“and everyone is at least potentially creative, how come inequality is compounding along the same old lines of race and class? And considering how many of our modern problems come from having too much new stuff too quickly, what reason do we have to believe that … encouraging more of it will solve any of those problems? […] In our divided times, one of the most amazing things about creativity is that nobody ever says anything bad about it.”
We didn’t used to be so obsessed with creativity. The word “creative,” Franklin reports, “has only been a regular part of our vocabulary since the middle of the twentieth century.” The first usage Franklin can find dates back only to 1875, and the earliest dictionary definition came as late as 1966. Before 1940, the preferred term was creativeness, but even that word lacked much cultural currency. Creative as an adjective, Franklin explains, used to be a term neither of praise nor criticism; “generative” would be a decent contemporary synonym. “If you had told someone in 1900 that they were ‘creative,’” Franklin writes, “they would likely have responded, ‘creative of what?’” In the 1940s, when Joseph Schumpeter wrote of “creative destruction,” he wasn’t flattering capitalists (as today is often supposed) by comparing them to paradigm-changing genius scientists or artists. He was merely saying that new stuff smashed up old stuff.
Like tract housing, rock ‘n roll, and the Pill, the cult of creativity was a post-World War II phenomenon, driven “by a concern not for art per se but for inventiveness in science, technology, consumer products, and advertising.” This was the era of David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956). White-collar jobs were displacing blue-collar jobs (the former exceeded the latter for the first time in 1956), and corporate conformity risked deadening American capitalism. “How may we rescue talented individuals,” asked a 1961 Rockefeller Brothers Fund report, “from the lowered aspirations, the boredom, and the habits of mediocrity so often induced by life in a large and complex organization?”
Creativity was corporate America’s answer. “Unlike genius,” Franklin writes, “creativity could be said to exist in everyone, and in that sense was both more democratic and (more importantly, perhaps) more useful for managers overseeing scores or hundreds of thousands of employees.”