Roots of Creativity

Welcome back to Midd. I am studying abroad this year, and this column will take a hiatus, but the Campus generously invited me to write a piece for the first edition. Feeling that a defense of the Iran nuclear deal would be overly dry, I will advocate – especially to first-years – on behalf of the liberal arts education.

These are complicated times. The upper class in America, still mainly white, controls more wealth than at anytime since the Great Depression, but the electorate is growing steadily more heterogeneous. Information proliferates, but old cultural polarities about race, abortion and economic opportunity remain as fixed as at anytime in the last half-century. These problems of a free society are of small concern to the rest of the world, most of which still lives under some kind of autocratic regime. America’s military has proved an imperfect midwife for freedom and democracy abroad. Access to digital networks and knowledge, however, could enable America’s military to better perform that endeavor. Yet technology has often only enabled the faults of human nature to be revealed on bigger stages: see the metastases of militant Islam or the mass surveillance of Chinese, British and American citizens. Perhaps the little green men of Kepler-452b are simultaneously facing the same problems.

Since coming to Middlebury, I have become convinced that studying the liberal arts uniquely equips students to deal with uncertainty and complexity. What colleges like Middlebury offer that the most competitive schools do not is the liberty to take what classes you like, across many disciplines, and then construct a network of interrelated ideas from whatever material intrigues, describes or inspires you. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Intellect” better expresses this process of intellectual exploration:

“The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity....We do not determine what we will think. We only open our sense, clear away, as we can, all obstruction from the fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We have little control over our thoughts. We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that we take no thought for the morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own. By and by we fall out of that rapture, bethink us where we have seen, what we have seen, and repeat, as truly as we can, what we have beheld.”

How to attain the rapture of gazing like a child? “You have an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge,” says Emerson. “Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render it no reason. By trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into truth.” Take courses you are interested in! Last fall, I took Introduction to Political Philosophy, Shakespeare’s Histories and American Foreign Policy. The professors were excellent, the courses rigorous and I found that Shakespeare, Plato and George Kennan share some ideas, (although I was laughed down when I suggested that language in Henry IV Part I echoed language from the Republic, and therefore that Shakespeare must have read Plato.)

The revelation of truth, says Emerson, is “always a miracle, which no frequency of occurrence or incessant study can ever familiarize. It is...a form of thought for now, for the first time, bursting into the universe, a child of the old eternal soul, a piece of genu- ine and immeasurable greatness.” Revelation is indeed the mark of the genius, says Emerson, but though the “composed attitude of library” does not alone spark genius, “the oracle comes, because we had previously laid siege to the shrine.” We only cannot predict when.

Surely the oracle of truth has use outside of the academy. Today we call it creativity, or innovation. If you take Emerson at his word, as I do, than the quality of being creative – eminently marketable – is no more than knowledge of the process of allowing your mind to combine dissimilar things –“the rubbish mats and which litter the garret.” There cannot be any better place in the world to tinker, to learn and to let your thoughts brew in latent ferment than a college like Middlebury.

The process is not easy. It is not for the man of repose, not for the seeker of “rest, commodity and reputation,” but for the lover of truth, (or, perhaps, of himself.) “He in whom the love of truth predominates,” says Emerson, “will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations, between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion.” Why would we ever submit to this “self-denial, no less austere than the saint’s?” Because we are obtaining the education to do so.