Creative Ecologies

Where Thinking Is a Proper Job

Bronislaw Malinowski, John Howkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351525183
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The main question of our age is how we live our lives. As we struggle with this question, we face others. How do we handle ideas and knowledge, both our own and those of others? What relationship to ideas do we want? Whose ideas do we want to be surrounded by? Where do we want to think? Most choose, or have the choice made for them, according to what family, colleagues, and friends do and say and what we read about, and a more or less rational calculation of the odds.

Modern ecology results from the shift in thinking generated by quantum physics and systems theory, from the old view based on reductionism, mechanics, and fixed quantities to a new view based on holistic systems where qualities are contingent on the observer and on each other. This perception changes how people treat ideas and facts, certainties and uncertainties, and affects both art and science. Worldwide it is part of the process of understanding the current crisis in the environment, and the balance of economy, creativity, and control required in our response.

The book's starting point is the growing role that information has played in industrial economies since the 1800s and especially in the last thirty years. It is an attempt to identify ecology of thinking and learning. It is also based on the need to escape from old, industrial ways and become more attuned to how people actually borrow, develop, and share ideas. Throughout the book, Howkins asks questions and offers signposts. He gives no guarantee that creative ecologies will be sustainable, but shows what should be aimed for.

1

The Challenge

Learning to Look

Being creative isn’t easy. It cannot be taught, although it can be learned. Everyone has to learn the rules before they can break them. The best way to learn is to work with people who are better, wiser, than oneself, with people who are challenging and have the knack of picking the right challenges. With some activities, you want other people to be less talented or successful so you can get ahead; in the creative ecology, you want to work with people who are better than you so you can get ahead.

Read this letter from a 21-year-old man who was living in London in 1874 and working as a junior assistant in an art gallery. It was the end of a cold January day. He had finished the stocktaking and had enlivened a tedious job by looking hard at the pictures:

Admire as much as you can; most people don’t admire enough. The following are some of the painters whom I like especially: Scheffer, Delaroche, Hebert, Hamon, Leys, Tissot, Lagye, Boughton, Millais, Thijs Maris, De Groux, De Braekeleer Jr, Millet, Jules Breton, Feyen-Perrin, Eugene Feyen, Brion, Jundt, George Saal, Israels, Anker, Knaus, Vautier, Jourdan, Compte-Calix, Rochussen, Meissonier, Madrazo, Ziem, Boudin, Gerome, Fromentin, Decamps, Bonington, Diaz, Th Rousseau, Troyon, Dupre, Corot, Paul Huet, Jacque, Otto Weber, Daubigny, Bernier, Emile Breton, Chenu . . .’¹

Few people today could name so many painters. Was he exaggerating? I do not think so.

He had thought of being a commercial illustrator but doubted he could draw. His brother was keen, but his sister advised, ‘Be a baker, that’s a useful trade’. He started to copy other paintings and to illustrate his letters.

Nearly ten years later, thinking back on his decision to paint, he wrote to his brother:

At the time when you spoke of my becoming a painter, I thought it very impractical and would not hear of it. What made me stop doubting was reading a clear book on perspective, Cassange’s ‘Guide to the ABC of Drawing’, and a week later I drew the interior of the kitchen with stove, chair, table and window - in their places and on their right legs.²

All his life he roamed around Europe, living off family and friends, searching for the right place to work. He dreamed of a community ofartists and, after many anxious letters, at last persuaded Paul Gauguin, an older and more successful painter, to stay in his little house in Arles. Their world consisted of the house, the countryside where they painted, the grocery, several bars and a brothel. They gave each other confidence - ‘Look, here’s someone else as crazy as I am’ - practical advice, and a glimpse of a perfect life together.

Vincent Van Gogh’s nine weeks with Gauguin in his studio were astonishingly creative for both of them. Van Gogh produced forty-nine oil paintings, several watercolours and hundreds of drawings and Gauguin about one-third as many. The Yellow House with its yellow furniture was an oasis for two nomads. It didn’t last, but it was extraordinary while it did. By December, Van Gogh had started his voyage into madness and Gauguin returned to Paris and then to Martinique where he painted, at the end of his life, a canvas titled Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?.

The buzz of hard work done well is exhilarating for those doing it and also for those who (are allowed to) watch. It is best when someone takes risks, and lets you see why and how. There is no better preparation or talisman for one’s own journey. Like all creative activities, art is dependent upon novelty, but we only recognise novelty if we know what everyone else has already done, as Van Gogh appreciated on that dark January day in London. This is why creative people want to immerse themselves in other people’s excitement and passions; to share their failures and successes; to get close.

