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Watch CNN. What you'll see played out before your eyes every single night is that the world is ruled, rocked and healed by "isms".
Ø Creationism traveling in the guise of Intelligent Design, contends with Darwinism for control of public schools.
Ø We've set up an entire government network to find sexism, ageism and racism under every bed because we no longer have communism hiding under there to frighten and entertain us.
Ø We watch nationalism turn Rwanda, Yugoslavia and Chechnya into pools of blood and genocide,
Ø and we wish to goodness that everyone would just choose baptism and capitalism so that we could all get a good night's sleep
Ø ... as long as we don't experience nightmares about liberalism or socialism.
Ø And then we awaken to the "Today" show where some dweebish scholar tells us that last night's bomb attack simply illustrated the ongoing battle between Romanticism and Rationalism, which is, of course, the engine that drives terrorism.
Enter the Great ISM
We are surrounded by isms. They are the energy that propels civilization towards its own future. And if we want to determine whether that future will be prosperity or the poorhouse, we need to tap into the one great ism that is the foundation for all the rest. Its name is ISM, somewhat like giving your name as "I am the great I AM", which tips us off that this is a concept of Biblical proportions. And yet, like most great concepts, it is simplicity itself.
The Great ISM stands for Invention, Synthesis, and Modification, the 3 ways that creativity expresses itself.
1. Invention. It is the act of making something out of nothing. With fervid apologies to physicists and their theory of atomic displacement, it is possible to make something out of nothing. Beethoven faced a blank page and made the immortal 5th symphony spring to life. Shakespeare did the same with Othello and a host of other masterpieces. The Wright brothers filled an empty sky with planes. Without the things that come from invention, we'd still be living in caves. However, don't lose sight of the fact that it is also possible to invent an idea. Someone invented the idea of freedom. And someone else invented the ideas of exchange, democracy, home and family. And someone else invented the word "invent". Think about that for a moment. An airplane is meaningless unless someone first invents the idea of flight, and the words and numbers to express it. Wow. In that case, the greatest inventor of all time was probably the person who invented the first word. It was probably a noun; something like “food”. Up until that moment nobody knew what he wanted. Everything was confusion. After that moment, everybody knew what he wanted. It worked so well, we invented a word for everything and the world changed. That’s why the book of John in the New Testament begins, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." It was trying to say that God (Jehovah, Yahweh, I AM) was the great inventor of all of life. Now that's what you call staking a claim. Anyway, invention is without question a form of creativity. But it is not the only form, nor is it even the most important one. There are others of equal import - which is crucial to remember - because most creative people are not inventors.
2. Synthesis is the act of relating two or more previously unrelated phenomena. Take a cake. Take a shovel. Put them side by side and stare at them. Boom! The cake server is born. It's a miniature shovel. That's synthesis. The first wheel was the product of invention. So was the first axle and the first box. But until someone came along and synthesized them into the cart, mankind didn't get much good out of the three components. Synthesis is the core of society's advancement. Invention is nice, but synthesis is the real engine of survival and prosperity. Have you ever performed synthesis? Have you ever filled a balloon with water instead of air? Now there's a very gratifying bit of creativity, especially when performed on a 4th floor balcony. Have you ever used a carpenter's chisel to separate frozen hamburger patties? Have you ever found that a beach was more conducive to reading than a library? If so, congratulations. You synthesized. And that puts you in the same league as Thomas Edison. He never created anything in his whole life. All he did was suck the brains of others and synthesized like crazy. So whadayathink? You creative?
3. Modification is the act of altering something that already exists so that it can: (a) perform its function better, (b) perform a new function, (c) perform in a different setting, or (d) be used by someone new. Putting pontoons on an airplane doesn't change the function of the plane (take off, fly, land), but it certainly broadens the settings in which it can perform its function. Moving a hose to the back end of a vacuum cleaner changes the whole function of the machine, from sucking to blowing. And something as simple as lowering a water
THE GREAT ISM IS IMPURE
Invention, synthesis and modification are the crux of creativity. But they do not exist in isolation. Instead, they overlap so much that it is difficult to separate them in reality. In fact, we are hard pressed to find any examples of pure invention beyond the creation story in the first few chapters of The Bible. And even there, Eve came from Adam's rib, a marvelous by-product of synthesis and modification. Creativity, therefore, is best envisioned as a bubbling stew in which the various components lose their crisp separate identities and start to meld into an interwoven whole.
This is a crucial point, because it affects our self-confidence and the goals we feel we must meet before we accept ourselves as being creative. You don't have to invent in order to be creative. In fact, our most prolific inventor wasn't really an inventor. Thomas Edison merely synthesized and modified existing items. Vacuum bulbs had been around for a century. So had burnable filaments. And electricity had been the subject of scientific inquiry for half a millennium. All Tom did was put it all together. I don't know about you, but realizing this fact makes me feel a lot better. I don't have to be God to be creative. All I have to be is a conscientious version of me. In fact, I can accomplish a lot in this life just living off of my ability to modify things, like Sinbad did. (Next week – the adventures of Sinbad)
© 2009 Joe Anderson
