Creativity and sub-creation: a ramble through the junk house of my brain

I spent some time thinking idly this morning - always a dangerous activity!  Yesterday I watched a video interview of Sir Ken Robinson in France - he spoke in English with French sub-titles.

Here it is:  Créativité avec Sir Ken Robinson


I don't intend to engage with his ideas on creativity here, but simply to note as a cultural historian that  'creativity' is an interesting concept to engage with in the study of religion.  Dr. Robinson [notice my segue into Brit style determination to use proper titles!  To go off on a wild tangent - I recall in the early 70s,  English newspapers referring to Fidel Castro as Dr. Castro because he had an honorary doctorate...]  Anyway.... I don't intend to engage with his contention that every human is creative, but that our schools squash that over time.  What I do intend to engage with is that some people are indeed creative in different ways.

I am not either, going to get into the debate over creativity in terms of Catholic vs. Protestant - Weber has fierce and pointed critics enough here.  But, this morning I was mentally caressing the Robinson video and up popped Martin Luther into my mind.  He was religiously creative.  That is, he took existing elements of western Christianity, aka Roman Catholicism, and moved the pieces around, gave new emphasis to some, and rejected others to create a new form.  I am also avoiding another debate here - was his new form actually an old form reborn as he claimed? Anyway, it was new and creative within the context of the 16th century.  His creation caused the then standard form to become creative itself and move around bits and pieces and rejig generally.

Then, of course, I thought of J.R.R. Tolkien.  Why, you might ask?  Well, Tolkien insisted that we humans are not creative in an essential sense, but rather we are sub-creative.  That is, we re-arrange already created elements of this world.  We do not do anything 'de nihilo' [for those Latin-challenged who might happen to arrive at this blog - this means loosely translated, 'out of nothing'].  Even if you go down to the physical level of quarks.. or atoms etc... they exist already.... to  use modern advertising parlance, they are pre-enjoyed.  We merely alter them to sub-create.  If indeed, we humans are made in the image of God, the creator, then of course we must sub-create as a function of our very essence as human.

There is a battle over to what degree should we change anything?  What, if anything, is left sacrosanct, and what is allowable in terms of change...

My next set of ruminations looked at the tendency of the 'western' world to give special privilege to creativity in all areas - not without protest!  That is the essence of what we call conservativism - meaning simply to conserve....and there is a constant tension between liberalism - the tendency to liberate ideas from constraints and conservatism, the tendency to conserve and change as little as necessary.  Both are human traits.... but we  honour the sub-creators generally over the conservators.

Anyway... off to more mundane tasks now that I would love to change... but alas, cannot...

Religion and Beauty

While doing my morning routine, I watched a YouTube video on classical Indian architecture, focussing on temples.  This got me to thinking about the old chestnut that the prime impact of religion on humanity is warfare.  This, to an historian, is of course demonstrable nonsense, but it is a meme that endures nonetheless.  The video got me thinking about the true impact of religion, speaking generally, on humanity. Religion has introduced another level of beauty into an already beautiful earth.  We humans take that which is here and refashion it according to our imaginations.  We sub-create, to use the term coined by J.R.R. Tolkien. Only divinity truly creates and myself being a Christian, I would say only God creates.  Humanity sub-creates, that is, we take creation and being in the image of God, we refashion it into various forms of beauty.

I cast my mind and memory over examples of religious architecture.  Gothic cathedrals, Quaker meeting houses, grand mosques, Hindu temples, all represent the highest forms of beauty ever produced by humanity.  Our secular architecture always pales next to the religious. Even that great evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins said that he would miss Hindu temples if religion were to vanish.   Add to this great endeavour, the arts:  painting, sculpture, calligraphy, metal working, poetry, music, dance.

Religion has as its face, beauty.

Happy

Happiness.  I came across this in a student's discussion post where he disputed the fact that First Nations' peoples may have  been 'happy' to convert to Christianity.  This got me thinking about happiness and our pursuit of it in this modern world.  The Americans have it built into their Constitution as a human right.. not happiness itself, but the pursuit of same.  I may be reading history badly, but I don't think happiness was a goal of human societies, or even of individuals until the Enlightenment.  This is not to say a society or an individual might not be happy, either generally, or on occasion. In another discussion in another class, a student brought up one of those statistical studies that float through the ether these days which stated firmly [being the result of scientific research] that the Danes are the happiest people on earth, while being amongst the least religious. I wonder what Hamlet would have thought?

Hmmmm......

Right brain/left brain and Religion/faith

For some years I was on a discussion list that purported to find a way to unity amongst Christian denominations.  At one time it had representatives from a range of churches, but in recent years there were mainly traditionalist Anglicans, some Catholics and occasional visits from extremists of various sorts.  It was going nowhere in terms of Christian unity, so I asked a Baptist friend who had no fear of engaging in dialogue to join as I wanted to  see what would  happen.  Well, it became obvious that the long term members could only think of  'the church' in terms of carefully defined and delineated structures, bound with clear rules. I could see at last why the purpose of this discussion list would never be realized, as they could not think outside the very precisely measured box they had constructed for themselves.

Today, I happened on a talk given by an English psychiatrist about the physical and mental structure and architecture of the human brain and mind - the old left brain/right brain dichotomy updated where the dichotomous was amputated from this understanding and replaced with a holistic view - but one which noted the particular features each hemisphere brought to this whole.

