INDIVIDUALITY AND CREATIVITY

PART 5, FURTHER ARCHEOLOGY OF EARLY FEDERAL POPULIST SCHOLARSHIP

Brief programming note: I’ve just become a grandfather and am focusing a lot of my energy on helping out the new parents and enjoying my lovely new grandchild; so posts here will become a bit scarce for the next while. I am still squeezing in a little reading when I can. So once back, I’ll hit the ground running. It just could be a while.

This is my final instalment from my broad-reading of Nisbet. I’ve found this digression fascinating; I hope it’s been of value to the readers here as well.

In case it’s not clear yet, Nisbet clearly places himself on the side of Innis’ time biased society. He sees not only inherent virtue in preservation or revitalization of organic community, with its concrete institutions, traditions and customs. He also believes it is the necessary antidote to pervasive human suffering that has resulted from the erosion of a society of polycentric authority and multiple associational belonging. Toward that purpose, he has taken on some of the common arguments for the virtues of individualism.

A couple of these don’t seem to me to warrant review. They strike me as either obvious, as in his argument for the incompatibility between individualism and religion, or well worn, as in his argument against the myth that free market capitalism is premised on the monadic individual. At least since Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, up to Patrick Deneen today, the recognition that capitalism cannibalizes pre-capitalist personality, rooted in the bonds of communal life, consuming the very virtues it requires to persist, has been illustrated so often that I don’t feel any need to repeat it here.

There is though one argument in defense of de-associated individualism which I haven’t seen addressed before — at least not that I can recall. So, I’ll take this last post on Nisbet to demonstrate his refutation of the argument that great creativity requires the deracinated individual. Here, as usual, I’ll let Nisbet do most of the talking. He starts off by describing the position:

a separation between the individual and authority has commonly been found the secret of the cultural freedom and prosperity of the world's great ages.

The birth of new ideas, of art forms, of technologies, the discovery of new sources of wealth, all of this has behind it—so the argument runs—the individual escaping his social group, his class, family, and community. Such relationships may give security but do not excite the imagination. Great ages of intellectual achievement are always ages of disorder, for the displacement of moral and social cohesion is but the reverse side of the release of the creative individual.

In his interesting book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, K. R. Popper has recently held up to us once again the rationalist's view of the problem of freedom as it manifests itself in cultural achievement. Like many before him, Popper sees the great age of Athens in the fifth century B.C. and the modern Renaissance in Western Europe as ages of “individualism.” What is central to Popper is the vision of a society in intellectual ferment, in persistent critical self-analysis, and in a perpetual outburst of individual expression. These are ages, he argues, recently released from the dead hand of tradition, membership, and tribalism. For Popper the greatness of Athens was at its very apogee when the Sophists and Socrates, among others, were declaring their relentless hostility toward all forms of moral or social interdependence.

Nisbet concedes that this argument is not without merit, but moves on to identify its lacunae:

The rationalist argument is a plausible one and inevitably attractive to all who find the greatest repressions of society to lie in the smallest and most personal of interdependences. But it raises certain difficulties.

We readily grant that it is the freedom of persons which is crucial in any period of intellectual achievement. Great works of art or literature are not created by anonymous organizations. They are the concrete results of personal performance. But from the obvious centrality of the person in intellectual or cultural achievement it follows neither that such achievement is the sole consequence of innate individual forces, nor that it is the result merely of processes of separation.

We are not justified in disregarding the profoundly important interdependences between the artist and his city, his locality, his religion, or the various other communal influences that give his work its inspiration and direction. The greatness of Athenian tragedy may have been the consequence, in considerable degree, of an increasing detachment which made it possible for an Aeschylus, a Sophocles, or Euripides to dramatize the great moral problems of their time. But these tragedies were also the consequence of profound and deeply evocative relationships with the communal contexts of Greek religion, kinship, and the community. To emphasize one set of psychological facts at the expense of the other is small contribution to that total picture of the conditions of cultural achievement which we seek.

He then uses Popper’s own example to illustrate his case:

If individual detachment and release are the crucial elements of cultural achievement, we should expect to find a constant increase in the quality of the Athenian culture that extended beyond the age of Pericles into the age following the Peloponnesian Wars. In any tangible sense of the word, this was the age of moral and social “individualism.” This age, which Sir Gilbert Murray, Rostovtzeff, and Glotz have described for us in such melancholy fashion, was assuredly an age of individualism, measured in terms of the individual's release from the constraints and symbolism of the past. But it was increasingly an age of cultural sterility, of “failure of nerve,” of philosophical morbidity. It is also pertinent to observe that this was an age of mounting political despotism.

As with the enthusiast of unfettered free markets, who ignores both the communally nurtured social trust necessary for the effective culture of reciprocal contract and respect for private property, and turns a blind eye to how the relentless commercialization and commodification of community, family, and private life erodes the conditions for such social trust; likewise, the proponents of creativity as the fruits of deracinated individualism completely overlook the communal substrate that nurture and provide meaning for creative endeavors and their products.  

This is not to deny the role of the individual, nor the reality of personal differences. It is assuredly not to accept the argument of crude social determinism—which asserts that creative works of individuals are but the reflection of group interests and group demands. It is merely to insist on the fundamental fact that the perspectives and incentives of the free creative mind arise out of communities of purpose. The artist may alter these, reshape them, give them an intensity and design that no one else has ever given them or ever will give them, but he is not thereby removed from the sources of his inspiration.

Only in the modern European world, and largely under the influence of romantic intensifications of the individualist hypothesis, has there arisen in popular form the myth of the artist as solitary, lonely, and dependent for his genius only upon what he spins from his inner consciousness. The notion that artistic achievement is always connected in some degree with rootlessness and alienation, that art itself is asocial, has been singularly effective in disguising the actual contexts of creative imagination.

The free artist, scientist, or teacher is always, in some degree, involved in the contexts of communication and association. His may be a detached position; he may be the recipient of impulses sent out from a variety of fields; he may live, more than do most of us, toward the periphery of his community and thus be in more sensitive nearness to other communities. But what is crucial to the creator is not release or separation, not inward withdrawal, but imagination feeding upon diverse social and cultural participation.

There are certainly pros and cons to both space and time biased societies (see here). Everything is about tradeoffs. However, given the greater control over our information-dense world exercised by the ventriloquist managerial class, it is important for those who would pursue a more time biased society – be that expressed as a form of federal populism, or some other social order – to be vigilant against the self-serving inclinations of space biased phenotypes to presume to attribute to their own social preferences all the virtuous qualities of human life. This question of creativity is just one such battleground. As noted, Nisbet has explored many of them.

As mentioned above, it may be a while before I get back on a regular schedule here. For those interested, inspired by Nisbet, I’m doing a bit of a dive into the thought of Max Weber: inspiration for the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental rationality and related bureaucratization of human life. Indeed, it’s becoming clear to me that Weber’s analysis of rationalization dovetails beautifully with Innis’ critique of space biased society. So, watch out for that (if indeed that is what I write about next), and if you haven’t yet, and want to know about it, when I’m back in the saddle, please…

And if you know anyone who you think would enjoy such discussions, please…