CREATIVITY IN A CHANGING WORLD!

CREATIVITY IN A CHANGING WORLD!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 21, 2009

“Goodness consists not in the outward things we do, but in the inward thing we are. To be good is the great thing.”

Edwin Hubbell (1814 – 1880), American clergy

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REFERENCE: This is an excerpt from CONFIDENT THINKING (a book in progress).

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While modernity celebrates its accomplishments, goodness has often been on holiday in a homeless mind. The greatest challenge to creativity is finding the key to behaving in peace, harmony and mutual support of each other, starting with those with the most abdicating their self-indulgent lifestyles and behaving more responsibly.

Once the role of religion was to spread light in this darkness and guide the human soul to find its way forward to goodness and light, but no more. It would appear religion has lost its way in the past century or so. Now God is confined to pomp and circumstance, ritual and rites of passage, or jihads, but not a deciding factor in normal daily life. Vitality, essential to creative endeavor, has gone out of this institution, but why?

Materialism engulfs the planet and materialism has nothing to do with leadership. Leadership has always been grounded in spirituality, and it is missing today, everywhere. Modern surrogates to religion, the social sciences, have only compounded the problem with their doublespeak and suspect research, mainly, because they are critical thinkers.

Psychiatry has failed; psychology has failed; anthropology has failed; sociology has failed; all the social and behavioral sciences have failed because their attention has been on description rather than on action. Most of what they tell us we already know, and that is the problem. We need to find away out, not more sophisticated explanations why we are in the puzzle of our dilemma. Listen to your priest or minister or rabbi and you will hear an echo of these disciplines. It is the hesitation rhetoric of those who don’t want to hurt the feelings or purses of powerful special interests. Or could it be a search for the perfect definition of truth? If so, there is an inherent problem in the quest.

Plato is said to have been dominated by a geometric or mathematical model as his thoughts operate on lines which are conditioned by the idea that there are axiomatic truths that can be uncover with severe logic to infer certain infallible conclusions. Bono claims we suffer from this perfect paradigm, the notion that somewhere “out there” a perfect vision exists like the Holy Grail.

As de Bono insists, and empiricism supports, you don’t search for truth; you create truth. I am aware I am stepping on Sacred Cows, a man of no distinction making such assumptions. How dare I? Well, I dare. I speak out of a long life of a world I have seen that is not tidy and has no rational order. I have lived to see revolutionists begin as liberators and end in some sort of despotism. I have seen the growth of corporate America begin and end thusly. I have seen universities begin as citadels of the open exchange of ideas and end as political sanctuaries for stunted ideologies. I have seen grammar and high schools begin with no notion of obligation and duty and end as preparation factories for the university system. I have seen science begin with a quest for the natural order and end being pimped by corpocracy to meet its insatiable appetite for new gadgets to promote happiness.

Our human institutions once were meant to serve us, but now they are designed for us to serve them. The values they once espoused such as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice our life to some inner light, dedication to some ideal for which it was considered worth sacrificing all that we were, for which it was worth both living and dying has passed. A little over a century ago, people admired wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate themselves to their ideals no matter what they were. That, too, has gone.

These disciplines are concerned with the values that arise from the “truth,” but what is truth? Christianity has its truth, Judaism its truth, Islam its truth, and are they not the same truth? Can there be a menu of cafeteria truths? Religions may be in decline but the old habit of formulating creeds and imposing belief in dogma persists even among atheists. The strange idolatrous overestimation of words and symbols, emblems and totems continues unchecked.

The truth is man is addicted to death and not to life; to self-destruction, and not self-creation. His teacher often is poverty, ignorance, and neglect. But paradoxically, that same teacher is often wealth, knowledge, and luxury. Waste from neglect and waste from indulgence are still forms of the same waste.

Social sciences search for understanding of man’s plight with statistical correlations rather than designing means to ameliorate the suffering. Action! They operate from ivory towers not from the trenches of the sick and weary. Action! They can be found as consultants in the boardrooms of corpocracy, not on the line. Action! They conduct studies of penal institutions rather than developing strategies to civilize the lost. Action!

Likewise, modern medicine and pharmacology seek to discover cures for AIDS and other lifestyle diseases playing a complicit role with social science and critical thinking. It is behavior that causes this dreaded disease, the disease of poverty, of lost hope, of unemployment, of corruption, and always, neglect.

It is no longer a matter of discovering “what is” the problem, but of designing a way forward out of it, not with a drug, not with a strategy, not with a master plan, not with the commitment of billions by philanthropists, not with fund raising concerts, but with education and training. A better miracle than feeding the hungry loafs and fishes is to teach them how to produce grain, bake bread, and fish.

It may be a matter of creating new bold counterintuitive ideas directly opposed to conventional logic rather than repeating the standard ones.

There is no point in judging dysfunctional governments, evil as some may be. Energy might better be directed at finding a way to make connection. Many African leaders, for example, have never gotten past their deep-seated hatred of repressive colonialism that still rankles them to the bone marrow although long gone.

The same applies to AIDS. It is not a moral issue. A way forward is only possible if there is a softening of hard-edged thinking and condescending morality. Bless the Doctors Without Boarders; bless the volunteers in the most deprived circumstances; bless the missionaries that quietly educate and train, minister and love; bless the UN workers who have found a life’s purpose; bless Bill Gates and his foundation, bless Bono and his work with the UN to forgive the debt of small insolvent African nations, bless the journalists that attempt to reveal the source of the carnage; bless actors like George Cooney and his father who attempt to bring attention to the suffering; and bless all the others who are the exception to this charge.

Noble as they are there are far too few of them. They are the heroes of our times, and the hope of our future because they understand the challenge of creativity in a changing world. They are like George Eliot’s definition of goodness, showing in their actions a desire for what is perfectly good without knowing clearly what it is. They are not waiting for the perfect moment or quintessential paradigm; they are a very small army of hope creating good.