Ayn Rand's definition of creativity?

[GerryShannon]

Doing a presentation in a few days based around creativity, is it something one is born with or learnt? Just curious did Ayn Rand ever provide a direct quote on creativity, I'd love to include it if possible.

[Chris Grieb]

Do you have the Ayn Rand Lexicon? You might also look at Richard Halley's statement in FNI.

[Reidy]

Another source would be her 1959 intro to We the Living, wherein she expresses disdain, in passing, for the notion of innate talent. She was generally skeptical of anything that sounded like innate knowledge. (Knowledge and talent aren't the same, but that's a separate topic.) According to Peikoff, she was even skeptical of IQ, apparently believing that intelligence is a matter of having developed the right cognitive habits. This is only anecdote, though; I don't think she said anything to this effect publicly.

The aforementioned Lexicon is available online at aynrand.org.

Edited October 9, 2008 by Reidy

[Chris Grieb]

Reidy'; Thanks for the info about the Lexicon.

[Mindy Newton]

Reidy'; Thanks for the info about the Lexicon.

Peikoff has lectured that creativity can't be taught. I myself think that that's wrong. I suggest you look at de Bono on the web, his strategies for thinking creatively include specific techniques to bring to light overlooked possibilities. These aid in, for example, designing new products. In a lecture, Nobel Laureate Paul Simon said that if something is new and valuable, it is creative. One's criteria for what is and isn't creative is a large part of the subject.

Also, the fact that language itself is creative--that is, we are able to speak and comprehend sentences that we have never heard before, is one way to reference creativity that has a huge amount of theory--linguistics--behind it. The creativity of language is one of the basic tenets of linguistics.

There is a terrific book on creativity by Hutchinson. I'll try to find my copy and then post the title and publisher. He goes into autobiographical anecdotes by highly creative people--mainly intellectuals. He pulls from that and other sources a pattern for how one should work to achieve creative insight.

Since we're talking about creativity:

I believe that strong likes and dislikes in art, music, literature, design, etc. are sufficient to lead a person to creative success in that area. It is mostly introspective. You gather samples of what you greatly like and greatly dislike. You look for similarities in each group. You go from one extreme to the other, and back and forth, studying your own reactions and feelings. This will sharpen your focus onto what quality(s) you value. You use your own feelings to focus in on the aspect that you feel strongly about. Once you've identified that--and it might not be in words, but you'll have it tied to some examples or a certain feeling, you begin creating by "making one of your own," and building on it, with your contrasts and feelings as guides.

This is an intense process, and there's no saying how long it takes to filter out extraneous features. Like saying the same word over and over, until it sounds foreign, you can "burn through" and have to stop. You actually need to give your brain a rest. You mustn't let other criteria sneak in, they'll pollute your judgment. You have to keep going back to that familiar feeling of liking, and use it like a blind man's cane to literally feel your way through the options--lighter or darker, faster or slower, slim or round? At the risk of beating a dead horse (heaven forbid!) you do not think of what is better or more desirable, you notice what causes you to feel a certain way, and you use that in your creation.

Of course, this process will only create something that satisfies the tastes of the person doing it, but that is enough for most of us.

= Mindy

[Barbara Branden]

Gerry, Mindy, the book by Eliot D. Hutchinson is How to Think Creatively. It is available from Amazon for $11.00. I've read a number of books on this suject, and this one is by far the best.

Barbara

[kiaer.ts]

I would strongly suggest reading Rand's The Art of Fiction, which is certainly the finest work of hers published since ItOE. The book is a wonderful analysis of fiction, as well of the thought processes behind its creation, and also, along with The Art of Nonfiction, a great book on thinking in the broadest sense.

Briefly, creativity certainly improves with practice, and with a prepared mind. The more that is properly automatized, the freer the brain is to work on creative elements. Creativity is NOT simply untrammeled random imagination. Rather, it is the ability to reach profound insights and wide syntheses and to express these eloquently. Stephen Jay Gould was one to do this, using points in the statistics of baseball to illustrate interesting phenomena in evolution and paleontology.

Is it true that Peikoff said creativity can't be taught? Mindy, Is there a reference? If he did say this, should he not have said he couldn't teach it?

[BaalChatzaf]

Is it true that Peikoff said creativity can't be taught? Mindy, Is there a reference? If he did say this, should he not have said he couldn't teach it?

[/quote

A few brain limbering techniques can be learned, but genius is probably innate.

1. Reversal

2. Juxtaposition

3. Inversion

4. Punning

and such like....

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Mindy Newton]

I would strongly suggest reading Rand's The Art of Fiction, which is certainly the finest work of hers published since ItOE. The book is a wonderful analysis of fiction, as well of the thought processes behind its creation, and also, along with The Art of Nonfiction, a great book on thinking in the broadest sense.

Briefly, creativity certainly improves with practice, and with a prepared mind. The more that is properly automatized, the freer the brain is to work on creative elements. Creativity is NOT simply untrammeled random imagination. Rather, it is the ability to reach profound insights and wide syntheses and to express these eloquently. Stephen Jay Gould was one to do this, using points in the statistics of baseball to illustrate interesting phenomena in evolution and paleontology.

Is it true that Peikoff said creativity can't be taught? Mindy, Is there a reference? If he did say this, should he not have said he couldn't teach it?

I heard him talk about it at some lecture, maybe even a Q & A session. I'll see if I can come up with a reference.