Definitions

To begin, we need to differentiate between creativity and creative economy. Creativity is the use of ideas to produce new ideas. The input, the original idea, may be novel or familiar. What is more important is that we use energy to transform it into novel outcomes. The output’s commercial value may depend on its uniqueness (as with Van Gogh’s paintings) or on how easily it can be copied (as with this book).

Creativity is a neuro-physical process that comes with a mix of emotions that add greatly to the pleasure, the kick, of thinking for oneself. It can be described but not defined and indeed has always been conditional. Ancient religions ascribe creativity to God and attribute Creation to a single Creator. In Europe up to the seventeenth century a Christian who claimed to be the sole source of his or her own ideas was regarded as blasphemous. Historically, Christians believed that God created the world (surveys indicate that about one-third of Americans still believe this). Islam describes Allah as the Creator and forbids representations of Allah or the Prophet.

Secular societies are no better guarantors of freedom and many regard independent thought with suspicion. In the fifth century BC, Plato lived his life on the basis of thinking for himself, but he banned artists from Utopia because he believed they would be disruptive. He was right. Today, totalitarian societies feel uncomfortable with free speech and forbid it. Every society, even the freest, places restrictions on what people can say and write and represent in images.

This raw creativity is not the same as talent, which is a kind of expertise, usually learned and repeatable. Nor is it the same as art, a tricky word, which refers both to particular kinds of expression and formats and to something done well. The argument rages whether there are any absolute standards in art (or beauty) or whether they are eternally relative. Since many brilliant minds have failed to resolve the dispute, the latter case is more likely to be true.³

Creativity is not the same as innovation. Creativity is internal, personal and subjective, whereas innovation is external and objective. Creativity often leads to innovation, but innovation seldom leads to creativity. Each creative domain tends to one or the other. Where success depends on personal expression, people want to be creative; if it depends on calculation and implementation they aim for innovation. Art for art’s sake is fine, and has produced great work, but ‘innovation for innovation’s sake’ is a waste of money.

Economy initially referred to the efficient management of a household or farm and then to the complex of human activities involved in production, spending, consumption and saving. Its base is the tension between what we want and what we can get, whether by producing our own goods and services or by buying someone else’s. The economic conundrum presented by John Stuart Mill has been that, whereas our desires, wants and needs are infinite or at least indeinitely large, our resources are limited. We therefore have to make choices that affect our wealth and welfare, the market, and our future desires.

The way economics and business has approached this for the past fifty years has been to focus on one-off innovation implemented in mass production with ever lower costs and prices. Business has seen creativity and innovation as specialist functions. I call this the repetitive economy. We are now seeing a shift to the creative economy where, although basic goods and services have not diminished in absolute terms, the bulk of growth comes from their added symbolic value. Like other economic systems, the function of a creative economy is to use resources so as to increase wealth and welfare. But, while the commodities and manufactured goods in a classical economy are physical and quantifiable, the inputs and outputs of a creative economy are subjective and qualitative. The value of a commodity like a potato is its physical importance as food; and one potato is much like another. But the value of what I create is what it means to me and, possibly, what it means to others; and meanings are unstable.

Ecology is the study of relationships between organisms and their environment, which probably includes other organisms. An eco-system is an ecology of several different species living together. Scientists talk of habitats, which are real places like streams and urban environments, and also of niches, which are systems wherein a species thrives. Early ecologists worked in wild places, but nowadays they look more at managed ecosystems and niches. Cultivated eco-systems are the best model for human ecologies. Eco-literate models do not just ‘let nature go’, leaving it wild, nor are they exclusively centred on human interventions. They ‘involve taking nature as its base and working with it to achieve your aims’.⁴ Deep ecology eschews a human bias and takes nature’s viewpoint.

A creative ecology is a niche where diverse individuals express themselves in a systemic and adaptive way, using ideas to produce new ideas; and where others support this endeavour even if they don’t understand it. These energy-expressive relationships are found in both physical places and intangible communities; it is the relationships and actions that count, not the infrastructure. The strength of a creative ecology can be measured by these flows of energy and the continual learning and creation of meaning. The quartet of diversity, change, learning and adaptation mutually enhance each other.

I often refer to self-organising systems, which can be de-ined as systems whose internal dynamics lead to increases in complexity and stability without external guidance, and to emergent behaviour which is observed when a system, rather than its parts, causes a new pattern. Both terms originated in physics, but they exist in biology, in the ways birds flock together and bees swarm, in ecology, with deep ecology and the Gaia theory, and in sociology, with memes, of which more later.

