Quick and Dirty Answers to the Biggest of Questions: Creative Systems Theory Explains What It Is All About (Really)

www.CreativeSystems.org).

CHAPTER 1

Ultimate Questions—The Very Short Version

LET'S START WITH A RAPID-FIRE OVERVIEW of this quick and dirty inquiry. This overview might at first appear to be so spare as to hardly provide help at all. But in fact it captures the whole of our endeavor. At the least it provides a feel for how a task as seemingly complex as this book takes on might prove ultimately more straightforward than we might imagine.

Three overarching—ultimate—questions are central to this short book's reflections (though, as we proceed, we will touch on others that are just as fascinating in their implications). While each of these questions has before been beyond us to answer in any satisfying way, I propose that we can answer them quite simply and directly. Even better, I will show you how. Those questions are:

1. How do we best understand the times in which we live? And, of particular importance, how do we understand the relevance of the challenges that define our time to larger challenges that lie ahead for us as a species?

2. How do we best understand the human story as a whole? How do we understand not just our current time in culture, but also what got us here?

3. Why, at different times in history, has human understanding taken the forms that it has?

That ultimate questions such as these might today be answerable is by itself intriguing, and the particular answers we will examine each provide valuable new perspective. But I will argue for a deeper significance. These questions are not just philosophically interesting; it is necessary that we successfully address them if we are to effectively make our way in times ahead.

Systemic Understanding

While these questions are in the end not as complicated as we might assume, it is true, too, that answering them effectively requires that we think in ways that are quite new. We can make basic sense of what is necessarily new by reflecting on a characteristic commonly shared by important innovations of the last hundred years: The best of contemporary thinking is systemic. It helps us get our minds around how mulitfaceted important questions can be. This book will show how the kind of thinking we will need in times ahead must be systemic in a new sense that we are only beginning to be able to fully grasp. Such thinking must effectively address the fact that we are dynamic, living beings.

For now, a simple observation will suffice: thinking that begins to get us where we need to go bridges familiar polar categories.1 It draws an encompassing circle around the either/or assumptions of times past. Examples of the many polarities that we are beginning to engage in more systemic ways include mind and body in medicine, masculine and feminine in our thinking about gender identity, and ally and enemy on the global stage.2 Such bridging of past polar assumptions suggests two questions of a more abstract sort that, if answered effectively, give us all we need to address our three initial ultimate questions. Those two polarity-related questions are:

Why do humans tend to think in the language of polarity in the first place (in other words, why should we assume reality to be anything but whole)?

And why do we find ourselves now beginning to be able to think in more encompassing ways (ways that bridge polar assumptions)?

It turns out that we find answers to these two more abstract questions in the answer to a single even more fundamental question:

What is it that most makes us human?

The answer? Is it that we stand, freeing our hands for new possibilities? Is it that we speak and use language? A specific way of answering this question is central to the thinking of Creative Systems Theory. The theory proposes that what makes us particular if not unique as creatures is more basic: our audacious toolmaking, society-making, meaning-making—we could simply say creative—natures.

Creative Systems Theory uses the word creative in a specific—or better we might say, particularly general—way. Here creative refers to science as much as art, and to the everyday as much as the original or unusual. It encompasses generativity—formative process—in human systems wherever we find it.3

In later chapters, I will describe how this use of a creative frame, besides having immediate practical significance, also has significance in the larger story of human thought. Modern Age understanding replaced Medieval superstition with the radical new notion that reality is, essentially, a great machine. However powerful this notion has been, it fails us totally as a basis for addressing the challenges now before us. I will argue that the critical questions ahead are all, in the end, questions of life; questions of human purpose, courage, and perspective.

No philosophical task more defines the future of understanding— and is more pertinent to future human well-being—than finding a new kind of image that can successfully replace this now-outmoded mechanistic picture. We are not machines; we are living beings. And as a function of being conscious in the specific way that we are, we are a very particular sort of living being. We will look at how the idea that reality—at least the reality of human experience—is ordered creatively effectively addresses this need for a new defining concept. We will also see how a creative frame has importance not just because it makes how we now need to think more understandable, but because it makes the story of human thought as a whole more understandable.

Formative Process

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let's get back to our two polarity-related questions. Answers to each of them can be found in how creative/formative processes in human systems inherently work. Needed answers follow directly from how new human experience comes into being, and, over time, develops and evolves.

A creative frame provides an immediate answer to the first of these questions: why is it that historically we have thought in the language of polarity in the first place ? The answer lies in the fact that the generation of polarity is necessary to anything creative.

