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July 2005— Creating Our Future
In 1879 a Spanish landowner of scholarly tastes,
Don Marcelino de Sautuola, visited a cave on his property
that was known to have been the home of prehistoric people.
He took with him his eleven-year-old daughter, Maria. While
her father examined the floor and walls of the cave, Maria,
perhaps a little bored, looked up at the roof - and made one
of the great archaeological discoveries of her time. "Toros!
Toros!" she cried. The roof of Altamira cave is covered
with magnificent paintings, not of bulls as Maria thought,
but of bison and many other animals who roamed Spain in the
Ice Age.
Sautuola believed, correctly, that the Altamira paintings
were as much as 18,000 to 15,000 years old. For the next twenty-odd
years few agreed with him. The paintings were confidently
declared to be modern fakes. That hunters, dressed in skins
and equipped with tools made from flint or antlers, could
have created paintings of such astonishing quality was a difficult
concept to swallow. If humans of the Stone Age were so gifted,
they were not merely physically like us - that was already
known - they were us. They had joined the club.
For to be human is, perhaps more than anything else, to
be creative. Many attempts have been made to find one single
quality that marks us off from our animal cousins. One by
one, they have all fallen before the advancing study of animal
behaviour. Animals, it turns out, also use tools, live in
complex hierarchical societies, decorate their homes and in
some species even have what appear to be languages. Only creativity
remains to us, and while it too may not be our exclusive property
- do whales in any sense compose their songs? - we can be
sure that no other animal has our obsession with re-arranging
whatever we encounter. We are the animal that cannot leave
things alone.
This drive to create is the common property of human beings.
It does not produce only paintings and cathedrals, plays and
poems, important though they are. It turns up everywhere.
Children who find stones on a beach arrange them in patterns.
Prisoners do elaborate scrimshaw work on bones and boards.
Nomads, whose possessions must be portable, elevate carpets
and saddlebags to a high art - or like the Inuit, make small
sculptures to fit in the hand. When we "set a table"
we instinctively create a pleasing pattern. And people at
meetings doodle, an activity, which apart from being mildly
creative itself, may well stimulate more original thinking
than paying close attention to the debate ever could.
There are of course limits to what we can do. As theologians
remind us, we cannot make something out of nothing. In our
most startling new departures there is always something that
has gone before. And what we think worth creating and how
we do it is always shaped by the particular culture to which
we belong. But if society in one sense sets limits it also
creates enormous opportunities. Creativity is social as well
as individual. Civilization itself, the art of living together
in highly complex groups, is perhaps the most significant
human creation, the one from which most others flow. And the
core of civilization is the city, both the nursery of creativity
and still the most potent symbol of what human beings can
achieve.
Cities made possible the division of labour into many specialized
trades, and this in turn brought an increase in both the range
and the volume of production, so that for the first time wealth
became a meaningful concept. By providing a wider range of
occupations and the possibility of saving, cities also created
wholly new opportunities for lucky or gifted individuals.
Yet cities are much more than purely economic arrangements.
By bringing all sorts and conditions of men together, they
made the shock of the unfamiliar part of daily life, and thereby
stimulated the growth of individual personality, self-consciousness
and with them creativity, the forerunner of all social change.
Writing came into existence with the first cities and made
it possible to store, analyze and communicate the results
of creativity far more widely in both time and space. And
the state, the central authority needed in a large-scale society,
used its power over thousands of individuals to create altogether
new things on an unprecedented scale -- useful things like
canals, but also towering temples which reinforced social
unity and identity by symbolizing the city to itself.
Of course there was a downside to cities. There always is.
Creativity came with a price. Wealth brought social inequality
and crime. Crowding people together meant pollution and disease.
Specialization over a lifetime can and does deform mind, body
or both. The state easily became the means by which the few
exploited the many. Contact with other cities or peoples was
as likely to provoke organized warfare as peaceful trade.
All these things are still with us in one form or another.
The dangers of city life, especially to the naïve or
the friendless, are notorious. Nonetheless cities soon won
a hold over the human mind they have never subsequently lost.
They represent at once the achievements of the past and opportunity
for the present. If the country stands for stability, the
city embodies the hope of change. It is in cities that we
create our future.
