11: Human Conditions - Creativity
The three limbs of human creative action are knowledge, imagination, and experimentation.
Arguably, the most significant human priority is creativity, or the potential to change what is into what will be. We exercise creativity every time we take what currently exists and manipulate it in some way – adding, subtracting, combining, dividing, heating, cooling, or otherwise transforming – causing something new to emerge. Most living beings, even bacteria, instinctually engage in creative processes, as simple as cell division, or challenging and complex as spiders weaving webs, pregnant people giving birth, or structural social organisation. But what differentiates human creativity from that of bacteria, plants and animals is that ours is not only about novelty, but it is also about meaning. While the creativity of other beings is, we understand, based primarily on sense, memory and instinct, our creativity requires imagination, or the potential to envision possible alternative futures. As humans, we are meaning-making beings: our relatively enlarged neocortexes, particularly the prefrontal regions that have expanded far beyond those of other mammals, give us the capacity for this conceptual thought. Our societies instruct us in language and offer various concepts that we use to interpret the world around us and our position and actions in it. Creativity, then, is a means of processing and expressing this information, which allows us to self-actualise, to reach our potential as human beings.
Some of the oldest and most durable of our meaning making structures are stories, which for millenia have been how we come to understand and make sense of our experiences, both individual and collective. Nearly all cultures have a creation myth, or a story that accounts for how we came to be. Though the stories themselves differ, our shared tendency towards a creation story as foundational mythology offers evidence for the centrality of creativity to human nature. Many of our ancestors worshiped a creator god or goddess, from Obatala of West Africa, to Baathala of the native Filipinos. The tales of how gods and goddesses made the world helped us grasp the unique human capacity to intake sensory or verbal information, then to feel, think, reflect and respond by transforming the world around us. We do this in so many ways: we play, plant, make tools, art, artefacts and weapons, build homes, villages, cities and technologies. Our creativity involves and indeed, requires, both structure and openness, engineering and emergence.
The three limbs of human creative action (and our creativity is expressed in action) are knowledge, imagination, and experimentation: knowledge about what is, imagination about what could be, and the experimentation that gets us from one to the other. The creative process begins with our knowledge about what is. This we understand in terms of lived experience, facts, assumptions, and discourses, which are interconnected threads of semi-shared meaning that make up wider social reality. Imagination comes into play as we ideate between the desirable and the possible, and then apply and evaluate our labour in creative experimentation.
But currently, the knowledge and imagination that so greatly informs our sense of experimentation is clouded by erroneous information about the relationship of the individual to the collective. Our task, then, as intersectional mystics, is to re-claim our innate creativity back from extractivist processes that seek to hijack our imaginations, strip them from our labour, and dull them with empty promises of individual fame and glory. We must reinvigorate our imaginations with the food needed to conceive of a future beyond late capitalism, transforming the current oppressive and exploitative system into one where our connections to the Earth and each other are tended to and regenerated continuously through our creative labour.
Evidently our big brains, survival orientation and our search for meaning have together served us in our evolution to become an apex predator species in the global hierarchy of being. However, the social and economic systems that we currently live under reflect hundreds of years of authoritarian, masculinist, white imperialist and settler-colonial capitalist, quasi-capitalist and pseudo-communist influences, all of which are toxic distortions of the human survival orientation and fundamental misappropriations of our meaning making capacity.
Our capacities for creativity can deeply warped under social systems that do not serve us; as these systems shape our choices, we use our collectively warped creativity to morph them into new forms. How capitalism has morphed in Global North countries, which since colonisation have had an outsize influence on the working of the global economy and continue to do so in damaging ways, is to a neoliberal model in which competition and market logics are centred, and the natural relationship of the individual to the collective appears inverted, such that the collective is seen to be dependent on the individual rather than the other way around.
