If you want to develop a cultural creativity, then be careful to harm the least, for a child to develop that will require more than curiosity and will provide pain along with joy. It will require the personality traits of ambition, endurance, perseverance, and obsessive single-mindedness.

I watched a lecture the other day by Walter Isaacson, President of the Aspen Institute and most recently the author of Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe.  (George is acknowledged in this book for his assistance in Walter’s understanding of relativity.)

Science promotes values; rationality, creativity, originality, the search for truth, adherence to codes of behavior, freedom and independence, dissent, rigor, and a certain constructive subversiveness. Note how many of these values are complementary to each other.

At the end of his presentation, Walter said that we are currently not living in an age of creativity, especially in comparison to the turn of the century when men like Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky took the world by storm. Walter admitted, however, that he was not sure why this lack of innovation was the case. These comments bothered me, even days after hearing them. Can one ever predict the present’s future?

We all want truths, simple ideas that we can hang our hat on for our lifetime and even pass on to our children. Some choose the scientist’s method of understanding rules and regularities rather than truths; others want truths, absolute truths, and turn to other authorities who are willing to enter the world of absolute truths. We skeptical enquirers may not doubt certain wisdoms of these authorities but doubt that it is absolute.

At first I thought it was all the angst and tension leading up to the two World Wars that spurned such awesome creativity. This theory aligns with the notion that art is a product of profound suffering. We are lazy today, too fat and full of materialism, too brain-washed and dumbed-down by the Internet, television, film, video. But soon afterwards, it occurred to me that our universe is not the past, although we are a function of the past. Genius and innovation will never look and feel the way they used to: there are infinite more foundations for creativity than an atom, a canvas, a note. We communicate faster, immediately, universally.

Creativity of the first type, the subjective personal experience is called the “flow” experience. In art, and perhaps in other activities, the activity itself is often more important than the product. While it is true that all creativity involves spontaneous joy, the converse, that all spontaneous joy involves creativity is not true.

The population has grown exponentially, as have the images, sounds, stories. As soon as a new image, sound, story emerges, another one flows from it. We no longer have the time or patience for an idea to stick around, for it to linger.

Perhaps my hypotheses are excuses for these stale generations. Perhaps I’m envious that I don’t live in, or among, an age of absolute genius. Or perhaps we are in a stage of processing, resting, reorganizing. Or, more to Isaacson’s point I surmise, in an age where creativity is not fostered in our schools, our homes, our society.

There are occasional authors where the best advise one can give is “Read anything they write.” Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Pinker, Barbara Tuchman, John Galbraith, John McPhee, Studs Terkel, Jim Harrison, and Hunter Thompson are a few that come easily to mind. Add to these Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor emeritus of human development in the departments of psychology and education at the University of Chicago and author of such books as Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Mike, as he is known in Chicago, is an evolutionary psychologist and one of the best researchers on the human experience that I know of. I chatted with him once in Chicago about my concern for the academics demanded in 3rd and 4th grades; “We drag them too soon out of the mud,” he said in his heavy Czech accent. I liked the way he shook his head, sadly I thought, as he said that.

Mihaly [argues] that students should experience flow in their school learning experiences, and that because it feels good and makes them happy they experience an intrinsic reward from learning. The school curriculum should follow their development and add skills and challenges that move them upward and rightward in the flow channel. With enough experience, the habit of happiness through flow becomes a lifetime practice; therefore lifelong learning.

I can flow shucking peas, happy at the lower left end of the flow channel. And in my life as a theoretical physicist I was happy analytically continuing the partition function into the complex fugacity plane, out there at the upper right hand end of the channel. I believe that the Platonic and Aristotelian happiness that Mihaly suggests as a goal for education is simply “flow for the right things.” If this is true, and I believe it to be so, then there is a third dimension to the diagram, rightness. The purpose of education is to develop people who find their greatest happiness in meeting difficult challenges with high levels of skills for purposes that are very right. This righteous flow then would be what Maslow describes as “peak experience.”

This would mean that as we talk about COMPASS programs, we include rightness equally with discussion about challenges and skills. This, of course, is a moral dimension, and in that dimension we find the diverse immutable cores of human beliefs. It’s a tough dimension where compromise and consensus are not welcomed. Tolerance and inclusion can be deliberately invited in to expand that dimension; expansion, of course, is a stretch. To stretch is to be limber, flexible and adaptive.

There is another factor to consider: the order of things. Maybe we are not to blame for this so-defined barren era, that we should not berate ourselves for existing in equilibrium. Dialogue builds momentum slowly; slowly, slowly until it pops, and then there is a breakthrough, a spike in the linear graph, that we attribute to an individual, or group of individuals. They get all the credit for putting the pieces together from the millions of datum collected over years. Nameless, faceless people hidden from extended history.

So, until the next spike, every thought, every idea, every mind counts.