= Mindy

[kiaer.ts]

Ah, yes, "brain limbering" techniques. In junior high we were entered in the "Olympics of the Mind" (sued by the Olympic committee for infringement!). "Brainstorming" was one of the events. The topic: "How could you use an Automobile Tire?" The winning answer: "To hustle off little kids." Yes, genius is innate.

Sorry, like I said before, creativity is not simple unfettered ability to jumble - if it were, mentally disabled preschoolers who draw daisies with smiles and people with green hair and wings would be more "creative" than the Author of the Fountainhead, who limited herself to the real-worldly plausible.

True creativity is breadth of synthesis, not superficial juxtaposition.

[BaalChatzaf]

Ah, yes, "brain limbering" techniques. In junior high we were entered in the "Olympics of the Mind" (sued by the Olympic committee for infringement!). "Brainstorming" was one of the events. The topic: "How could you use an Automobile Tire?" The winning answer: "To hustle off little kids." Yes, genius is innate.

Sorry, like I said before, creativity is not simple unfettered ability to jumble - if it were, mentally disabled preschoolers who draw daisies with smiles and people with green hair and wings would be more "creative" than the Author of the Fountainhead, who limited herself to the real-worldly plausible.

True creativity is breadth of synthesis, not superficial juxtaposition.

As I said, "but genius is probably innate". We cannot turn out geniuses or Olympic class gymnasts simply by having exercise sessions. Some people have the gift, others do not. The best we can do with limbering exercises is to keep people from cramping up. We cannot make them into world class athletes either physical or mental. The various kinds of genius; mathematical, artistic, musical are probably highly conditioned by genetic makeup. Poets are probably born, not made.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[kiaer.ts]

So, Bob, you agree that creativity is not merely just the ability to mix and match uncritically?

As for genius, you seem to have missed that I was being ironic.

In any case, most people are born geniuses (absolute, not relative) and are stunted by lack of stimulus, environmental chaos, parental irrationality, social metaphysicians, schools which serve as substandard daycare, and so forth. Babies are born smart and happy, and people spend years teaching them otherwise.

From Hugo's L'Homme Qui Rit:

THE COMPRACHICOS.

I.

Who now knows the word Comprachicos, and who knows its meaning?

The Comprachicos, or Comprapequeños, were a hideous and nondescript association of wanderers, famous in the 17th century, forgotten in the 18th, unheard of in the 19th. The Comprachicos are like the "succession powder," an ancient social characteristic detail. They are part of old human ugliness. To the great eye of history, which sees everything collectively, the Comprachicos belong to the colossal fact of slavery. Joseph sold by his brethren is a chapter in their story. The Comprachicos have left their traces in the penal laws of Spain and England. You find here and there in the dark confusion of English laws the impress of this horrible truth, like the foot-print of a savage in a forest.

Comprachicos, the same as Comprapequeños, is a compound Spanish word signifying Child-buyers.

The Comprachicos traded in children. They bought and sold them. They did not steal them. The kidnapping of children is another branch of industry. And what did they make of these children?

Monsters.

Why monsters?

To laugh at.

The populace must needs laugh, and kings too. The mountebank is wanted in the streets, the jester at the Louvre. The one is called a Clown, the other a Fool.

The efforts of man to procure himself pleasure are at times worthy of the attention of the philosopher.

What are we sketching in these few preliminary pages? A chapter in the most terrible of books; a book which might be entitled—The farming of the unhappy by the happy.

II.

A child destined to be a plaything for men—such a thing has existed; such a thing exists even now. In simple and savage times such a thing constituted an especial trade. The 17th century, called the great century, was of those times. It was a century very Byzantine in tone. It combined corrupt simplicity with delicate ferocity—a curious variety of civilization. A tiger with a simper. Madame de Sevigné minces on the subject of the fagot and the wheel. That century traded a good deal in children. Flattering historians have concealed the sore, but have divulged the remedy, Vincent de Paul.

In order that a human toy should succeed, he must be taken early. The dwarf must be fashioned when young. We play with childhood. But a well-formed child is not very amusing; a hunchback is better fun.

Hence grew an art. There were trainers who took a man and made him an abortion; they took a face and made a muzzle; they stunted growth; they kneaded the features. The artificial production of teratological cases had its rules. It was quite a science—what one can imagine as the antithesis of orthopedy. Where God had put a look, their art put a squint; where God had made harmony, they made discord; where God had made the perfect picture, they re-established the sketch; and, in the eyes of connoisseurs, it was the sketch which was perfect. They debased animals as well; they invented piebald horses. Turenne rode a piebald horse. In our own days do they not dye dogs blue and green? Nature is our canvas. Man has always wished to add something to God's work. Man retouches creation, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The Court buffoon was nothing but an attempt to lead back man to the monkey. It was a progress the wrong way. A masterpiece in retrogression. At the same time they tried to make a man of the monkey. Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland and Countess of Southampton, had a marmoset for a page. Frances Sutton, Baroness Dudley, eighth peeress in the bench of barons, had tea served by a baboon clad in cold brocade, which her ladyship called My Black. Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, used to go and take her seat in Parliament in a coach with armorial bearings, behind which stood, their muzzles stuck up in the air, three Cape monkeys in grand livery. A Duchess of Medina-Celi, whose toilet Cardinal Pole witnessed, had her stockings put on by an orang-outang. These monkeys raised in the scale were a counterpoise to men brutalized and bestialized. This promiscuousness of man and beast, desired by the great, was especially prominent in the case of the dwarf and the dog. The dwarf never quitted the dog, which was always bigger than himself. The dog was the pair of the dwarf; it was as if they were coupled with a collar. This juxtaposition is authenticated by a mass of domestic records—notably by the portrait of Jeffrey Hudson, dwarf of Henrietta of France, daughter of Henri IV., and wife of Charles I.

