Creativity (41 page)
Authors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
What sustains her instead of the desire for fame is a fundamental feeling for the order and beauty of nature, a calling for creating orderly and beautiful environments around her. In colorful hyperbole she says:
On one level I feel like an extraterrestrial. I’m here visiting for a while. And I’m also in human form. I’m very emotionally attached to the species. And so I have incarnated myself at this time. But I also have an infinite aspect to myself. It all kind of hangs together quite easily for me. It sounds flippant, but the thing is that this is a spiritual practice for me.
Not many people confess to feeling like extraterrestrials, but one must be able to look at oneself from a certain distance in order to get an objective view of the human condition. And in order to invent new ways of living that are not compromised by past traditions, one must strive to attain such objectivity. Yet at the same time, one must also maintain one’s “emotional attachment to the species.” This dialectic between rational calculation and passionate involvement was mentioned earlier as one of the traits of creative individuals in general. It is perhaps even more essential for t
hose whose creativity lies outside of traditional domains. This is how Henderson expresses it:
There’s a very harmonious continuum of what Zen Buddhists call attachment-detachment. And you should always be in the state where you’re both. There’s a yin/yang continuum, which we can’t understand in Western logic because we have this either/or. But it’s “both/and” logic, and it says that there’s a constant dance and continuum between attachment and detachment, between the long view, the infinite view, and the incarnated view where we have to learn about limitedness, and finitude, and action.
S
TEPS TO
P
EACE
Elise Boulding, married for fifty years to the economist Kenneth Boulding, had a difficult time emerging from the shadow of her famous husband. But after bringing up five children and spending eighteen years as a homemaker, she finished a doctorate in sociology and embarked on a unique career of her own devising. Like the other individuals in this chapter, Elise Boulding discovered her problems in the vicissitudes of real life and tried to solve them first within the boundaries of an existing domain. Upon finding out that this was impossible, she left the security of the academic f
ield and struck out on her own, hoping to develop new approaches to the threats that she saw endangering our future.
No Safe Place Left
The main theme in Boulding’s life is peace, peace at all levels—in the home, the community, the nation, the world. It is a concern that matured slowly and now absorbs all her energy. It started when she was a small child in New Jersey:
The fear of war in my childhood was the fear of being gassed, from the stories and movies of World War I. And so the kind of nuclear fears children have today, I had an equivalent fear of populations being gassed. I had a fantasy as a child that if there should be another war I would go to Norway, which is where I was born, and go into the mountains and live in a cabin and be safe. All of my mother’s stories were about Norway being the good place. The U.S. was in many ways not such a good place; it was selfish, greedy, corrupt. Even in the twenties. [She laughs.] When I was a
senior in college, Norway was invaded. Suddenly there was no safe place
to go anymore. And so the internal upheaval, my own coming to terms with that, that I’d lost the safe place. Although I knew that was a childhood fantasy, nevertheless it was very much a part of my own core being.
What Boulding saw was that the world was too interconnected to allow anyone to withdraw to a safe haven. Violence can spread everywhere instantaneously. Just as Commoner and Henderson, Boulding confronted the systemic nature of our mutual dependence. She realized that the only way the world was going to be a safe place was if everyone worked to make it so.
Grounding
Working for world peace is no small task. In fact, it is such a utopian idea that it borders on the naive. Most people, when they realize the dangers global aggression poses to their lives, take psychological shortcuts such as denial or scapegoating. It is so much easier to blame the ills of the world on manageable targets such as the Soviet Union, South Africa, religious fundamentalists, or the liberal establishment, instead of considering the possibility that one’s own actions are part of the problem. It is always easier to try to get other people to behave instead of behav
ing ourselves. Yet when we see the world as a system, it is obvious that it is impossible to change one part of it while leaving the rest unchanged.
Boulding approached the problem of peace from the ground up, so to speak. Part of her talent, like that of other creative individuals, consists in finding a way to deal with a complex problem in a manageable way. The steps are simple and obvious: First, we must raise children to be peacemakers; second, we must understand how families can achieve internal harmony; third, we must link harmonious families into neighborhoods and communities; and finally, people so linked should be made aware of their global identity, of their mutual interdependence:
I discovered international nongovernmental organizations, and that gradual understanding of what it meant that there was a network of eighteen thousand transnational associations, where people had different identities than their national identities. What that meant, and how we could plug into those networks, or use the
ones we were in. I spent a lot of my time helping people to understand that whatever they belonged to was in fact a world identity. You see, whatever you’re doing locally, whether it’s Rotary, Kiwanis, all the service clubs, or whether it’s churches, whether it’s chamber of commerce, sports, there is no realm of activity [that cannot be done] at a global scale. But always departing from a very strong conviction that unless you understood how your own local community worked, you were useless in working anywhere else. You had to know how things worked locally.
Of course, formulating the problem of peace in terms of these ascending levels of complexity does not make the task easy; but it makes it manageable enough that one can start doing something about it instead of throwing up one’s hands in despair. Boulding started out by making sure that she brought up her own children to be “peacemakers.” She then took her ideas to the Society of Friends, the Quaker meetinghouse to which the family belonged. From there her influence moved to increasingly large audiences—as chairperson of the Sociology Department at Dartmouth, as a writer and lecturer at
both the popular and scientific levels. Like Hazel Henderson, Boulding considers the goal of her writing to change the way people think about world problems: “I’m thinking all the time about the different metaphors we use and how they determine our understanding of how reality works. And how we want to change it.” Her activities broadened to include leadership in various organizations, and finally she began to move on the international stage:
Well, right at this moment it’s the follow-up of my serving as secretary general of the International Peace Research Association, which duty ended the first of May. But in January, as a result of the Gulf War, we established something called the Commission on Peacebuilding in the Middle East. I undertook to be acting chair just to get it rolling, and I’ve agreed to do that until October; I would like someone else to take over then. So a lot of my time now is involved in corresponding with people. I’m trying to develop as many Middle Eastern contacts as possible, so that it isn’t
just people in Europe and the U.S. thinking about what should be happening in the Middle East. I’m committed to trying to gather a lot of background papers and produce an overview document.
