The Making of Culture
The author states that "the world would be a very different place without creativity." Specifically, it would not evolve. Men, like animals, would remain governed by primitive instincts and capable of nothing more.
A culture without creativity becomes stagnant. There is a devotion to tradition and a resistance to any new or different ways of doing things. The old ways, inefficient as they are, would be regarded as good enough to get the task done. And culture itself would become stagnant - with nothing new to offer in the way of ideas or artistic expression.
For human beings, evolution necessitates breaking "the thrall of tradition" to experiment with new ideas and, once they are successful, to champion them to the remainder of the culture. Cultural evolution is in that way a struggle, to overcome the culture into which we are born and make the culture for future generations.
Creativity and Survival
The author speaks of creativity as a survival skill. It is our mind that enables us to survive, and creativity is the mental equivalent of a physical mutation that enables us to change our behavior to adapt to many environments and the changes that take place. The brilliant success of the human species, over the past few centuries has nothing to do with physical adaptations.
We have very few threats to our continued survival. Most of our threats are of our own creation - overpopulation, warfare, pollution and the depletion of resources, and the like - and will be solved only be creativity. Even natural diseases are less likely to be solved by natural adaptation than innovation.
There's a bit of ranting about the "dark side" of our own inventions: steel and gunpowder have made warfare a more serious threat, nuclear power and industrial chemicals do great harm to the environment, agricultural science depletes the land, television stupefies the mind. Many of the things created to help humanity have the greatest potential to harm us, to render the world unfit for habitation.
A bit more ranting about the way in which making it easier to survive has left us with a bit too much spare time. In our boredom, we adopt religious and political ideologies that are self-destructive. The Mayans, Romans, Russians, and British all built great civilizations that crumbled in the decadence and ennui of people who had nothing better to do than destroy themselves.
He speaks to the America of today, which has become so spoiled that we are neglecting the necessities. Americans enjoy wealthy lives, but produce little in terms of physical goods - they are dependent on manufacturing operations overseas and, increasingly, import even engineers and technical workers. Should the American dollar collapse, these ties will be severed and the nation will lack the facilities and competence to produce for its own consumption.
Back on track: if one accepts the notion that creativity is necessary for human survival, it then follows that our well being hinges on the ability to generate and implement new creative ideas. In this sense, the academic institution has become a failure: it no longer serves to encourage new ideas, but to preserve traditional ways of thinking against new ideas.
It's also asserted that the commercial sector has also become destructive. The commercial sector has always been focused on profit rather than progress, and when progress threatens profit, then progress must be halted by any means necessary. As a result, the best products are not always made, and patents are abused to protect the commercial viability of less efficient or effective products by ensuring that discoveries that would make them better are not delivered to the market.
There is also the problem of consumer demand for cheap and convenient solutions that provide immediate satisfaction, without a broader concern. The electric automobile is a solution to one of the greatest causes of pollution - but it costs too much and is inconvenient to charge, so consumers continue using petroleum-powered machinery. Convenience food that is laden with additives and preservatives known to be harmful is still purchased in great quantities because people would rather not take the time and effort to cook.
And both the manufacturer and consumer are prone to remaining set in their habits until some crisis compels them to change. Given that today's technology is capable of creating crises on a major scale, the damage may be too great to correct once it has become severe enough to motivate change.
So what can be expected is not for western culture to reverse its course, but to continue until it has destroyed itself, and the cycle will begin again as one of the developing nations - perhaps Brazil or India - rises to become the new superpower for a time, until it too becomes weakened by its own decadence and falls to be replaced by yet another.
Making Creative Individuals
After having predicted self-distribution on a global scale, the author then suggests that it may be possible to alter this course by stimulating creativity rather than restricting it. In essence, it is innovation that got us into this mess, and it is innovation that can get us out of it.
Consider for example the industrial pollution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly when coal was the primary source of power: the air was choked with soot and industrial towns were perpetually caked in grime. The answer, Luddites would proclaim, would be to stop manufacturing - but this would deprive us of the greater good of access to mass-produced necessities. Instead, the answer was to innovate: to find cleaner and more efficient ways to use coal. Coal is still widely used as a fuel source for industry, but the negative side-effects have largely been eliminated.
The obvious answer is to have more creative individuals. To be precise, this is not more individuals who are creative, but to tap more of the creativity that already exists within individuals by decreasing the barriers to creativity. In the earlier chapters, the myth of the creative genius as a maverick or a genetic freak has been discounted: while there are some biological factors, creativity is more often dependent on the culture and environment that fosters rather than discourages creativity.
Creativity is fostered by giving an individual a grounding in the domain of knowledge while leaving them sufficient latitude to question the cannon and work in ways that extend the boundaries of knowledge. This includes both education and sponsorship - both in terms of providing the resources necessary to experiment and create as well as acting as a champion of new ideas rather than a guardian against them.
There is also the problem of a society that rewards experience without achievement. Those who succeed often quietly play by the rules, do not challenge authority, and act in other ways to conform to and defend the status quo. Those who play by the rules are rewarded and encouraged, even if they accomplish nothing significant. This reward system must change on every level of society.
We see these conditions prevailing in locations where great innovation has traditionally taken place: Florence during the Renaissance, England during the early industrial revolution, America during the technology race of the late twentieth century.
There follows a rather long passage about training, largely in academia. The problem with the current educational system is that it places too much emphasis on specialization rather than generalization, as well as prioritizing memorization over innovation. We are essentially training the youngest generation to limit their minds to a very narrow scope.
There's a brief mention of the manner in which a culture encourages academic achievement. Consider the racial stereotypes: that Jews and Asians are smart and Blacks are stupid. These stereotypes are not entirely external: within their cultural groups, Jews and Asians are encouraged and rewarded for applying themselves to academic pursuits, Blacks are not rewarded and often ridiculed or punished for taking an interest in their schoolwork.