After watching it, I realized that the members of the fruitless discussion list all saw their faith from a left hemisphere dominant mode of thinking.  They were rational, but not reasoning - that is, they focussed on the particular and could not see the whole.  A properly functioning brain uses both to give us a full idea of the nature of life.  The left brain according to this psychiatrist [Dr. Iain McGilchrist] functions to focus narrowly and perceive in a wholly scientific mode - a kind of dissection of life into component parts, a view of life as a machine to be studied and which functions in a machine like fashion.  The right brain has the primary function of seeing holistically - of seeing life in a whole context.  Both are necessary to living, but our modern world gives primacy to the left hemisphere's view.  Hence we have constructed a world - which he opines began with the industrial revolution and the lifestyles necessary to the operation of industrialism - which has as its essence, the cogs in a machine view of life.  The now secondary right brain which sees life as a holistic, integrated, interoperating system, has been relegated to entertainment, rather than the serious business of functioning in the world.

Dr. McGilchrist did not talk about religion.  But immediately I began to see the left brain dominant position of the members of this list I had finally abandoned.

In religion, extremists are modernists in this sense - an irony indeed, in that they view religion as a rigid set of rules and practices that must be controlled and never deviated from - while ordinary believers, see religion in its context, as a part of a whole and full life, but which can be altered to fit reality, as it is part of reality.  A balanced mentality sees the left brain need for some structure, some large box to put it in those terms, or you do have chaos, but also sees that like all of life, context is vital and flexibility is more so to function within a context.

Anyway, I will probably view this talk again - and if I can scrape together the money, buy his book [alas, my finances are handled by my right hemisphere!].

I found the video in the excellent Big Ideas series by TVOntario - far better talks in my estimation that the much better known TED talks as the speakers here go into greater depth, not being limited to 10 or 15 minutes of sound bites while striding around a stage....

Here is the link:

Dr. Iaian Gilchrist: The Divided Brain

Statistics

Yesterday I showed some overall statistics for religions in the world, and more focussed numbers for Judaism to a class at the University of Guelph/Humber.  I made the usual cautions about the reliability of statistics and their use as only one tool in an historian's toolkit.  I then mentioned that stats are useful at least to give you broad indications of the place of religion in the world.  One statistic that stood out for me at the world wide level was for those with no affiliation - roughly 16% - which is about the same as appeared on Canada's 2001 census [the last reliable census data for religion in Canada BTW, perhaps forever....], and about the same proportion as social scientific data can winnow from surveys of Americans.  The statistic surprised me as I know from a recent article I read that there is a resurgence of religion in China, and other places where atheism had been imposed for some time.

I suppose it depends on  how one defines that difficult word, 'religion'.  Does it refer to the institutional aspect only?  Or does it refer primarily to that amorphous concept called faith?  Or both?  The study in Rethinking Secularism [edited by Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen] by Richard Madsen, Secularism, Religious Change, and Social Conflict in Asia reports that in Asia, religion was traditionally a matter of ritual that bound families and communities together and did not necessarily need belief in the western understanding of religion.  That is, an individual who willingly took part in religious rituals - Buddhist, Taoist, or even Christian, in China did not necessarily accept all or even any of the doctrinal bases of these faiths.  The individual had a cultural acceptance of the need for communal ritual to bind society, and usually, local society/community together.  There may well be a poignant faith in an unseen order, but there may also be only a residual belief in this, or even none whatsoever.

This is something I must think more about, as it might apply more to the western world than I would have thought - at least to the West before the Protestant Reformation.

Prince Charles, champion of the holistic approach to life

Seeing this, I began to realize that the great juggernaut of industrialization relies upon a somewhat aberrant kind of language–a man-made one–which articulates a world view that ignores Nature’s grammar. Much of the syntax of this synthetic language is out of synchrony with Nature’s patterns and proportions and this is why it so often jars with the language of Nature. This is why so many Modernist buildings don’t feel ‘right’ to so many people, even though they may find them clever; or perhaps why we feel uncomfortable with factory farming, even though it makes economic sense because it supplies such a lot of food at such low prices; or why we feel something is missing from a form of medicine that treats the body like a machine and does not accommodate the needs of the mind or the spirit.

I find, by contrast, that if people are encouraged to immerse themselves in Nature’s grammar and geometry–discovering how it works, how it controls life on Earth, and how humanity has expressed it in so many great works of art and architecture–they are often led to acquire some remarkably deep philosophical insights into the meaning and purpose of Nature and into what it means to be aware and alive in this extraordinary Universe. This is particularly so in young people and the results of such immersion are as heartening as they are surprising.

The Prince argues that the modern rejection of the spiritual dimension of the universe led directly to the confrontation of fundamentalist secularism (materialist, atheist) with fundamentalist forms of religion (puritanical, literal). “Science can tell us how things work, but it is not equipped to tell us what they mean. That is the domain of philosophy and religion and spirituality.” But the religion we need has to be authentic, not an ideological substitute for the real thing. We need to get beyond those forms of tradition that have become empty shells or been corrupted by “mechanistic thinking.”

Prince Charles, as quoted by Stratford Caldecott in Prince Charles: Imaginative Conservative

Religion Statistics and the Canadian Census

IIn 2010, the federal government decided to remove a whole series of statistical data from the legally required collection of census data in Canada. Since the first national census in 1871, Canadians have been asked to state their religion on the national census.  This is an obviously useful tool for historians of religion as well as for a host of other scholars and others.  In recent years the census was divided into two forms: a short form asking basic demographic questions every five years and a long form census sent using random sampling techniques to roughly 19% of the population.  Random sampling - an effective technique used in a sophisticated fashion in the social sciences and Humanities - was abandoned in the 2011 census conducted in May of that year.  While the National Households Survey, the questionnaire designed to replace the mandatory long form census, was sent to a variety of households, it is entirely voluntary.  This renders it useless, albeit interesting, to scholars.

As the chief statistician of Canada Munir Sheikh, said briefly and to the point after his resignation in protest over the voluntary nature of the NHS in 2010:

 “I want to take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue which has become the subject of media discussion ... the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census ... It cannot.”