Think of what happens in the creative process that generates a new idea (see Figure 1-1). Any such process begins in an original unity of established knowledge. Next, an insight breaks off from that unity and in doing so creates polarity. Over time, that newly created idea develops and matures. The generation and evolution of polarity is inherent to how formative processes of every sort in human systems function. We wouldn't be who we are without it.

Fig. 1-1. The Creative Generation of Polarity

Answering the second of our more abstract questions—why are we now able to think in more encompassing ways?—requires that we make our creative picture more complete. We need to add the recognition that any formative process has two halves. The first half brings the newly created object or idea into being and generates polarity. The second half reintegrates the now developed and refined new object or idea with the context from which it originated. In doing so, it establishes a new, now expanded whole. What had been a new insight in the process becomes second nature (and part of the context for further creative possibility). This can be depicted as a simple three-step process, as shown in Figure 1-2.

Fig. 1-2. Polarity and Bridging in Formative Process

If we wish to think with greater detail, we can take this simple image and extend it like the bellows of an accordion. The first half of formative process becomes an evolving play of polarities, with polarity in each stage following a predictable progression. Each succeeding stage reflects greater identification with the newly created form and diminishing identification with the context from which that new form originated. In the second half of formative process, the newly created form gradually finds mature integration with what has come before. A new, now expanded and more complete picture is the result—a new common sense. The diagram in Figure 1-3 maps human formative process wherever we find it. Creative Systems Theory calls this generic template The Creative Function.

Fig. 1-3. The Creative Function

In chapters to come, I will describe how the Creative Function can help us understand not just the evolution of ideas, but also human development more generally. For example, we can readily recognize this two-part extended picture in the changes that produce psychological development in individuals. The developmental tasks that define the first half of a person's life are similar in that the underlying impetus with each is toward distinction and the establishment of identity. In childhood we begin discovering who we are; in adolescence we make our first forays into the social world; and during adulthood we establish our unique place in that world. Second-half-of-life maturity involves more specifically integrative tasks. It is about learning how to live in the world with a greater sense of perspective, integrity, and proportion.

Cultural Maturity

Of special importance for this inquiry, we will look at how we find related parallels in the way culture has evolved over time. And of particular significance, we find parallels with the developmental tasks that mark the beginnings of second-half creative dynamics in today's cultural challenges. Creative Systems Theory calls the changes that result from engaging these tasks at a cultural scale Cultural Maturity.

Note that this observation of parallels, if accurate, provides an answer to our second more abstract question, why we are now becoming able to think in more encompassing ways. The bridging of polarities is inherent to the mechanisms of any formative process's second half. If a second-half kind of maturity underlies new cultural possibilities, then a growing capacity for more encompassing perspective is what we would expect to see.

In Chapter Four, we will examine in detail the notion that a related creative progression underlies human formative processes across the board. We will look more closely at a simple creative event (like that which produces a new idea or invention) and individual human development. We will examine, too, the evolution of a human relationship (we will look at a love relationship) and the larger story of human culture's evolution through time. The chart in Figure 1-4 provides a preview summary of where these observations will take us, with Creative Systems Theory language labels added to identify the various creative stages (see Figure 1-4).

The answers to the three ultimate questions with which I began this chapter follow directly from the picture that results. Further reflections in the chapters to come will bring these answers to life:

1. How do we best understand the times in which we live? If the creative picture I've just described is accurate, our time is defined by the developmental challenges of Cultural Maturity. The central tasks of our time should parallel at a most encompassing scale what we see with the beginnings of individual maturity in personal development and, more generally, with the beginnings of formative process's second half. Later chapters describe how this is exactly what we find.

2. How do we best understand the human story as a whole? The larger human narrative is itself an expression of our creative, toolmaking, meaning-making natures. Later chapters describe how history's progression has followed the sequence of stages intrinsic to human formative processes of all sorts.

3. Why, at different times in history, has human understanding taken the forms that it has? Human understanding has taken the forms that it has because its evolution reflects the stages of formative process. Later chapters explain how each stage in this creative progression alters not just what we think, but also how we think. We will also look at how this observation can be used to develop sophisticated frameworks for addressing today's pressing human concerns.

In Chapter Seven, we will address four bonus questions, additional ultimate concerns that follow from these observations:

1. How do we reconcile the experience of free will with what might logically seem a deterministic world?

2. Are the beliefs of science and religion just different, or do they, instead, represent parts of a larger picture?

3. How do we best understand how we humans differ from one another (and just how have these differences come about)?

4. As a species, what is our place in the larger scheme