To degrade man tends to deform him. The suppression of his state was completed by disfigurement. Certain vivisectors of that period succeeded marvellously well in effacing from the human face the divine effigy. Doctor Conquest, member of the Amen Street College, and judicial visitor of the chemists' shops of London, wrote a book in Latin on this pseudo-surgery, the processes of which he describes. If we are to believe Justus of Carrickfergus, the inventor of this branch of surgery was a monk named Avonmore—an Irish word signifying Great River.

The dwarf of the Elector Palatine, Perkeo, whose effigy—or ghost—springs from a magical box in the cave of Heidelberg, was a remarkable specimen of this science, very varied in its applications. It fashioned beings the law of whose existence was hideously simple: it permitted them to suffer, and commanded them to amuse.

III.

The manufacture of monsters was practised on a large scale, and comprised various branches.

The Sultan required them, so did the Pope; the one to guard his women, the other to say his prayers. These were of a peculiar kind, incapable of reproduction. Scarcely human beings, they were useful to voluptuousness and to religion. The seraglio and the Sistine Chapel utilized the same species of monsters; fierce in the former case, mild in the latter.

They knew how to produce things in those days which are not produced now; they had talents which we lack, and it is not without reason that some good folk cry out that the decline has come. We no longer know how to sculpture living human flesh; this is consequent on the loss of the art of torture. Men were once virtuosi in that respect, but are so no longer; the art has become so simplified that it will soon disappear altogether. In cutting the limbs of living men, in opening their bellies and in dragging out their entrails, phenomena were grasped on the moment and discoveries made. We are obliged to renounce these experiments now, and are thus deprived of the progress which surgery made by aid of the executioner.

The vivisection of former days was not limited to the manufacture of phenomena for the market-place, of buffoons for the palace (a species of augmentative of the courtier), and eunuchs for sultans and popes. It abounded in varieties. One of its triumphs was the manufacture of cocks for the king of England.

It was the custom, in the palace of the kings of England, to have a sort of watchman, who crowed like a cock. This watcher, awake while all others slept, ranged the palace, and raised from hour to hour the cry of the farmyard, repeating it as often as was necessary, and thus supplying a clock. This man, promoted to be cock, had in childhood undergone the operation of the pharynx, which was part of the art described by Dr. Conquest. Under Charles II. the salivation inseparable to the operation having disgusted the Duchess of Portsmouth, the appointment was indeed preserved, so that the splendour of the crown should not be tarnished, but they got an unmutilated man to represent the cock. A retired officer was generally selected for this honourable employment. Under James II. the functionary was named William Sampson, Cock, and received for his crow £9, 2s. 6d. annually.

The memoirs of Catherine II. inform us that at St. Petersburg, scarcely a hundred years since, whenever the czar or czarina was displeased with a Russian prince, he was forced to squat down in the great antechamber of the palace, and to remain in that posture a certain number of days, mewing like a cat, or clucking like a sitting hen, and pecking his food from the floor.

These fashions have passed away; but not so much, perhaps, as one might imagine. Nowadays, courtiers slightly modify their intonation in clucking to please their masters. More than one picks up from the ground—we will not say from the mud—what he eats.

It is very fortunate that kings cannot err. Hence their contradictions never perplex us. In approving always, one is sure to be always right—which is pleasant. Louis XIV. would not have liked to see at Versailles either an officer acting the cock, or a prince acting the turkey. That which raised the royal and imperial dignity in England and Russia would have seemed to Louis the Great incompatible with the crown of St. Louis. We know what his displeasure was when Madame Henriette forgot herself so far as to see a hen in a dream—which was, indeed, a grave breach of good manners in a lady of the court. When one is of the court, one should not dream of the courtyard. Bossuet, it may be remembered, was nearly as scandalized as Louis XIV.

IV.

The commerce in children in the 17th century, as we have explained, was connected with a trade. The Comprachicos engaged in the commerce, and carried on the trade. They bought children, worked a little on the raw material, and resold them afterwards.

The venders were of all kinds: from the wretched father, getting rid of his family, to the master, utilizing his stud of slaves. The sale of men was a simple matter. In our own time we have had fighting to maintain this right. Remember that it is less than a century ago since the Elector of Hesse sold his subjects to the King of England, who required men to be killed in America. Kings went to the Elector of Hesse as we go to the butcher to buy meat. The Elector had food for powder in stock, and hung up his subjects in his shop. Come buy; it is for sale. In England, under Jeffreys, after the tragical episode of Monmouth, there were many lords and gentlemen beheaded and quartered. Those who were executed left wives and daughters, widows and orphans, whom James II. gave to the queen, his wife. The queen sold these ladies to William Penn. Very likely the king had so much per cent. on the transaction. The extraordinary thing is, not that James II. should have sold the women, but that William Penn should have bought them. Penn's purchase is excused, or explained, by the fact that having a desert to sow with men, he needed women as farming implements.