In recent years the connection between cities and creativity
has been examined anew by Richard Florida, in his book The
Rise of the Creative Class and its successors. Florida's
"creative class" is broadly defined. As well as
the occupations traditionally thought of as "creative"
- artists, performers, architects, writers, photographers
and so forth - he includes scientists, engineers, computer
software writers, academics, teachers, and the long-established
professions such as medicine and the law. Collectively, they
are now much more numerous than the traditional industrial
working class, and rivalled only by the "service class"
who provide everyone else with public and individual services,
from the police and fire department to daycare and hairdressing.
The members of this creative class, Florida argues, prefer
to live in cities that are diverse, tolerant, stimulating
and well provided with a range of amenities from museums to
jazz clubs and ski runs. As a result the American "creative
class" is strongly concentrated in a relatively small
number of metropolitan areas, some of them to be expected,
some less so: San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Atlanta and
Washington DC are examples. These cities rank highly in a
number of indices Florida and his colleagues have created
to measure tolerance, diversity and stimulation. Once concentrated,
the creative class makes these cities centres of economic
growth. Creative cities are rich as well as open and diverse,
and they are becoming steadily richer. The implications are
profound. From Max Weber to Daniel Bell, economic growth was
believed to be correlated with what are sometimes called the
Protestant virtues, although Protestants certainly have never
had a monopoly of them: hard work, thrift, sobriety, decency
and saving for a rainy day. Now it turns out to depend on
having a thriving nightlife and a dozen different nationalities
on the bus.
If the rise of the creative class and the economic growth
it creates is important, it also has some troubling implications.
It can certainly be argued that economic growth is important
for our society because, by giving substance to the promise
of a better life for all in future, it promotes social stability
in the present. But there is no doubt at all that growth also
has undesirable consequences. It creates environmental stress,
not so much today by the productive process itself - computers
are far more environmentally friendly than steel mills - as
by the lifestyles increased wealth makes possible. Florida
reports that his creative class value outdoor activities highly,
but once in the great outdoors they really will find lots
of other people like themselves. The news that the summit
of Mount Everest is covered with litter speaks volumes. The
open road exists today only in fantasy television ads for
cars, which appear to have been filmed on another, thinly
inhabited planet.
Further, economic growth can increase social inequality.
The creative cities referenced by Florida are rich, but they
also have the highest income inequality in the United States
- something that will come as no surprise to anyone who has
seen San Francisco house prices. These cities are socially
polarized into the well-paid creative class and a growing,
much less well-paid service class who do the things the creative
people are too busy to do for themselves. It is an exaggeration,
but a disturbing one, to say that they recall the Alphas,
Betas and Gammas of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Of course in our world the dividing line is not absolute or
socially mandated as it was in Huxley's. The woman selling
shoes today may well be doing it to put herself through university.
In ten years' time she will be a full-fledged member of the
creative class. The out-of-work actor who is your waiter tonight
may in fact get the big break which will allow him to eat
in restaurants rather than work in them. And is a laboratory
technician a member of the creative or of the service class?
Nonetheless, when every reservation has been made, the divide
remains. It is hard to imagine it disappearing, if only because,
unless we can invent robots able to put out fires or dry-clean
clothes, it is hard to imagine a society in which everyone
belongs to the creative class. Most disturbing of all is the
possibility of the divide's becoming deeply entrenched. Social
background already gives more opportunities to the children
of the educated and the comfortably off. Equality of opportunity
thus is and probably always has been a goal rather than a
fact, but it is a noble goal, and the belief that it exists
in at least some degree is one of the ideas that hold American,
and Canadian, society together. A trend which calls that belief
in question therefore has far-reaching implications.
This polarization by class is accompanied by a deeper polarization
by values. American politics for the last decade or more have
been dominated, not by the traditional questions of social
justice, but by "culture wars" over such issues
as abortion, euthanasia and gay rights. These struggles in
courts and legislatures are to a significant degree regionally
based - very broadly, the centre against the coasts, the country
against the cities. They are resistant to the brokerage politics
that have historically propelled the American political system:
building a military base in a given area may get a senator
re-elected, but it will not change the voters' opinions on
abortion.
