Gladwell notes that Hirschman, an economist by trade, was unique among his peers in that he highlighted the consistency with which economic creativity results from projects gone awry. In Hirschman's words,
Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is be misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.I find this notion fascinating. Perhaps this is not surprising since I am drawn to Romanticism and chaos theory, to notions of the lyrical arising out of the indeterminate, to notions of intertextual play. Although I advocate rationality and pragmatism in matters of policy, it is clear to me that moments of what Hirschman called 'creativity' arise in response to crisis. Whether it is the environmental crisis that confronted the Karnaphuli paper plant that Gladwell describes in the review or the artistic crisis Bloom identifies in The Anxiety of Influence, creativity represents a departure from the status quo.
The paradox of creativity is that it is inherently unpredictable. Since creativity depends on the presence of unintended consequences, a creative response is by necessity novel. Thus, one cannot 'learn' creativity in the sense that one learns grammar or biology or physics. Though we strive to prepare students and employees to be creative thinkers, we can have little or no foreknowledge of the situations that will arise requiring a creative response and what a creative response might be. The best we can do is to condition persons to question the assumed parameters of a given problem and to subject her own response to critical analysis, what Hirschman called 'self-subversion.' Essentially this conditioning would inculcate a mental predisposition to accept uncertainty, vagueness, and ambiguity. The reason that this may allow for creativity to arise is that creativity is usually plucked from the interstices of convention.
With regard to the necessity of uncertainty as a precondition for creativity, Hirschman was of a mind with his brother-in-law Eugenio Colorni who "believed that doubt was creative because it allowed for alternative ways to see the world, and seeing alternatives could steer people out of intractable circles and self-feeding despondency." Despite the reality that creative solutions arise in the context of unintended consequences, Hirschman was prescient in understanding that the idea runs counter to most people's expectations. In his own words:
While we are rather willing and even eager and relieved to agree with a historian's finding that we stumbled into the more shameful events of history, such as war, we are correspondingly unwilling to concede--in fact we find it intolerable to imagine--that our more lofty achievements, such as economic, social, or political progress, could have come about by stumbling rather than through careful planning... Language itself conspires toward this sort of asymmetry: we fall into error, but do not usually speak of falling into truth.In the words of a psychology, we are prone to a self-serving bias, in which we claim more responsibility for successes than failures. This was a remarkable conclusion for an economist toiling in a field that über rationalist, neoclassical economists dominated. We have been conditioned to believe not only in the possibility but also the ascendancy or order. We have been conditioned to believe, without convincing proof, that humans are rational economic actors who behave predictably. Hirschman's iconoclasm in challenging the status quo is a refreshing reminder that dogma does not always defeat originality.
Interestingly, Hirschman also addressed school vouchers in response to Milton Friedman's advocacy of them. Gladwell notes that Hirschman was above all a person of action who volunteered on the side of the republicans in the Spanish Civil War and then was active in the French Resistance during World War II. Perhaps in line with his idea that creativity is activity in response to unpredictable hurdles, Hirschman apparently viewed with disdain Friedman's position that school vouchers were preferable to engaging the public education system directly. Hirschman contrasted the Friedman solution to a problem, what he called 'exiting,' or [in Gladwell's words] "voting with your feet, expressing your displeasure by taking your business elsewhere, with his preferred solution which he called 'voice,' or [in Gladwell's words] "staying put and speaking up, choosing to fight for reform from within." In one of the most succinct and coherent critiques of school vouchers, Hirschman wrote:
In the first place, Friedman considers withdrawal or exit as the 'direct' way of expressing one's unfavorable views of an organization. A person less well trained in economics might naively suggest that the direct way of expressing views is to express them! Secondly, the decision to voice one's views and efforts to make them prevail are contemptuously referred to by Friedman as a resort to 'cumbrous political channels.' But what else is the political, and indeed the democratic, process than the digging, the use, and hopefully the slow improvement of those very channels?This neatly encapsulates my own suspicion that the corporate sponsors of school vouchers and education reform would like nothing more than to remove education from public debate, control, and oversight.
I am off to the public library to pick up a copy of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. I for one prefer engaging the seemingly intractable problems of our post-capitalist democracy to running away and hiding my head in the sand. Perhaps you do too.
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