In the 1950s, psychologists sought to define a previously unclear phenomenon. To what should they attribute a stroke of inspiration? Or the birth of a new idea? Surely the invention of something new—whether a work of art, a scientific hypothesis, or a technical innovation—was driven by an underlying process?
As ideological tension increased between the United States and the Soviet Union, so too did the importance of efficiency and innovation through technology. Finding talent in the population seemed necessary. In competition with the Soviet collectivist enterprise, the United States favored a worldview based on one’s personality rather than on a centrally-oriented structure in which individuals relied on the innovations of the state rather than the private citizen. These Cold War technological and cultural imperatives are two explanations offered by Samuel W. Franklin in his new book, The Cult of Creativity, for the meteoric rise of “creativity” beginning in the 1950s. Franklin does not set out to define the term, but instead to document the history of the cultural phenomenon.
The saga begins at the end of World War II with the demand to identify and capitalize on talent in the general population so as to keep pace with innovation abroad. The early creativity researchers such as J. P. Guilford and Calvin Taylor supplemented traditional intelligence testing with a measure of “creative ability,” backed by the belief that everybody was capable of “creative acts”—not just a few greats. Society could thus capitalize on both individual cases of exceptional creativity and that which was generally available throughout the populace.
Yet the insistence that creativity was supposed to exist in “the commonplace and the sublime” stretched the concept thin. This paradox opened a new facet of “creativity research” unconcerned with productivity and societal progress. Humanistic psychologists such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow viewed creativity as a tool to search for “one’s true self” and to promote “self-actualization.” This understanding formally fused creativity with art: self-actualization took place as “person and product [i.e., their art] became one.”
Rogers and Maslow’s research took a different tack than earlier studies aimed at creative technological progress. To them, creativity through art was seen as “the antidote to the ills of industrial society,” as opposed to a way to win the Cold War through technological development. Their theory also assuaged fears of the societal minimization of “irrational and artistic” traits in the rush for scientific progress.
Furthermore, in the technoscience of the Cold War arms race, with the looming threat of a nuclear attack, the idea that creativity could help make innovation more ethical meant a newfound appreciation for the intersection of art and science and the “priestly role of the artist.” A 1958 issue of Scientific American featured Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks (1483–86) as a work of such creativity. The lead author, Jacob Bronowski, a Polish-British mathematician, believed Da Vinci was “the embodiment of the natural unity between science and art” because of the scientific accuracy in his technique. For Bronowski, the two fields overlapped significantly in their “esthetic sense of unity” and the personal engagement required from the individual.
Bronowski further points out that science and art thrived in societies that valued the achievements of individuals, such as in ancient Greece or in the city-states of the Italian Renaissance. These societies emphasized the role of the individual in comparison to those of medieval Eastern Europe, whose prominent architecture, for instance, is mostly anonymous. Bronowski conceptualizes the creative mind as that which seeks unity “given the infinite variety presented by Nature.” This variety is presented to scientists in the laws of nature and to artists in the possibilities of a blank canvas. The creative mind, given the freedom available within certain societies, is able to distill this variety into a cohesive narrative in either science or art.
The new concept of creativity, however, always seemed to find its way back to the drive for progress—such as in the 1950s, with an artistic bent in the advertising industry. This industry became a haven for the creative man whose skills were newly appreciated by corporations as an artistic way to manufacture desire in consumers. Many advertisements took on an anti-consumerist sentiment, as seen in ones that used psychedelic imagery. Distinctly American companies such as Ford or PepsiCo shifted from a bare-bones “reason-why” advertising style to one based on visual captivation, using vibrant, deeply saturated swirls of pinks, yellows, and blues.
Although Franklin’s discussion of the history of creativity is thorough, his conclusion, like his understanding of creativity itself, is indefinable and elusive:
But a little shift back to an appreciation of the power of collective goals, to an ethic of care and maintenance, a love of art not necessarily for art’s sake but for more than just a stimulus of new ideas, a respect for thoughtful research and knowledge, and above all the space to question the goodness of the new might just be the big idea we need right now.
Regardless of his conclusion’s tenuous connection to the rest of the narrative, the “power of collective goals” is at odds with his understanding of creativity, which is hard-pressed to thrive in collective settings. As the sociologist William Whyte and other critics of the practice of group brainstorming tell us, people “talk together, they exchange information, they adjudicate, they make compromises; but they do not think; they do not create.”
Franklin’s conclusion of a collective “ethic of care and maintenance” emphasizes the opposite of what Bronowski and Whyte suggest to be useful for the creative mind: individualistic settings. Perhaps a more apt conclusion would be for us to prioritize fostering these settings by providing opportunities to seek and create, instead of burdening the individual with societal demands of collective care and maintenance. For Bronowski, such opportunities for creativity “emancipate from the laws of time, from the chaos of the universe. A triumph over death!”