Her Gracious Majesty made a good business out of these ladies. The young sold dear. We may imagine, with the uneasy feeling which a complicated scandal arouses, that probably some old duchesses were thrown in cheap.

The Comprachicos were also called the Cheylas, a Hindu word, which conveys the image of harrying a nest.

For a long time the Comprachicos only partially concealed themselves. There is sometimes in the social order a favouring shadow thrown over iniquitous trades, in which they thrive. In our own day we have seen an association of the kind in Spain, under the direction of the ruffian Ramon Selles, last from 1834 to 1866, and hold three provinces under terror for thirty years—Valencia, Alicante, and Murcia.

Under the Stuarts, the Comprachicos were by no means in bad odour at court. On occasions they were used for reasons of state. For James II. they were almost an instrumentum regni. It was a time when families, which were refractory or in the way, were dismembered; when a descent was cut short; when heirs were suddenly suppressed. At times one branch was defrauded to the profit of another. The Comprachicos had a genius for disfiguration which recommended them to state policy. To disfigure is better than to kill. There was, indeed, the Iron Mask, but that was a mighty measure. Europe could not be peopled with iron masks, while deformed tumblers ran about the streets without creating any surprise. Besides, the iron mask is removable; not so the mask of flesh. You are masked for ever by your own flesh—what can be more ingenious? The Comprachicos worked on man as the Chinese work on trees. They had their secrets, as we have said; they had tricks which are now lost arts. A sort of fantastic stunted thing left their hands; it was ridiculous and wonderful. They would touch up a little being with such skill that its father could not have known it. Et que méconnaîtrait l'oeil même de son père, as Racine says in bad French. Sometimes they left the spine straight and remade the face. They unmarked a child as one might unmark a pocket-handkerchief. Products, destined for tumblers, had their joints dislocated in a masterly manner—you would have said they had been boned. Thus gymnasts were made.

Not only did the Comprachicos take away his face from the child, they also took away his memory. At least they took away all they could of it; the child had no consciousness of the mutilation to which he had been subjected. This frightful surgery left its traces on his countenance, but not on his mind. The most he could recall was that one day he had been seized by men, that next he had fallen asleep, and then that he had been cured. Cured of what? He did not know. Of burnings by sulphur and incisions by the iron he remembered nothing. The Comprachicos deadened the little patient by means of a stupefying powder which was thought to be magical, and suppressed all pain. This powder has been known from time immemorial in China, and is still employed there in the present day. The Chinese have been beforehand with us in all our inventions—printing, artillery, aerostation, chloroform. Only the discovery which in Europe at once takes life and birth, and becomes a prodigy and a wonder, remains a chrysalis in China, and is preserved in a deathlike state. China is a museum of embryos.

Since we are in China, let us remain there a moment to note a peculiarity. In China, from time immemorial, they have possessed a certain refinement of industry and art. It is the art of moulding a living man. They take a child, two or three years old, put him in a porcelain vase, more or less grotesque, which is made without top or bottom, to allow egress for the head and feet. During the day the vase is set upright, and at night is laid down to allow the child to sleep. Thus the child thickens without growing taller, filling up with his compressed flesh and distorted bones the reliefs in the vase. This development in a bottle continues many years. After a certain time it becomes irreparable. When they consider that this is accomplished, and the monster made, they break the vase. The child comes out—and, behold, there is a man in the shape of a mug!

This is convenient: by ordering your dwarf betimes you are able to have it of any shape you wish.

V.

James II. tolerated the Comprachicos for the good reason that he made use of them; at least it happened that he did so more than once. We do not always disdain to use what we despise. This low trade, an excellent expedient sometimes for the higher one which is called state policy, was willingly left in a miserable state, but was not persecuted. There was no surveillance, but a certain amount of attention. Thus much might be useful—the law closed one eye, the king opened the other.

Sometimes the king went so far as to avow his complicity. These are audacities of monarchical terrorism. The disfigured one was marked with the fleur-de-lis; they took from him the mark of God; they put on him the mark of the king. Jacob Astley, knight and baronet, lord of Melton Constable, in the county of Norfolk, had in his family a child who had been sold, and upon whose forehead the dealer had imprinted a fleur-de-lis with a hot iron. In certain cases in which it was held desirable to register for some reason the royal origin of the new position made for the child, they used such means. England has always done us the honour to utilize, for her personal service, the fleur-de-lis.

The Comprachicos, allowing for the shade which divides a trade from a fanaticism, were analogous to the Stranglers of India. They lived among themselves in gangs, and to facilitate their progress, affected somewhat of the merry-andrew. They encamped here and there, but they were grave and religious, bearing no affinity to other nomads, and incapable of theft. The people for a long time wrongly confounded them with the Moors of Spain and the Moors of China. The Moors of Spain were coiners, the Moors of China were thieves. There was nothing of the sort about the Comprachicos; they were honest folk. Whatever you may think of them, they were sometimes sincerely scrupulous. They pushed open a door, entered, bargained for a child, paid, and departed. All was done with propriety.

They were of all countries. Under the name of Comprachicos fraternized English, French, Castilians, Germans, Italians. A unity of idea, a unity of superstition, the pursuit of the same calling, make such fusions. In this fraternity of vagabonds, those of the Mediterranean seaboard represented the East, those of the Atlantic seaboard the West. Many Basques conversed with many Irishmen. The Basque and the Irishman understand each other—they speak the old Punic jargon; add to this the intimate relations of Catholic Ireland with Catholic Spain—relations such that they terminated by bringing to the gallows in London one almost King of Ireland, the Celtic Lord de Brany; from which resulted the conquest of the county of Leitrim.