The Origins of an Idea

There have been peaks of extraordinary thinking and invent iveness throughout human history, often linked to trade and empires. With hindsight, we can see that the peaks tend to be brief. Cultures emerge to provide a high-energy nutrient for creative achievement but seldom sustain it: Mesopotamia and Sumeria (the Fertile Crescent), Classical Greece, China in the Han Dynasty and later as well as today, Italy during the Roman Empire and again during the Renaissance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Arab science and civilisation in the ninth to eleventh centuries, and so on. It is invidious to make a list because so many cultures have flourished in ways we scarcely appreciate.

The origins of Western creativity can be traced back to the Renaissance of Greek and Roman classical ideas and to the birth of humanism. Europe has been astonishingly creative in philosophy, art and industry, flowering in culture continuously since the fifteenth century and in technology since the eighteenth. The Enlightenment upheld the claims of reason over doctrine (and sometimes of personal passion as a motor of reason) and provided an environment for independent expression, debate, the rule of law, the freedom of the press, accountable government, and independent public institutions. Although some believed it would lead to the death of religion, it did not do so, as Darwin discovered when he presented his ideas on the ‘origin of species’ in the 1860s.

The capital cities of London, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Moscow were world centres of creativity, invention and novelty (I call them mini-ecologies). New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other American cities soon joined them. Some American scientists believe that the ecology of the Native American could not have developed civilisation and industry on its own and needed an injection of northern European values.⁵ Once injected, and given the immigrants’ commitment to freedom and en-trepreneurship, America developed quickly to take a lead.

The first few decades of the twentieth century saw astonishing artistic, scientific and technological outbursts. Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, Einstein published his theory of relativity five years later, and by the 1920s scientists realised that the Cartesian and Newtonian assumptions that matter consists of hard-edged things that could be objectified had been replaced with patterns of probabilities. These decades saw a tectonic shift in our handling of ideas, summed up in the new theories of quantum physics, from the old world view based on reductionism, mechanics and fixed quantities to a view based on holistic systems where qualities were contingent on the observer and on each other. Originating in physics, these new perceptions had profound effects on all science and art and indeed on how people treat ideas and facts, certainties and uncertainties. We can trace modern creativity as a mass movement back to quantum physics and its implications for uncertainty, contingency and interdependence.

The Lumiere brothers had invented cinematography in 1896 and Picasso remade painting in his Demoiselles D’Avignon in 1907, followed by his experiments with African tribal art and cubism. Marcel Duchamp, who like Picasso was influenced by the French mathematician Henri Poincare, painted his Nude Descending a Staircase in 1912 and exhibited his even more controversial Urinal in New York in 1917. James Joyce wrote Finnegan ‘s Wake, incidentally referring to Einstein as Winestain, and then 1922 saw both Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Nijinsky invented a new choreography. The premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913 caused a riot in Paris, only for Arnold Schoenberg to revolutionise music again a few years later with his Pierrot Ensemble. Marconi was developing radio and Louis Bleriot lew across the English Channel. The Dutch de Stijl, the German Bauhaus and the Russian School of Art and Design launched modern design and constructivism. It was the time of cabaret, cocktails, the Jazz Age, cinema and Dada. Technological innovation proliferated: safety razors, the latex condom, vacuum cleaners, air-conditioning, neon lights, windscreen wipers, bakelite, cellophane, instant coffee, stainless steel, the bra, the zip, pop-up toasters and frozen food.

The American Dream Machine

America was the first country in modern times to conjoin the arts and business and so practically invent popular culture, the notion that artists, the people and big business could speak the same language and enjoy the same pleasures. This is why, although the French invented cinematography, the Americans invented the movie business. It is evident in the work of Norman Rockwell, Walt Disney and Motown Records and most notably the internet. While many in Europe were shoring up ideological barriers between art and commerce, America found great delight in bundling them together and making money out of the cocktail. It is famous for its historic cultural and political freedoms, enshrined in the Constitution, and its robust competitiveness. It has been criticised for being too commercial, though these comments have been muted recently, and it was home to some of the most imaginative twentieth-century art, iction, poetry, film, TV, music, fashion and architecture and has a rare ability to make designs and tell stories that appeal worldwide. Its social networks produce an extraordinary variety of emergent thinking.

Throughout the century, America, Europe and later Japan embarked on a spree of discovery, invention and innovation. Business became more competitive by reducing costs and expanding internationally. America shifted its focus from manufacturing to services, as did Europe, with only Germany, which has a worldwide reputation for technical R&D, maintai...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Challenge
• 2 First Ideas
• 3 Scope and Scale
• 4 The Adaptive Mind
• 5 Creative Places
• 6 Negotiating Uncertainity
• 7 The Way Forward
• 8 New Places, New Policies
• 9 Three Steps to Growth
• 10 The New Billion
• Notes
• Reference
• Acknowledgements
• Index