind, and then we immediately tried to bestow it on machines.2 Fascinating…
But what does all this mean? Who cares and why should I?
Well, it is encouraging to see how far we’ve come, from “creating” being a blasphemous thing for humans to do during Medieval times to today, where “Creator” is an actual job title. We often take for granted what a privilege it is to live in a time and society that encourages us to create and has so many tools readily at our disposal to help bring any idea to life.
Crucially, we may have always created things, but our motivations were often more practical and utilitarian than the cry of “self-expression!” that has almost become a caricature of the modern artist. This shift in mindset, from Art being an attempt to recreate something outside of ourselves to Art being something that originates wholly from within ourselves, says a lot about how the modern psyche has developed as well. Again it can be hard to identify which development actually came first, sparking the other.
By necessity, we have always had to build things to help us survive and improve our quality of life, but the mindset we bring to this work significantly influences the paradigm we live in. For this reason, each of us constructively engaging with our creative potential can be a driving force behind, and an essential component of, a flourishing society.
So for once we have a buzzword that isn’t all hype, “Creativity” really is a magical elixir that can help us learn more about ourselves and even help improve the society we live in. It sounds too simple to be true but the collected efforts of many focused minds can have a tremendous effect on shifting cultural tides.
How? Well this introduction wasn’t meant to go on for so long so that’s why there’s a Part 2. Stay Tuned as next time we’ll explore fun questions like “why even make art?” if a computer can do it better and infinitely faster than us every time. Cheers! ✌️
And a reminder to check out this month’s song if you didn’t do so already. This one features a sampled Kithara so I thought it fitting for a reflection on ancient origins… If you really like it, you can also check it out on Bandcam here - Elysium’s Odyssey...
Any judicious reader should take a line like this with a grain of salt…
To clarify, I very much enjoy exploring the myriad of AI developments available to us today, this is not an anti-AI rant. However, like all highly developed tools, it can be used to elevate us or it can be used to help us stay stagnant and happy in our little caves. Show me an AI that will do my taxes for me and I’ll stop complaining that “making music FOR me” is being billed as a feature… human ingenuity deserves greater respect and purpose.