The Comprachicos were rather a fellowship than a tribe; rather a residuum than a fellowship. It was all the riffraff of the universe, having for their trade a crime. It was a sort of harlequin people, all composed of rags. To recruit a man was to sew on a tatter.

To wander was the Comprachicos' law of existence—to appear and disappear. What is barely tolerated cannot take root. Even in the kingdoms where their business supplied the courts, and, on occasions, served as an auxiliary to the royal power, they were now and then suddenly ill-treated. Kings made use of their art, and sent the artists to the galleys. These inconsistencies belong to the ebb and flow of royal caprice. "For such is our pleasure."

A rolling stone and a roving trade gather no moss. The Comprachicos were poor. They might have said what the lean and ragged witch observed, when she saw them setting fire to the stake, "Le jeu n'en vaut pas la chandelle." It is possible, nay probable (their chiefs remaining unknown), that the wholesale contractors in the trade were rich. After the lapse of two centuries, it would be difficult to throw any light on this point.

It was, as we have said, a fellowship. It had its laws, its oaths, its formulæ—it had almost its cabala. Any one nowadays wishing to know all about the Comprachicos need only go into Biscaya or Galicia; there were many Basques among them, and it is in those mountains that one hears their history. To this day the Comprachicos are spoken of at Oyarzun, at Urbistondo, at Leso, at Astigarraga. Aguardate niño, que voy a llamar al Comprachicos—Take care, child, or I'll call the Comprachicos—is the cry with which mothers frighten their children in that country.

The Comprachicos, like the Zigeuner and the Gipsies, had appointed places for periodical meetings. From time to time their leaders conferred together. In the seventeenth century they had four principal points of rendezvous: one in Spain—the pass of Pancorbo; one in Germany—the glade called the Wicked Woman, near Diekirsch, where there are two enigmatic bas-reliefs, representing a woman with a head and a man without one; one in France—the hill where was the colossal statue of Massue-la-Promesse in the old sacred wood of Borvo Tomona, near Bourbonne les Bains; one in England—behind the garden wall of William Challoner, Squire of Gisborough in Cleveland, Yorkshire, behind the square tower and the great wing which is entered by an arched door.

VI.

The laws against vagabonds have always been very rigorous in England. England, in her Gothic legislation, seemed to be inspired with this principle, Homo errans fera errante pejor. One of the special statutes classifies the man without a home as "more dangerous than the asp, dragon, lynx, or basilisk" (atrocior aspide, dracone, lynce, et basilico). For a long time England troubled herself as much concerning the gipsies, of whom she wished to be rid as about the wolves of which she had been cleared. In that the Englishman differed from the Irishman, who prayed to the saints for the health of the wolf, and called him "my godfather."

English law, nevertheless, in the same way as (we have just seen) it tolerated the wolf, tamed, domesticated, and become in some sort a dog, tolerated the regular vagabond, become in some sort a subject. It did not trouble itself about either the mountebank or the travelling barber, or the quack doctor, or the peddler, or the open-air scholar, as long as they had a trade to live by. Further than this, and with these exceptions, the description of freedom which exists in the wanderer terrified the law. A tramp was a possible public enemy. That modern thing, the lounger, was then unknown; that ancient thing, the vagrant, was alone understood. A suspicious appearance, that indescribable something which all understand and none can define, was sufficient reason that society should take a man by the collar. "Where do you live? How do you get your living?" And if he could not answer, harsh penalties awaited him. Iron and fire were in the code: the law practised the cauterization of vagrancy.

Hence, throughout English territory, a veritable "loi des suspects" was applicable to vagrants (who, it must be owned, readily became malefactors), and particularly to gipsies, whose expulsion has erroneously been compared to the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors from Spain, and the Protestants from France. As for us, we do not confound a battue with a persecution.

The Comprachicos, we insist, had nothing in common with the gipsies. The gipsies were a nation; the Comprachicos were a compound of all nations—the lees of a horrible vessel full of filthy waters. The Comprachicos had not, like the gipsies, an idiom of their own; their jargon was a promiscuous collection of idioms: all languages were mixed together in their language; they spoke a medley. Like the gipsies, they had come to be a people winding through the peoples; but their common tie was association, not race. At all epochs in history one finds in the vast liquid mass which constitutes humanity some of these streams of venomous men exuding poison around them. The gipsies were a tribe; the Comprachicos a freemasonry—a masonry having not a noble aim, but a hideous handicraft. Finally, their religions differ—the gipsies were Pagans, the Comprachicos were Christians, and more than that, good Christians, as became an association which, although a mixture of all nations, owed its birth to Spain, a devout land.

They were more than Christians, they were Catholics; they were more than Catholics, they were Romans, and so touchy in their faith, and so pure, that they refused to associate with the Hungarian nomads of the comitate of Pesth, commanded and led by an old man, having for sceptre a wand with a silver ball, surmounted by the double-headed Austrian eagle. It is true that these Hungarians were schismatics, to the extent of celebrating the Assumption on the 29th August, which is an abomination.