No one knows what the future holds on these issues, although
there will be predictions enough and to spare. The cultural
divide, however, will not go away, although it may well move
to different battlegrounds. At bottom it is the current version
of two tensions that are inherent in all complex societies.
The first is the age-old and profoundly ambiguous relationship
between city and country. City dwellers have tended to view
their supposedly simple-minded and backward country cousins
with contempt, an attitude that survives today in such words
as redneck. They also, paradoxically, believe that life in
the country is indeed in some sense simpler, more wholesome
and authentically human than life among buildings, pavements
and strangers.
Country people for their part have always regarded cities
as a land of opportunity, and innumerable Dick Whittingtons
have set out for London and the streets allegedly paved with
gold. Those who stayed on the farm, however, have tended to
think of cities as hotbeds of vice, places where the laws
of God and man were held in contempt. The emergence of the
"creative class" cities is unlikely to change their
minds. Nor should this point of view be rejected out of hand
as mindlessly reactionary. Creativity can and often does raise
major social issues. It is often profoundly disruptive of
the status quo. It is significant that the totalitarian regimes
of the twentieth century, whatever their ideological basis,
were united in controlling and when necessary liquidating
the creative members of their populations. Morally speaking,
creativity is no better than the use we make of it. The twentieth
century was replete with examples of human creativity being
put to the most inhuman uses imaginable by those same totalitarian
states that eliminated all free thought and expression. Modern
techniques of electronic surveillance can be used to make
us safer, but they are also a potent weapon in the hands of
dictatorships. We may invent many things, but we shall never
invent a machine that makes our ethical decisions for us.
The second tension is that between the individual freedom
that makes innovation, creativity and progress (however defined)
possible, and the collective responsibilities that hold society
together. The creative class are very much the product and
the practitioners of the freedom of the individual, its members
tending to have relatively loose ties or none at all to the
traditional institutions of corporation, church, family or
political party. Such a class can be an immensely dynamic
element in society, but there is another side to the argument.
It seems at least possible that the rise of the creative class
is related to the growing indifference to politics, seen most
obviously in falling voter turnout, which is especially apparent
in the United States but can be found almost everywhere in
the developed world. There is something disturbing in the
spectacle of such a privileged group (the most privileged
in history, according to the American writer David Brooks)
benefiting from a political system but giving little back
to it. In a sense these individuals can enjoy their freedom
to design their own lives because they have inherited social
capital from many generations who thought responsibilities
to the group were as important as freedoms for the individual.
There is, too, the disquieting thought that those who will
not govern themselves will sooner or later find themselves
being governed by others. Aristotle thought that extreme democracy
would always end in tyranny. The traditional institutions
the creative class have largely abandoned, however stifling,
prejudiced or simply unfashionable they may be (and sometimes
are), can also paradoxically be the best guarantees of liberty.
Creativity is a priceless human attribute, but it is not able
to sustain a healthy, stable society by itself. To repeat,
it is no better than the use we make of it. Public life alone
can make the decisions on what that use will be. Self-evidently,
it will be those who participate in public life who take those
decisions and create our common future.
Perhaps the foregoing has placed too much emphasis on the
economic and social consequences of the rise of the creative
class, far-reaching though these undoubtedly are. Perhaps
the really important news is that so much more human creativity
is becoming actual, rather than potential; that so many people
are able to live more fulfilling lives. The painters of Altamira
may have been hoping to increase the number of bison in the
neighbourhood, but looking at their work it is hard to doubt
that the sheer pleasure of creation took them far beyond whatever
their ideas of magic required. For most of history, the immense
drudgery needed to keep civilization going, together with
an understandable fear of the risks involved by any new departures,
kept creativity within narrow bounds. Modern, post-industrial
society is rich enough, and self-confident enough, to accept
the risks of creativity in return for its rewards. Where this
will take us in the long run we cannot know: true creativity
always contains an element of the unexpected. What is important
is that we, alone among the animals, can shape our future,
since to be human is not only to be creative but to have the
public institutions and policies which can make creativity
a force for the betterment of all.
Published by RBC Financial Group. All editions from the RBC
Letter collection are available on our web site at www.rbc.com/community/letter.
Our e-mail address is: rbcletter@rbc.com.
Publié aussi en francais.
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