The People of the Creative Self

Most ordinary Americans do not raise their sights above the notion of ordinary life: following the rules, going to work, obeying the law. You might call it the agenda of ordinary human flourishing: forming families, owning property, doing it for the children. 

But some people, as Charles Taylor writes, yearn for something higher, fuller -- you know -- creative. In his Sources of the Self Taylor calls this experience "expressive individualism." These are people that want to live a creative life, maybe as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary. They don't want to follow the rules, they want to discover new rules. They don't just want to go to work, they want to reinvent work. They don't just obey the laws; they want to make new ones. In their religion humans, not gods, are now become the creators of the world.

I call such people the People of the Creative Self.

It is important to understand how radically new and revolutionary this is.

Back in the old days humans understood that they lived under the sway of powerful gods and spirits that might, at any moment destroy them, just because. Then, in the Axial Age, humans invented new gods that created the world, announced a book of rules -- a Ten Commandments or a Hammurabi's Code -- and left humans to get on with it.

But now, with the marriage of science and technology, it seems that humans can create their own world, that with human intelligence and creativity and scientific knowledge we can fashion the world ourselves. we don't need a god to create the world and then set forth the rules; we can invent the future; we can set the rules. Gods need not apply.

But not everyone. It is clear, from the fact of oppressed peoples and other marginalized humans, that some people still experience the world as a chaotic place under the sway of malevolent forces. It is clear from the emergence of middle-class populism that there are a lot of people that just want to be told the rules so they can get on with it.

So the People of the Creative Self are a minority, but an influential minority, because they are the most educated, the most evolved. And, since their culture encourages them to create and imagine they naturally reinvent everything, from architecture to business to politics to sex. 

There is a tendency in creative people to imagine themselves as "free spirits" as opposed to the rest of mankind's "fettered spirits." As Nietzsche says in Human, All Too Human, 

He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him. He is the exception, the fettered spirits are the rule[.]

Nietzsche doesn't like the "fettered spirit," especially because of its tendency to anathematize the "free spirit" and the "free spirit's" tendency "to shock and offend... in actions incompatible with sound morals." 

As a rule, though, [the free spirit] will nonetheless have truth on his side, or at least the spirit of inquiry after truth: he demands reasons, the rest demand faith.

Thing is, of course, that any creative work, successful or unsuccessful, will cause what Joseph Schumpeter so famously called "creative destruction." Creative destruction means that people are going to get caught in the undertow. If you start a business with a brilliant new invention, then it is likely to put people out of work in other businesses. If you implement a brilliant political idea, it may change the world for the better and inaugurate a glorious era or peace and prosperity, or it may change the world for the worse and cause millions of deaths and ruin tens of millions of lives. Moreover, it is also true, for instance in business startups, that many are called but few are chosen. Most creative endeavors, whether in business or politics or the arts, end in failure.

As Nietzsche teaches, if you want to be creative you have to be hard. You also have to cast off the Christian culture of Good and Evil. That's because the creative project necessarily goes Beyond Good and Evil. It accepts the basic fact of all living things: the will to power; my life and my posterity over your life and your posterity. If I am to create something new, well, I will have to break some eggs to make an omelette. This is perhaps better understood in the Jungian notion that creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin; if you are working on a creative project then you are also involved in project to destroy something else. 

This truth has not yet penetrated to the heart of the People of the Creative Self. They are creative because they were raised to be creative. To them, a normal life is a creative life, full of interesting challenges and projects. Nobody has taught them that creativity is hard, and likely to fail. They tend to think of themselves as the beneficent Oz spreading goodness and light everywhere. They are concerned about the Precautionary Principle where fossil-fuel companies are concerned, but not with respect to their own creative plans.

But creative people run the world: get used to it.

Google Diversity: The Rage for Meaning

We humans insist that life has a meaning. We are not satisfied to be born and to die, to be a link in the Great Chain of Being. We want to be the link in the Great Chain of Being.

Thus is it not enough for Google to be a hugely successful tech company that provides knowledge to the world through its search technology.