In England, so long as the Stuarts reigned, the confederation of the Comprachicos was (for motives of which we have already given you a glimpse) to a certain extent protected. James II., a devout man, who persecuted the Jews and trampled out the gipsies, was a good prince to the Comprachicos. We have seen why. The Comprachicos were buyers of the human wares in which he was dealer. They excelled in disappearances. Disappearances are occasionally necessary for the good of the state. An inconvenient heir of tender age whom they took and handled lost his shape. This facilitated confiscation; the tranfer of titles to favourites was simplified. The Comprachicos were, moreover, very discreet and very taciturn. They bound themselves to silence, and kept their word, which is necessary in affairs of state. There was scarcely an example of their having betrayed the secrets of the king. This was, it is true, for their interest; and if the king had lost confidence in them, they would have been in great danger. They were thus of use in a political point of view. Moreover these artists furnished singers for the Holy Father. The Comprachicos were useful for the Miserere of Allegri. They were particularly devoted to Mary. All this pleased the papistry of the Stuarts. James II. could not be hostile to holy men who pushed their devotion to the Virgin to the extent of manufacturing eunuchs. In 1688 there was a change of dynasty in England: Orange supplanted Stuart. William III. replaced James II.

James II. went away to die in exile, miracles were performed on his tomb, and his relics cured the Bishop of Autun of fistula—a worthy recompense of the Christian virtues of the prince.

William, having neither the same ideas nor the same practices as James, was severe to the Comprachicos. He did his best to crush out the vermin.

A statute of the early part of William and Mary's reign hit the association of child-buyers hard. It was as the blow of a club to the Comprachicos, who were from that time pulverized. By the terms of this statute those of the fellowship taken and duly convicted were to be branded with a red-hot iron, imprinting R. on the shoulder, signifying rogue; on the left hand T, signifying thief; and on the right hand M, signifying man-slayer. The chiefs, "supposed to be rich, although beggars in appearance," were to be punished in the collistrigium—that is, the pillory—and branded on the forehead with a P, besides having their goods confiscated, and the trees in their woods rooted up. Those who did not inform against the Comprachicos were to be punished by confiscation and imprisonment for life, as for the crime of misprision. As for the women found among these men, they were to suffer the cucking-stool—this is a tumbrel, the name of which is composed of the French word coquine, and the German stuhl. English law being endowed with a strange longevity, this punishment still exists in English legislation for quarrelsome women. The cucking-stool is suspended over a river or a pond, the woman seated on it. The chair is allowed to drop into the water, and then pulled out. This dipping of the woman is repeated three times, "to cool her anger," says the commentator, Chamberlayne.

[BaalChatzaf]

So, Bob, you agree that creativity is not merely just the ability to mix and match uncritically?

As for genius, you seem to have missed that I was being ironic.

In any case, most people are born geniuses (absolute, not relative) and are stunted by lack of stimulus, environmental chaos, parental irrationality, social metaphysicians, schools which serve as substandard daycare, and so forth. Babies are born smart and happy, and people spend years teaching them otherwise.

I always miss irony. That is one of the effects of being an Aspie. Galloping literal-mindedness and all that.

As to your main assertion, can you produce empirical evidence to support it? If you can, please do.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Mindy Newton]

So, Bob, you agree that creativity is not merely just the ability to mix and match uncritically?

As for genius, you seem to have missed that I was being ironic.

In any case, most people are born geniuses (absolute, not relative) and are stunted by lack of stimulus, environmental chaos, parental irrationality, social metaphysicians, schools which serve as substandard daycare, and so forth. Babies are born smart and happy, and people spend years teaching them otherwise.

I always miss irony. That is one of the effects of being an Aspie. Galloping literal-mindedness and all that.

As to your main assertion, can you produce empirical evidence to support it? If you can, please do.

Ba'al Chatzaf

I would put it differently, Ted: most people are born creative, and it is stunted by...

=Mindy

[BaalChatzaf]

Is there an objective and quantifiable measure of creativity or originality? Is this measure applicable to young children? If so one could measure a lost of creativity due to acquired social inhibitions and perhaps parental mismanagement.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Mindy Newton]

Is there an objective and quantifiable measure of creativity or originality? Is this measure applicable to young children? If so one could measure a lost of creativity due to acquired social inhibitions and perhaps parental mismanagement.

Ba'al Chatzaf

This is only an anecdote, but it is apropros: A 2+ year old boy is sitting in a tiny wading pool at a pre-school. He has a few toys in the pool, including plastic, graduated-size rings and the wooden rod they get stacked on, and a couple of plastic Easter eggs that come apart across the middle. A bored college student is "minding" this child and a few others.

The kid picks up a half of an egg, and pulls the rod over to himself. Slowly, he puts the egg half over the top of the rod. He seems unsure whether to let go of it, when the "teacher" looks over at him. "Billy," she says, in a bored voice, "that doesn't go there."

Whether or not we can measure the potential kids begin with, you can be sure there is a huge loss due to their "nurture."

