The Shop A Creative Hotline

I have a minor addiction to reading online American media, if only because it casts life elsewhere into a different context (they say that planet earth is famously beautiful from space). Frankly, this peccadillo would rarely intersect with the agenda of this blog, but I was struck by this article in the New York Times this week. Not so much the article itself - a defence of the creative niche, which could easily be accused of being distilled to the point of triteness - but rather for some of the comments upon it. You don't have to scan very far down to realise that for man, establishing a creative niche is somehow akin to cheating; to invent an umbrella is to cheat your responsibility to get wet like your neighbours. Well, if I follow this idea through, the definition of a fair society would be one where everyone dashes themselves against the rocks equally, and then derives an English sense of inner peace from their neighbour being exactly as unhappy as they are.


Creativity, from that perspective, is a moon shot. How can one aspire to such a thing, when there are people starving in Africa? Which reminds me: not long ago I listened to a programme on Radio 4 in which a pundit from Medecins Sans Frontieres politely criticised the arriviste Gates Foundation for trying to solve third world problems with innovation. Subtext: the bastards! You can't just go and invent a vaccine for tuberculosis! Don't these technologists know that's not how the game is played?

A lecturer when I was at university stays in my mind (probably the only one who did...) because he took exception to Einstein's line about genius being 99% perspiration, which we commonly trot out a s a metaphor not just for scientific enquiry but for every endeavour in life. The foundation of innovation, he suggested by contrast, is more often simple laziness on the part of the inventor - there's no shortage of motivated people who would dutifully do long division and multiplication forever, but surprisingly few who are secure enough in their laziness to frig themselves a calculator to make their task easier. I wonder whether our unconscious tendencies towards pointless graft are stamped upon us by peer pressure; like the kind of psychological experiment where the subject pretends that the picture of a lemon is, as all his peers around him confidently assert, an orange after all.