No matter how far Boulding’s influence extends, her activities stand on the firm foundations of home, family, and community. And even deeper than that, her commitment to peace is rooted in faith: She calls her work “action grounded in God’s love.” As a Quaker, her conception of God is not tied down to a particular historical interpretation; it is a diffuse and evolving entity. But it is a lively and powerful force that allows her to feel connected to the cosmos in “organic wholeness.” She turns to lyrical expression to describe how the relationship to the Godhead affects her: “The brigh
t shaft of longing love that goes into the cloud of unknowing, reaching out to unimaginably distant horizons of creation. And having it inside yourself.”
Despite this strong faith and the strong supports of family and community, Boulding’s life has not been smooth and without problems. Occasionally she feels depleted, exhausted by the burdens she has chosen to carry. One such crisis occurred on her sixtieth birthday, when “all of a sudden I felt totally surfeited with my own life. I felt I had indigestion from my life, that it was too full, too much. I couldn’t stand it. It took me a couple of months to work it through and get back to feeling it was OK, there was room for more experience in my life—you know, I wasn’t totally surfeited,
wasn’t totally clogged up—and to kind of open up again and go on.” When the dark night of the soul descends, Elise Boulding retreats to her mountain hermitage. There, surrounded by distant peaks and her cherished objects, her days ruled by ritual prayer and meditation, she can restore inner balance and rediscover her spiritual grounding.
R
ELEASING
P
OTENTIALITIES
John W. Gardner has had many jobs: He started out teaching psychology in college, was the president of a major philanthropic foundation, was appointed by President Johnson as the first secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, and wrote several influential books. But none of these achievements, each one of which would justify most people’s existence, gave Gardner a feeling that he had done enough. Because he was not seeking either money or power, the goal he was striving for remained elusive even though to an objective observer it would have seemed that he had reached it several times over.
The Excellence of Plumbers
What did Gardner try to accomplish in his life? Before answering this question, it helps to know what he identified as the main problem that needed solution, the major goal that was worth investing his energies in. Basically, Gardner became convinced that we don’t live up to the potential for excellence that is the birthright of every person.
This has two consequences. Our lives become drab and impoverished. We never experience the feeling of exhilaration that one has when acting at the fullness of one’s capacities, the kind of feeling that an Olympic athlete may have when running her personal best, or a poet may have when turning a perfect phrase—what I call flow. The second consequence is that people who are both badly paid and have dull jobs eventually become alienated from the fortunate few. With time, this tension necessarily results in social conflict. The problem, as Gardner saw it, was to implement an ethos of social equa
lity even while recognizing the reality of profound individual differences. In a sense, this would require a concept of excellence that includes plumbers (or, from the point of view of plumbers, a concept of excellence that includes university professors):
Around my late thirties I came to recognize a very powerful dilemma for the American people. They have an ethos of equality and some words that describe that ethos, and yet people vary tremendously in ability and capacity to reach certain standards. And so the subtitle of the book [
Excellence
] was “Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too?” It seemed to me that we had to have a conception of excellence that left room for the person who was excellent as a plumber. Excellence at various levels. If you start off and say only these people at the very top are excellent, then you invite a carelessness
for all the rest of the society. You’re saying it doesn’t matter, because they can’t be excellent anyway, they’re just slobs. That’s a terrible way to run the society. Everybody ought to feel that whatever his or her calling, they can be excellent. They can be an excellent mechanic, they can be an excellent kindergarten teacher, as well as being an excellent neurosurgeon or whatever. And it was this that really set me on the road to trying to get some ideas across. But today, thirty years later, those ideas are still very mixed up in people’s minds.
Reaching the People
The riots that flared through the major cities of the United States in the late 1960s seemed to confirm Gardner’s fears: The segments of society that had been denied a chance to be excellent were beginning to revolt. It was at this point that his creativity really began to surface: He left the comfortable institutional positions where he had been so successful and started moving out of the range where foundations and government bureaus held sway. Basically, he felt that the way to combat alienation was to get people more involved in the decisions that affected their fortunes.
This meant organizing voluntary movements that would inform people of their options and then help them find their voices and their power in the political process. The first such job was heading the National Urban Coalition, which had been a remarkable group of corporate, union, minority, and religious leaders who had come together to address the problems of the cities.
My job was to chair that extraordinary group, and it was a very interesting experience, because I visited the toughest parts of every city. I was certainly deeply into every city where there was a riot. I really got intensive exposure to a side of American life that I knew something about, but I didn’t know as deeply. I found it very valuable, and also, it led me to form Common Cause. Because as I studied the things that you might do to correct the situation, I kept running into real ailments of government, shortcomings of the process of government, and concluded that we need
ed attention to government by citizens. There is lots of attention to government by citizens who are acting as lobbyists for the unions or lobbyists for businesses or lobbyists for all the professional groups, but there wasn’t much of a voice for the common good, you know, how do we make this system work, how do we make this city a better city.