= Mindy

[kiaer.ts]

I emphatically deny that children are born actually creative. (Since genius is potential, I repeat my claim that most people are born aat a venius level - and for empirical evidence, I ask how many people learn a language from scratch as fast as they.) Children do not have the breadth of knowledge that is necessary to be creative. They do have the potential to be creative, just as they have the potential to be educated. But to say that young children are creative or original simply because they mix and match is to accept a Deweyian notion of intelligence and education. Creativity is not wishful thinking unburdened by facts and real constraints. Imagining, say, people with wings or multiple organs or of an immense size is not creativity. It is simple ignorance of biology on par with that of the ancients mixed with a perceptual level mentality. Isis with 50 teats or cupid or Superman and other winged/flying mythological beings do not in any way compare to the actual creativity of such things as Saussure's prediction of the coefficient sonantique, Francis and Crick's discovery of the structure and nature of DNA, the imagination of the nuclear bomb or the work of the Wright Brothers. These true acts of creativity were based on immense amounts of integrated knowledge and the ability to think efficiently - not on puerile mixing and matching of percepts.

As for the bored college student, he has confused the task of the toy with the two year old's exploratory play. Play is cerftainly a precursor of creativity. It should be explored with a child. The adult could show the child the task of the rings and the rod, but also praise the child for seeing that the egg half fits over the top of the rod. But better toys for a child are blocks and legos which do not have a set task such as the rings on a rod pyramid. The child will abandon that toy upon mastery while continuing to enjoy legos for many years.

[Mindy Newton]

I emphatically deny that children are born actually creative. (Since genius is potential, I repeat my claim that most people are born aat a venius level - and for empirical evidence, I ask how many people learn a language from scratch as fast as they.) Children do not have the breadth of knowledge that is necessary to be creative. They do have the potential to be creative, just as they have the potential to be educated. But to say that young children are creative or original simply because they mix and match is to accept a Deweyian notion of intelligence and education. Creativity is not wishful thinking unburdened by facts and real constraints. Imagining, say, people with wings or multiple organs or of an immense size is not creativity. It is simple ignorance of biology on par with that of the ancients mixed with a perceptual level mentality. Isis with 50 teats or cupid or Superman and other winged/flying mythological beings do not in any way compare to the actual creativity of such things as Saussure's prediction of the coefficient sonantique, Francis and Crick's discovery of the structure and nature of DNA, the imagination of the nuclear bomb or the work of the Wright Brothers. These true acts of creativity were based on immense amounts of integrated knowledge and the ability to think efficiently - not on puerile mixing and matching of percepts.

As for the bored college student, he has confused the task of the toy with the two year old's exploratory play. Play is cerftainly a precursor of creativity. It should be explored with a child. The adult could show the child the task of the rings and the rod, but also praise the child for seeing that the egg half fits over the top of the rod. But better toys for a child are blocks and legos which do not have a set task such as the rings on a rod pyramid. The child will abandon that toy upon mastery while continuing to enjoy legos for many years.

Kids are born with IQ, or IQ-correlates, and I don't see why his geometrical insight as to the concave egg half and the projection of the rod doesn't count as creative. I'm happy with Simon's definition of creativity, that something new and valuable is a creation. If that isn't satisfactory, how would you define it?

=Mindy

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

What's wrong with having genes and experience+volition, with their respective impacts on creativity? Why either-or?

(This is addressed to the thread in general, not to anyone in specific.)

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

I would put it differently, Ted: most people are born creative, and it is stunted by...

=Mindy

Little children are born with few or no preconceived notions to inhibit their thinking. Prejudices and preconceived notions are primarily learned things.

Here is a little factoid I learned. Children at one year of age have -more- neural- interconnections per mass of brain than adults. What seems to be going on is that the superabundance of neural interconnects that have formed are culled for operating efficiency. Those circuits the child needs or uses are retained. Perhaps this explains why children acquire language quickly at an early age, but it takes longer at a more advanced aged.

Also, children are "wired" for speech (not reading!). That is why just about every human being on the planet has a language complete with syntax rules, by the time he/she is two years old. This is true regardless of culture, technological level or economic condition. We are born blabbermouths.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

Ayn Rand wrote very little about creativity. Not a word in The Fountainhead and just a short thing about Rearden having an epiphany for the bridge design in Atlas Shrugged. That's not remarkable since she was such a control freak. What is remarkable is the great extent she let herself be creative in spite of that. After her fiction writing she must have said quite a lot (?) publicly and privately.

--Brant

[Mindy Newton]

I would put it differently, Ted: most people are born creative, and it is stunted by...

=Mindy

We are born blabbermouths.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Blabber for yourself, Baal.

:baby: Mindy

[Mindy Newton]

Ayn Rand wrote very little about creativity. Not a word in The Fountainhead and just a short thing about Rearden having an epiphany for the bridge design in Atlas Shrugged. That's not remarkable since she was such a control freak. What is remarkable is the great extent she let herself be creative in spite of that. After her fiction writing she must have said quite a lot (?) publicly and privately.

--Brant

I don't understand the hostility toward Rand here, Brant. The woman was a truly great thinker. She was a magnificent writer. She had the scope of vision to structure (not invent) a complete philosophy, her analyses of cultural and political affairs were continuing proof of the activity and accuracy of her take on things.

You must believe that she had a superior grasp of all that is involved in these intellectual achievements. You surely realize that only excruciatingly precise intellectual standards could achieve these things. Don't you consider that what you term being a control freak might actually be manifestations of that ruthless mind?

To say, (paraphrased) Remarkably, she let herself be creative in spite of being a control freak, is startlingly uncalled-for.

