Creativity and Truth

Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future

No philosophical task more defines the future of human understanding than finding an image that can effectively replace the Modern Age’s “great machine” image of reality’s workings. That a creative frame appears to offer a workable alternative is of no small significance. Creative System Theory proposes that not only is the functioning of human systems most generally, and human intelligence and human awareness more specifically, ultimately creative, so are the truths we draw on when we make effective decisions. It also proposes that what makes the new truths needed for times ahead new is that, with them, we become more directly conscious of this fact. Like with intelligence and awareness, truth—at least as we can know it—has always been creative, an expression of our toolmaking, meaning-making natures. But, again, seeing this directly would, in times past, have been more than we could have tolerated.

Integrative Meta-perspective’s more systemic picture of truth makes it possible for us to engage what matters in more explicit and complete ways—more humbly, but also in a manner that better takes all that creatively needs to be considered into account. Creative Systems Theory describes how a creative frame can be used to develop highly detailed and sophisticated new truth formulations. But the more basic recognition that the truths we use to make even the most everyday of human choices must be more consciously creative is ultimately just as significant.

The loss of traditional guideposts that comes with Cultural Maturity means that we must learn to address truths of all sorts in ways that are more bare-boned, separated from their cultural trappings. When we do so, we discover that truths that can usefully guide us are necessarily less once-and-for-all and less readily pinned down than the sort we have known. When we add Cultural Maturity’s cognitive changes, we begin to recognize, too, that such truth is more obviously generative and deeply ordered than we could have before understood. We could say, simply, that the truths we necessarily use to make decisions—of every sort—become more explicitly creative.

The topics of love and leadership get considerable attention in my writings. (See the Cultural Maturity Blog.)  I describe how each today is coming to manifest in ways that are more explicitly systemic. Rather than “two-halves-make-a-whole” dynamics based on projection, we see in each case the possibility of relating more fully as whole systems. Love and leadership also provide particularly striking examples of the way today’s new realities make it increasingly essential that we be conscious of the fact that truth is ultimately creative. In each case, we must draw more and more on newly creative sorts of truth if we are to make good choices.

Let’s start with love. Traditionally, we’ve described the causalities that define love from one of two polar vantages. We’ve framed love in everyday, cause-and-effect, I-do-this-to-you/you-do-this-to-me interactional (ultimately mechanical) terms. Alternatively, we’ve drawn on more romantic language and framed love in terms of magic and oneness; in the extreme, as somehow “fated.” It is more accurate to think of love’s causalities—and the causalities that order relationships of any sort—as creative. Love is about being together in ways that make us mutually more alive—more generative and purpose filled.

Love’s truths have always been creative in this sense, but recognizing this fact directly would before have overwhelmed us and, in the process, made love impossible. We’ve been saved by the way in which cultural guideposts, along with more traditional ways of thinking about how love works, have both protected us from the full implications of this creative picture and ensured that love’s creative workings functioned in safe and reliable ways.

Today, the ability to think of love more directly—in terms of what ultimately makes it love—becomes increasingly important. The most obvious reason is today’s loss of traditional guideposts. Love in the absence of clear external rules requires that we make our choices in terms of our best sense of what will be ultimately most life affirming—we could say most ultimately creative. But that is only one piece of it. In addition, there is how the romantic ideal—in which we project parts of ourselves onto the other and relate as two halves that together make a whole—is giving way in our time to the possibility of more full and complete kinds of relating.

We see a related set of changes in the truths needed to effectively guide culturally mature leadership. Traditionally we’ve tended to think of leadership in mechanical cause-and-effect terms—leaders lead, followers follow. Or, in idealizing our leaders, we’ve implied the same sort of more magical causality that we often apply to romantic love. Again, reality has in fact always been more interesting—more two-way and more creative. Leadership, in the end, is about approaches to social organization that at particular times and places are most likely to have generative outcomes.

In a similar way, addressing leadership’s larger creative implications directly today is becoming increasingly essential. Before now, confronting this more complex and less-easily-pinned-down picture directly would have been more than we could have handled. But again, today, we really have no choice. There is our loss of once-reliable principles to draw on. And there is also the way culturally mature leadership requires a more consciously responsible relationship to what are ultimately creative realities. We need to understand truth more creatively so that we can see our leadership choices with the necessary clarity. We also need to understand truth more creatively because such truth, when we are ready for it, reveals new (and newly necessary) creative possibilities.

We find additional support for a creative framing of truth in cutting-edge advances throughout the previous century—thinking in physics and biology that challenges classical assumptions, more developmental and systemic ideas in psychology, and breakthroughs in art that juxtapose perspectives in unexpected ways. The word “creative”—here used to refer to an overall worldview or paradigm—provides a simple, encompassing way to capture how such new ideas contrast with the more mechanistic notions that preceded them. Nobel chemist Ilya Prigogine beautifully articulated such an explicitly generative picture for the physical sphere with these words in his book, Order Out of Chaos: “Our physical world is no longer symbolized by the stable and periodic planetary motions that are at the heart of classical mechanics. It is a world of instability and fluctuations, which are ultimately responsible for the amazing richness of forms and structures we see in nature around us.”

In a similar way, creative imagery provides at least a good metaphorical description for much that is particular, and particularly

important, about the cutting edge of modern invention. How we think determines not just what we are capable of thinking, but also what we as toolmakers are capable of conceiving and executing. I’ve proposed that the advent of Modern Age thought was key to the great advances of the Industrial Age. Much of contemporary technical innovation begins to extend the traditional engineering picture into more creative territory. The hyperlinked, endlessly interactive structures of new information technologies, for example, make communication dynamic—and, in potential, creatively dynamic—at levels that a few short decades ago we could not have considered.

We can usefully apply a creative interpretation of truth directly to the broader significance of our time. If what most defines us is our creative, toolmaking abilities, then the new story required if we are to effectively proceed must be about creating more consciously and wisely. We can understand both the necessary new human story and the human skills needed to make that story manifest in terms of a new ability to stand back from, fully appreciate, and more responsibly apply the full complexity of our remarkable creative capacities.

Creative truth asks a lot of us. It is necessarily less predetermined, more demanding of responsibility, and more permeated both by change and complexity than what historically we have known. But when we are ready for it, creative truth makes the stretch it requires more than worthwhile. It reveals options that we could not before see. In the end, because it better includes all that needs to be considered, it makes possible ways of thinking that are more solid, nuanced, and precise than what they replace.