We might be tempted to accuse corporate America of cheapening the idea of creativity by borrowing the prestige of the arts in order to lend a moral veneer to profit-making. The truth is more complex and disturbing. The business world not only trumpets its allegiance to creativity as a way of glamorizing its activities, it also helped develop the concept in the first place. This is, at any rate, what Samuel Weil Franklin argues in his irreverent and informative work of cultural history, The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History.
Creativity, as Franklin’s subtitle suggests, is a recent invention, a 20th-century concept that patched together prior notions of inventiveness, ingenuity, and imagination into a new synthesis. While the coinage is not entirely new — the Oxford English Dictionary cites usages from 1659 (referring to God) and 1875 (Shakespeare) — the notion of creativity as we know it today emerged in Cold War America. Psychologists, advertisers, and businessmen found in creativity a solution to the stifling conformity of the postwar order. This was a period saturated with anxieties about the inhumanity of the modern social order. The drive for efficiency and rationality had, critics feared, created a culture that was affluent yet meaningless. Civilization had become a “soulless machine.” The new doctrines of creativity rescued irrationality and play, and assimilated their fertile energies into consumer capitalism.
By nourishing their creative abilities, experts promised, Americans could resist the deadening pressures of bureaucracy (incarnated in the era’s dreaded figure of the “organization man”). They could find meaning in life while, at the same time, delivering new product lines for their employers. Creativity could even help beat the Soviets. America needed to ramp up its “idea production,” one creativity guru advised, while the Navy hired a specialist in the art of brainstorming — one of the signature activities of the postwar creativity movement — in hopes of generating “more Washington imagination” to meet “the new Communist tactics.”
The elasticity of the term proved key to its success. More soulful than “originality” and more universal than “genius,” creativity was a quality associated with artists and visionaries but available, in theory, to everyone. It imbued science and technology with the allure of art. Linked with idleness and play while whispering promises of innovation and economic productivity, creativity became a value everyone could agree on. A new field of creativity research “brought military brass into the same room” as educational reformers “who wanted oddball schoolkids to thrive.” Much as the “imagination,” in the Romantic period, swept aside rivals such as “fancy” to become the ruling concept for our faculties of inventiveness, in the postwar period “creativity” became the new dominant framework for how we think about human acts of making.