Do you remember the Thanksgiving scene at Reardon's, with his wife, brother, and mother sitting down to dinner? Rand describes the beautiful table settings, and the decorations. Then she has the brother comment on the table, saying that all the china, silver, and crystal were just bought, while Lillian's decorations were "creative, or 'took real thought?'" Here she's obviously thinking of "creative" as the anything-goes nonsense that is popular today. Perhaps that's why she doesn't praise her characters' creativity more. But, if you didn't think of that scene at all, perhaps you don't realize how she dealt with the subject. For example, when Dagny is alone at the cabin in the woods, and starts moving boulders around, re-designing the yard, etc., Rand is showing how a mind such as hers acts productively whether there is pressing need or not. Dagny's efforts in that situation were creative, whether Rand used the term or not.

I'm assuming nobody here uses "creative" only in relation to artistic practices, maybe that's not a warranted assumption?

= Mindy

[Barbara Branden]

Mindy,Brant may have had in mind a phenomenon I discussed in The Passion of AynRand-- that is, that as the writing of Atlas Shrugged progressed, Rand became less and less able to "abandon herself uncritically to the literary inspiration, the free uncensored flow of thought and feeling that emotions provide a creative artist; the process of inspirational writing was aborted before it could fully begin. She was rarely solely creator; she was editor as well, during the very act of creation, often devising each paragraph, each sentence, each phrase, sometimes each word, by conscious rational calculation."

In one of my interviews with her about this painful period, she said: "'Non-fiction writing to me feels like the ease I had in writing before I was twelve; it feels natural to me, But in fiction, I feel as if my mind has to work on two tracks, one natural, the other forced; its the fiction element -- except for the action sequences -- that feels forced. The need to communicate moods, emotions, sensory perceptions, feels like its impeding what I really want to say. I project everything in my mind in nonfiction terms, then I must drop that and allow myself to feel; and then project what I want by means of a feeling -- and the words don't come."

Barbara

[Brant Gaede]

Ayn Rand wrote very little about creativity. Not a word in The Fountainhead and just a short thing about Rearden having an epiphany for the bridge design in Atlas Shrugged. That's not remarkable since she was such a control freak. What is remarkable is the great extent she let herself be creative in spite of that. After her fiction writing she must have said quite a lot (?) publicly and privately.

--Brant

I don't understand the hostility toward Rand here, Brant. The woman was a truly great thinker. She was a magnificent writer. She had the scope of vision to structure (not invent) a complete philosophy, her analyses of cultural and political affairs were continuing proof of the activity and accuracy of her take on things.

You must believe that she had a superior grasp of all that is involved in these intellectual achievements. You surely realize that only excruciatingly precise intellectual standards could achieve these things. Don't you consider that what you term being a control freak might actually be manifestations of that ruthless mind?

To say, (paraphrased) Remarkably, she let herself be creative in spite of being a control freak, is startlingly uncalled-for.

Do you remember the Thanksgiving scene at Reardon's, with his wife, brother, and mother sitting down to dinner? Rand describes the beautiful table settings, and the decorations. Then she has the brother comment on the table, saying that all the china, silver, and crystal were just bought, while Lillian's decorations were "creative, or 'took real thought?'" Here she's obviously thinking of "creative" as the anything-goes nonsense that is popular today. Perhaps that's why she doesn't praise her characters' creativity more. But, if you didn't think of that scene at all, perhaps you don't realize how she dealt with the subject. For example, when Dagny is alone at the cabin in the woods, and starts moving boulders around, re-designing the yard, etc., Rand is showing how a mind such as hers acts productively whether there is pressing need or not. Dagny's efforts in that situation were creative, whether Rand used the term or not.

I'm assuming nobody here uses "creative" only in relation to artistic practices, maybe that's not a warranted assumption?

It's not hostility to Rand, here, Mindy. I am both in awe of her and staggered by her heroic life and what had to go into that life to make her what she was. It is what she did manage to do creatively in spite of her need to be in control. Her ruthlessness made everything else possible and I am sure literally saved her life in Soviet Russia by getting her out of there. "Control freak" is the most objective way to describe all this I can think of. I'm sorry it doesn't sound nicer but other terms are denatured expressions of the same thing or not quite right in other ways. I strongly suspect but only speculate the need to be in control came out of the terrible necessity of protecting Atlas Shrugged from those who would keep her from expressing her vision therein and getting it published as she wrote it, without editorial butchering from third parties. She was basically right about that. Any significant change to the novel would have collapsed the whole thing in every respect. She spent the rest of her life protecting her magnum opus. I think that alone wore her out and further limited her creative expressions. Consider if after 1957 she had the idea that wow! That was great! Now it's time to write another! See the problem? Another novel may have significantly contradicted what she had already done and would have been in conflict with her need to protect her extant product. Atlas, after all, was going to save the world. I also speculate that the need to protect what she was creating was one but not the only one reason she keep her private life hidden and off-limits. That made Atlas Shrugged a kind of personal Moloch in ironic contradistinction to the philosophy of Objectivism and her basic message.

I see what seems to be a lot of confusion on your part about creation, productivity and the nature of creativity itself. In this sense you may be very similar to Ayn Rand. Her novels were huge expressions of creativity. One of the most heroic things she ever did was be creative in spite of herself. It may have been the most heroic. A lot of that had to do with focusing on what had to be done, of course. The intensity of the focus was the major cause of the created product and much more important than creativity per se, which was allowed room to romp and roam within the designated structure. And within that structure she spent the rest of her life. I can't say I blame her for that at all.

--Brant

Edited October 13, 2008 by Brant Gaede