CHILDHOOD TOYS AND SOCIETAL CREATIVITY
During my childhood, my parents’ backyard was a little boy’s dream. Full-sized playground swing set, a large maple tree that was perfect for building forts in, spruce trees that were perfect for climbing, a corner of the yard that was designated for digging, a sandbox, and a wooden fence that often doubled as a wild-west stockade. Through the imaginations of my younger brother and I, that backyard was transformed into virtually every imaginable place and time period, for virtually every situation. The many hours spent in imaginative play in our backyard, plus the encouragement of my parents to find better, yet still proper, ways of doing things, instilled in my siblings and I something that has and will continue to play a fundamentally important role in our lives. Creativity. One of the fundamental aspects of the human thought process, creativity allows flexibility and agility on the road to finding a better way, a different way, or sometimes even any way at all. Creativity is important for home life, business success, artistic expression, and political or social problem solving. Those societies that successfully enjoy the full richness of the individual’s powers of creativity are those societies that posses the social, educational, legal, and cultural conditions necessary to encourage and allow both the development and the expression of creativity. Though the power of creativity is hardwired into the brain of every child, it can be stifled, or, even more tragically, lost. Each of the four societal conditions above interacts with creativity in a different way and can substantially alter either the expression or development of the individual’s creative powers.
In a societal setting, individual creativity manifests itself in a variety of different forms. These forms are private creativity, social or public creativity, business creativity, and artistic creativity. Private creativity is that which is exercised around friends, at home, and in personal affairs. Social or public creativity is that which is used to develop solutions to public issues in a non-business sense. This type of creativity would be used in a neighborhood council, a church, a school board, or even in politics to solve observed problems. Artistic creativity is what most people think of when they hear the word “creative” – performing and writing music, painting, sculpture, acting, and writing. Business creativity is that power necessary to find innovative solutions to marketing, production, and entrepreneurial issues. Though all four types of creativity can be lost over time as children are raised in an institutional and cultural structure hostile to creative development, it is business and public creativity that are most susceptible to restrictions on their expression. Private and artistic creativity largely take place out of the public eye, unobserved, and thus can persist despite rigid, unyielding, and unimaginative social structures, but business and public creativity exist to work change in the public eye and are thus easily squelched, even unintentionally, by burdensome legal, social, and cultural conditions. It is these easily destroyed expressions of creativity in public and business practices that are vital for the long-term health of any economic system.
For years, my younger brother and I enjoyed nailing guns together from wood and playing with them. Though we each had our favorites, each time we began to run short of the necessary pieces to fabricate our next idea, out came the hammer and pliers as we tore apart those rifles that just did not meet the grade anymore. Just as wood scraps of the proper shape and size were in short supply for my brother and myself, at any given time certain resources and qualified people with the proper experience are scarce in the nation’s economy as well. Rather than require that these people and resources remain occupied in a non-benefit maximizing fashion, the structure of the market and society needs to be willing to let – nay, needs to encourage – the failure of those businesses that are not providing the maximum benefit to society. In this way, in addition to natural resource growth, resources are released and freed for new business ventures and ideas. If my brother and I had not been willing to dismantle those rifles that we enjoyed less than we expected to enjoy our next creation, none of the rifles that became our favorites would have been made – including the wooden rifle that still stands in a closet at my parents’ house. This is precisely what is needed to maintain a healthy economy – a certain amount of turmoil and motion.[1] Business ventures need the freedom to start and to fail; only in this way can any economy achieve the greatest chance of discovering those ideas that actually work. Creativity comes into play in developing new business ideas, new ways of doing things.
Conversely, the more the natural motion of the economic “tide” is distorted, either by restricting the expression of business creativity in the implementation of new ideas or by artificially supporting failed business ventures – thereby tying up resources, the more stagnant the economy will become; outdated, inefficient, and lacking real, meaningful, growth. To avoid this result social, cultural, and legal structures must exist which protect individual effort and investment without seeking to maintain the status quo. Governmental regulations are especially suspect in this, often burdening entrepreneurs with “red tape”, requirements, and punishments for being “too successful” that reduce the entrepreneur’s creative agility.
Public creativity is also subject to many of the same influences. Though the blame largely shifts from government regulatory structures to social and cultural institutions, all too often individuals are prohibited from using their public or social creativity to solve a problem simply because “it has never been done like that before” or some other such reason. The result is a host of ideas in government and public life that were workable or the best available at some point in the past but which now have been superseded and should be replaced.
In the words of F.A. Hayek, and applicable to both business and public creativity; “It is in the pursuit of man's aims of the moment that all the devices of civilization have to prove themselves; that the ineffective is discarded and the efficient handed on. And this is the point, but it is important to have as large of a selection of ideas and possibilities to be chosen from as possible.”[2] Only through allowing and encouraging the use of creative powers in public and business life can a large selection of diverse ideas be obtained for society to choose from. Though repressed creativity in these areas would be disastrous for an economy, far worse can happen.
Some social and regulatory factors can restrict the expression or utilization of creative powers to solve business, economic, and political problems, but other social factors can restrict or prohibit altogether the very development of creativity in the individual. It is this result that is far more damaging, because once an individual has grown up without creativity being a part of his or her life, it is extraordinarily difficult to develop that creativity regardless of how hospitable the legal, regulatory, social, and cultural conditions may be. Though creativity is hardwired into the mind of every child, it needs to be exercised. If society stifles expressions of creativity in business and society, creativity can survive for a while, but will perish in less than one generation as children are unable to observe creativity and the use of creative solutions in day-to-day life. Here the educational structure of a society comes into play. Along with the example provided by adults, education has an important role in nourishing the natural creative drive.
The education system – whatever form it takes – must both allow creativity and yet provide structure. It is completely true that creativity, unconstrained by appropriate restraints, is destructive. Simply allowing children to “creatively” avoid truly doing their schoolwork only teaches avoidance and poor work habits, but encouraging creative ways to find the proper solution, the right solution, now that, that is how education can truly help foster creativity in a society. This responsibility is not limited to primary and secondary education – colleges and universities also serve to enhance individuals’ creative powers through pushing them to find solutions to ever more difficult puzzles. Enhancing and training natural creative powers is vital to ensuring that those abilities will be available for future use in the economic and social realms.
One of the primary ends of creativity is to better society, all of society.[3] Towards this end, a full realization of the individual’s creative powers requires a legal structure that protects human and capital investment while not weighing entrepreneurs down and decreasing their social and business ‘agility’. Society and culture must encourage flexibility. Even more important, social and cultural factors must celebrate, allow, and encourage change. An acceptance to change encourages creativity by rewarding it and actually allowing the creative solution to be applied. Finally, children must be encouraged and allowed to be creative in play and education through their years of growth. Only in this way will children grow into adults who have creative solutions ingrained in their thought process for access later in life. Though social, cultural, legal, and educational institutions can greatly dampen creativity, they can also greatly enhance the same. Creativity is too precious a commodity, a resource, to be squandered and suppressed by those who believe they know best for society.[4] It was creativity that allowed me to see my parent’s backyard as a zoo, a battlefield, the Wild West, or frozen tundra. It is now creativity that allows me to find interesting and sometimes unique methods of solving the puzzles posed by the graduate school faculty. One day, it will be creativity that assists me in finding answers to economic and social issues for the betterment of those around me and myself. May we all never lose that creative spark that inhabited our childhood play.
[1] Unseem, Churn, Baby, Churn
[2] Hayek, F.A. 1958. The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization
[3] Hayek, F.A. 1958. The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization
[4] Postrel, Virginia. The Future and Its Enemies
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