Another rough transition to the means of evaluating talent in young people. For some fields like mathematics it is possible to measure talent through the use of standardized tests, and this has been successful in many cultures. But recognize as well that some of the most innovative individuals in any field often do not show a proclivity for it in youth, but instead drift into the field later in life, bringing with them the perspective of other life experience in different domains.
There is the criticism that creativity is impractical, and that young people are better served by learning skills by which they can make a living. Part of the reason that there have been virtually no innovations in the field of music is that there are very few jobs in that industry. Before recorded music was used in virtually all venues, there was ample work for musicians in society - every local community could support working-class musicians, so it became a large field. Today, performing live music is a hobby for the majority of practitioners, who cannot make a living in the field.
There is a brief mention of the manner in which supply and demand tend to herd people into fields in larger numbers than are required. The demand for businessmen led many more individuals to pursue an MBA than there would be jobs for people with that degree. And the romanticism of certain careers causes many to be misdirected: it is the dream of about 10% of teenaged boys to become professional athletes, many thousands of times the number that the sports industry hires each year.
There is also the notion that a creative person will somehow blossom on his own, without any support or encouragement. Consider that Einstein was working as a clerk in a patent office when he came up with his theory of relativity. No doubt other such cases exist, and no doubt they are extremely rare.
There's a bit of vacillation over monetary encouragement. A person needs to be able to make a living, and would generally prefer to make a living doing work that inspires him - but very few creative people have been motivated to create for the love of money. Most of them created for the love of knowledge or achievement, and money was the side-effect of success. Those who covet wealth are seldom very innovative about anything except the art of swindling.
Similarly, public acclaim is seldom attractive to innovative individuals, who tend to shun fame. Those who are interested in celebrity status are very often fakes whose ego far surpasses their capabilities - they wish to be recognized for great potential, even though they are incapable of producing great achievements.
As such, the author does not believe that the answer lies in encouraging individuals to be more creative - they are internally motivated, and all that is necessary is to adjust the culture and institutions that discourage and prevent them from pursuing their interests.
Contributions of the Domain
In general, creative contributions to a domain are affected by the size and behavior of the field: the more people, and the more latitude, then the greater the number of creative contributions. But in some instances, the domain itself (particularly the manner in which the information is encoded and accessed) can promote or dissuade creativity.
For example, knowledge in the western world had been for many centuries recorded in Latin, even when the language was no longer spoken and could only be learned in schools. Very few individuals had the means to study Latin, which meant that very few people were able to participate in the intellectual discourse of the time. And worse, most books were written by hand, meaning there were very few of them and those that existed were very precious, so limited access was available. And further, the religious intolerance of the time made holding ideas contrary to the church to be an offense punishable by execution.
There would have been no intellectual explosion in Europe, no Renaissance, were it not for the invention of the printing press and a shift to translating books into everyday language to make it both physically and mentally accessible to far more people. Neither would there have been an awakening if the church remained firmly in power.
Between fear of persecution and a desire to maintain power, many cultures limit access to information, keep the artifacts (books and sketches) secreted away, and encode knowledge in a manner that made it inaccessible even to those who were able to seize the artifacts. While this is often considered part of the dark ages of history, many of these attitudes persist even to the present day.
Consider the legal profession: lawyers speak their own language, commonly called "lawyerese", to keep the common man dependent on their services because he cannot comprehend the language in which the law is encoded. For most domains, graduate students are taught to write in awkward and cryptic prose rather than natural language.
The breadth and depth of knowledge are also high barriers to entering into any domain, though in most instances this is happenstance and incidental. Consider the college English department - one does not merely study English, but a very specific topic within that umbrella such as rhetoric or literature. Even those who specialize in literature will ultimately be shepherded into a very specific genre and time period. And even when you arrive at a very tightly defined subset of the domain, there are massive amounts to learn before it is possible to make a meaningful contribution.
An in the present day, the sheer proliferation of information is inhibitive - an overwhelming amount of information is digitally available via the Internet. Even if one ignores unreliable sources, a thorough search on a very specific topic will turn up enough material to keep a person busy reading for years.
The explosion of knowledge also means it's difficult to tell whom to give attention. Any old theory (in some cases just a few years old) may have been replaced by a better one. Any new theory is so untested that it might be a false trail.
There is also the matter of the organization of knowledge: before entering study in a domain, it's necessary to figure out how the domain is organized. There are various rules that govern the hierarchy of topics and subtopics - and as knowledge expands, there are even more divisions among them. Each field of study is highly idiosyncratic, and even within a field there are many competing theories of how the information should be organized.
In all, the universe of knowledge has become even more chaotic than the universe itself. It is often remarked that it's better just to ignore the books and strike out on one's own, following gut instinct and experimenting by trial and error. Not only would the canon take a very long time to read, but it often wears down the creative spirit: to know what has been considered theoretically impossible is to discount the chance that it is actually possible.
To be creative, one must first understand the domain - but when the domain itself has become cryptic and monolithic, it becomes impossible to learn, hence impossible to innovate except by accident. And when we look to academia, whose ostensible purpose is to help young minds learn, the teaching mentions either restrict students to a rigid and narrow point of view, encouraging tradition and discouraging innovation.
There is a bit that seems to be praising the commercial sector, as having the right mind-set about education. If learning is to be a flow activity, it must provide feedback in the way of results. Studying for the sake of studying is onerous and mind-numbing - but studying something for a purpose and witnessing the results that are achieved when that knowledge is put to practical use. And in that sense, the commercial sector offers more rewarding and effective educational opportunities than academia.