No, Google longs for something fuller, higher than that. Indeed Google follows the instruction  of liberal Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. We humans, he argues must follow a dual track, as I retail in An American Manifesto.

First, we recognize the importance of ordinary human flourishing: forming families, owning property, doing it for the children. Second, we recognize that we all search for something higher and fuller.

So it is not enough for Google to assist in ordinary human flourishing with cool technology and Google Photos and Google Drive and Android and Uncle Tom Cobbley. Google searches for something higher and fuller.

And if you are an ordinary successful tech billionaire in tune with the Zeitgeist, that means diversity. But, argues Taylor

To balance these goals, we must define our moral aspirations in terms that do not “crush, mutilate or deny what is essential to our humanity... [and] fully respect ordinary human flourishing.” He proposes to balance the ideal with the practical, to recognize that secular utopianism belongs in the same bin as religious millennarianism: Plato’s Republic, medieval monasticism and the Bolshevik “new Soviet man;” all of them crush and mutilate ordinary human flourishing. 

Hello SJWs!

Back in the old days, liberals used to fulminate about conservatives "legislating morality." Today, we read of people anxious that the Google guy that issued a ten-page manifesto that was equivocal about diversity should be named and shamed and fired for his apostasy.

The French have a  word for this: Plus ça change. The more it changes, the more it stays the same.

What I say is that diversity is a grand and noble idea. Except when it is accompanied by force. So, I don't like the idea of government universities playing race and gender politics, because  that means enforcing someone's idea of diversity with force.

And it is the most pathetic conceit for a big corporation like Google to imagine that it is in the business  of anything other than ordinary human flourishing.

It is very hard to balance ordinary human flourishing with something higher and fuller. Time and time again in human history, the folks longing for something higher have spindled and mutilated the folks that disagree with them.

But you knew that.

Defining the Modern Foundation

I’ve been reading liberal Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor recently, for a very simple reason.  I want to know the best that liberals can think.

Then I want to write about how liberals every day in every way betray and corrupt their principles in the vanity of their corrupt and hypocritical rule.

So let’s look at this quote from the end of Sources of the Self and tease it out a little.  Taylor is talking about the “moral imperatives” of our “modern culture.”

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.

He means that the central driving forces of our modern culture are our faith in freedom, in helping others, and in valuing and honoring the trajectory of ordinary life, the life of work and family, of marriage and children.  This last item is new, because in the old days ordinary life was considered rather demeaning.  Only the higher life, the courageous life of the warrior or the bios theoretikos of the philosopher was worthy of respect.

Taylor marshals three sources of meaning that underpin the moral imperatives.  They include the inheritance of Judeo-Christian religion.  In his formulation, perhaps the most significant contribution of theistic religion has been the banishment of magic to the periphery.  There are no longer good and evil spirits wielding their power in the world.  Only God.

Then there is the influence of modern science, what he calls “disengaged reason,”  Everyone knows how science permeates everything we think and do. 

And finally there is “Romantic expressivism.”  All of us, even conservatives, are driven by the Romantic notion of the creative individual, creating something new, breaking the mold, making a mark, challenging the status quo.

We conservatives believe in a balanced faith in all these notions and symbols.  Our liberal friends do not.   We conservatives believe in a balanced faith in freedom, in helping others, and in the trajectory of ordinary life through youth, marriage, children, career, and old age.  And we believe that life should be lived as far as possible outside the orbit of force and compulsion.  Our liberal friends believe in universal compulsion.

We conservatives believe in a balanced application of religious values, of science, and of creativity.  Our liberal friends do not.  They believe in self-expression in a consuming cult of creativity, in science when it supports their creative life, and religion when it agrees with their secular pursuit of power.  All these things are for them alone.  Other people must do what they are told.

We all agree on the same things.  It’s just that liberals don’t believe in living up to their principles.  That’s because they have the power, the interior lines on political and cultural power.  As George Maroutsos says: You don’t have power unless you’ve abused it.  Power without abuse is just responsibility.

Excited?  So was General “Chesty” Puller when it was reported that his Marines were almost surrounded.  We’ve got them just where we want them, he growled.