I like to imagine a mind that is active, curious, questioning, open and excited about new ideas. I like to hear a student say, “Don’t tell me yet; give me a chance to figure it out for myself.”  I like to see students exercise their minds through reading, writing, arts, cross word puzzles, debate, movement, theater, competitive and non-competitive games, and so many more mental activities. I like a mind that has a low tolerance for the trivial and “bullshit” including its own. I like a mind that understands and appreciates itself, for that is a mind more likely to understand and appreciate other minds. Give me a keen sense of humor, and there’s enough coarseness in life that a bit of humor there too helps. An effective mind can use logic, compass abstractions, and grasp an extended argument. As for knowledge, there should be breadth enough, but breadth without depth, no. It would be fun and useful to add to this list.

Walter also said it would take approximately 100 years to discover what Einstein spent most of his adult life contemplating after relatively: a Theory of Everything, or a Unification Theory. I have also read that Einstein was obsessed with the concept of light throughout his entire career. Here is my novice belief, although I will never have the mathematics to translate or prove it: when artists share language with physicists, and physicists borrow language from artists, as in: light, darkness (dark matter), gravity (profundity), relative, there is truth there. We associate the words “light” and “darkness” with “good” and “evil”; “relative” with personal and intangible associations.

Light is also considered love, clarity, purity, and always wins over the dark side, although there seems to be a lot more darkness in the world than light. Dark matter accounts for the vast majority of mass in the observable universe. Dark matter exerts a gravitational pull on objects in and around distant galaxies, and even on light emitted by those objects.

Words bring up an image, a little playlet in the mind, and this playlet causes an emotion, which if pleasant confirms approval of the image, and if unpleasant confirms disapproval. The rational mind tells us that this is the human condition.  So, it’s not the words themselves, it’s the image they bring up.

Thought and language are deeply intertwined; there are indeed cognitive processes, ideas, thoughts and emotions that aren’t represented by words and it is useful to consider those counter examples in order to understand just how important words are to the processes of making meaning…What we understand about the meaning of almost any word at all is personal and relative to the experiences, particularly the social experiences of our individual lives.

This relativity is not much bother as we converse about the more concrete aspects of our lives. If you say ““It is hot enough” about your cup of tea I understand it as “It is hot enough for you,” and that same cup, for me, might be warm, tepid, hot, very hot, etc., but I am not confused. When we get to the more abstract aspects of our lives the situation changes. If you say “This is beautiful” I may ask “But what is beauty?” and we may then engage in a long and confusing discussion, bringing in increasingly abstract concepts, such as simplicity, until we should become convinced that if the word “hot” is relative, then the word “beauty” is extremely relative.

For me, “making meaning of” is almost the same as “not being confused about.” Making shared meaning through words will be difficult in any event and increasingly difficult as one moves from the concrete to the abstract. Shared experience and shared practice can indeed create a shared meaning, but that that shared meaning may not find shared expression in words should be no great surprise.

Many people believe everything that exists in the universe is a product of our imagination, and that consciousness is the last frontier. I wonder often, as children do, if all of creation and existence is not a collective figment of our imagination. “How do we know that we haven’t made everything up?” I have heard many children ask. “That everything is not part of one person’s dream?” So, the child in me is asking, “How do we know that there really isn’t a key that unlocks language’s relation to physics, or rather, abstraction’s relation to substance? How do we know that the Theory of Everything does not mean what is inherent in its name: that it is fundamentally a Theory of Everything – a theory about motion and matter, light and time, about language, consciousness, evolution, relativity and reality, and the relativity of reality, life and love.

My first mother-in-law once asked me, as I was staring at her Persian carpet, if I saw the carpet as atoms, and I said yes for that was the truth. Now I might answer that I know the carpet is atoms but what I see are knots and loops and I imagine the old and gnarled fingers that made those knots and loops. The same is true now about how I see people, particularly those littler people we call children. I know that they are atoms, molecules, and cellular expressions of their DNA, but I see the light of innocence in their eyes and I imagine their possibilities. I am a romantic scientist.

I’m not sure how to prove the state of reality one way or another. Existential philosophers and cognitive scientists have seriously pondered questions like: “What is a chair?” “How do we recognize or define a chair?” with little or no predictable answers. If we can’t answer the supposedly simple question of what makes a chair, then Walter may be too optimistic with his centennial prediction.

As we go through life we face many problems, predicaments and paradoxes. It is natural to try to find meaning about these things, to generalize and simplify with phrases of words like “All men are created equal” even though know this is not true no matter how much time we take to discuss our individual meanings of the word “equal.”

Words become our representation of our perceived reality, and we constantly check, through conversations, our reality against the reality of others. Our realities are relative, our words are relative, thus our words to express our realities are doubly relative. It’s a double bind. But we need to do our best, to struggle, to muddle forward. No, I think we do it for ourselves, for our own sense of being real, and not imaginary or insane.

Of course, there is always Einstein’s most popular adage: Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Posted in chapters | No Comments