It is easy to believe that there is no alternative to the continual mindlessness, violence, artificiality and destruction that characterises much of modern society. Capitalism may have had some basis in material reality; the accumulation of goods and other sources of value for survival purposes seems a reasonable instinctual response to a harsh world in which survival is not guaranteed. Animal groups tend to fight amongst themselves for scarce resources – even puppies and kittens clamber over each other in their desperation for milk. But today, self-interest, typically tempered through processes of socialisation, has – through decades of contradictory meaning making prioritising the individual over the collective – been permitted to drive our stories. We tell ourselves untruths – for example, that barter and exchange was more typical in pre-monetary societies than debt, or that social Darwinism is natural. In fact, Graeber (2011) argues, debt was an important technology of social relation meant to keep us connected to each other – yet it, too, has been warped by capitalism into a means of social control.
A related untruth is that what most matters in life is the accumulation of money, which in reality is nothing but bits of metal, pieces of paper, or numbers on computers in banks that are profoundly disconnected from the actual reproduction and sustenance of life on Earth. Yet we have imbued it with meaning such that it has become the ultimate source of Earthly power and privilege. Because under this system, we need money to survive, it profoundly shapes our relationship to creativity and the functions for which we use it. It’s no secret that creativity is the cause celebre of neoliberal capitalism – for, with its unrelenting and unrealistic profit-and-growth imperative, capitalism in the 21st century is poised to use machines to make much human labour obsolete, as has been the case since the industrial revolution. In such a society, creativity is likely to be the highly rewarded provenance of an elite few. Here a key market truism holds: the less creativity is on offer, the rarer and more desirable it becomes. Thus capitalism is an enemy of human creativity, as it continually co-opts it to serve destructive rather than generative or healing purposes.
But to reclaim our creativity from this extractive system, we must be willing to experiment. The path between what is and what will be is made of situations for which there are few models, so we cannot predict the outcome. Nevertheless, many people suppress their creativity because in contemporary society creative output is continually evaluated and judged with likes and comments, and we are expected to embody and produce perfection while making it look easy. Yet to engage in the experimentation that links our creativity with our imaginations takes courage, which Brené Brown (2013) argues inherently requires vulnerability, or emotional exposure in the context of uncertainty and risk. The risk and uncertainty can be so terrifying that we refuse to be vulnerable, and that means refusing to be creative, to do something altogether new and institute growth and change in our lives.
Genuine creativity cannot emerge if we hide from the chance to develop it by denying ourselves the opportunity to show up. But because we tend to do what is most familiar, relying on our tried-and-tested neural pathways of risk and reward, we must resist the inertia and stagnancy that keeps us from self-actualisation through creativity. To give our creative experimentation the greatest potential for success, we can institute habits and practices in our lives that offer regular opportunities for our creativity to, as psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi so aptly described, flow. Structure is required in order for us to, as adrienne maree brown (2019) frames it, answer internal calls to realise the creative potentials alive inside of us. Because creativity tends to be associated with freedom, it is perhaps counterintuitive that the habits and practices that support our creativity are instituted in our lives through a combination of discipline and willpower. Prolific creatives, from Charles Darwin to J Dilla, Ursula Le Guin to Stephen King, relied on personalised daily routines to meet the needs of their unique creative processes. This paradox reveals a deeper spiritual truth: true creative freedom emerges within appropriate boundaries, contained securely within capacious frameworks that nurture individual creative practices while enabling collective flourishing.
References
· Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The first 5,000 years. Melville House.
· Brown, B. (2015) daring greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. New York: Avery.
· brown, a.m. and Brown, A. (2019) Sashay Away from Supremacy with Matt McGorry. How to Survive the End of The World Podcast. 6 Dec. Available at:
Further Reading
Csíkszentmihályi, M. (2022) Flow: The Psychology of Happiness. London: Rider.
Federici, S. (2019). Re-enchanting the world: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. PM Press.
Federici, S. (2018). Witches, Witch Hunting, and Women. PM Press.
Pettifor, A. (2018). The Production of Money. Verso.
Pinkola Estés, C. 1992/2008. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman. London: Rider.
Wynter, Sylvia. "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument." CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3 no. 3, 2003, p. 257-337. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.