There is a small garden outside my window which I can see as I write this. An isolated plant sticks up out of the flat, cleared soil, and it does not have flowers right now. I know that plants have roots that are at least as extensive as the parts I can see. Half of a plant is buried in dirt, the other half is buried in air.

The air extends for many miles above this small plant, far higher than the plant can reach. The soil extends downward for many miles more. The plant would not be able to survive anywhere but here; if it were entirely under the ground, it would be cut off from air and sunlight, and it would die. If it were completely in the air, it would be starved of nutrients and water and die. The plant lives right at the boundary of the two, a very precise location.

Soil and air are very different things. This plant finds life by mediating that difference. If there were no difference– if soil were the same as air or air the same as soil, then the plant would not be able to live at their boundary. Differences are necessary for life.

We see this kind of thing everywhere. Wind blows when there is high-pressure air next to low-pressure air. If the pressures were the same, there would be no wind. Heat flows from warm objects to cold objects. When temperatures are the same, heat does not flow. Money can move around too, though this one gets complex. But it only moves when there are disparities, when one person owes another. The disparities may come from effort (someone might work hard) or luck (someone might need help in a catastrophe) or talent (we pay be people for being entertaining), or many other things. But there must be a disparity; money will not move by itself.

Buddhism teaches that we will one day reach a state of Nirvana– a condition in which we have shed our individual identities and merged with the universe to become a blissful, homogenized whole. This teaching is one of the reasons why I do not believe in Buddhism. If the plant’s world were to become entirely soil, the plant could certainly decompose into oneness with the great mystery. But where would the bliss be? Soil cannot experience bliss, soil cannot experience anything. Soil needs air to go with it. With soil and air we can have plants, and butterflies, and birds, and lightning bugs– then we can start talking about bliss.

If we are going to have bliss, or life, or anything, we are going to have to have differences. Bliss can arise from the flow between those differences. Such a conception is closer to the Christian teachings on the afterlife, in which the present order gives way to a new Heaven and a new Earth. A world in which there are differences has a chance of being a paradise. A world in which all identities– all differences– have been anihilated has nothing left that is worth talking about.

There is a thunderstorm in Kandahar just now. Lightning is leaping between clouds, and water is condensing out of the air and falling to the ground. The lightning causes a process called nitrogen fixing, which adds nutrients to the raindrops that find their way into the soil. Electricity, water, and nitrogen are literally flowing, and the plants are feeding off this flow. (In fact, there was a large lightning bolt just as I wrote that sentence.) There is a great deal of activity.

Activity is different from a state of being. To do something and to be something are not the same. The plant is a small rosebush, what it is doing is taking in nitrogen-rich rainwater. Later it will use this rainwater to grow. That it is taking in water and growing is far more important than it being the second plant on the right.

Compare this with people. Some people might tell me I am a writer, because I have this blog. But I do not update it very often, and how many words have gone unread because of that? Whether I have earned the appelation “writer” or not is irrelevant– it is what I have actually written that will matter. In writing we see a flow of ideas between two different minds. This is activity, and this is what is important. That we will label one of the minds “writer” is trivial.

An important thing to notice about this flow– whether we are taking about the movement of water, or wind, or heat, or money, or ideas– is that it has consequences. The garden is saturated now in a way that it wasn’t earlier this morning. Now that you have read this far, you have ideas that were not in your head before. These changes cannot go backward. We might dry out the soil, but the plant will be a little bit older. You might forget what you read, but not without encountering other ideas or thoughts as well. Neither you nor the plant will be as you were yesterday, because the flow brought irrevocable change.

This change that happens because of the flow of stuff between differing things is the phenomenon of time. Change requires motion, and motion begets time. The Buddhists were right about one thing; Nirvana would be timeless. But if time ever stops, it means no motion is happening, and thus no change, and thus no flow. Without flow there can be no life or bliss.

(By the way, the rain has stopped now, and the sun is coming out. A stiff wind is shaking the plants. You see how slowly I write; we were at the peak of the storm just five paragraphs ago. But it couldn’t rain forever.)

If time is change then nothing in the world holds still. Reality never stops shifting on us, and we ourselves are constantly shifting too. Some philosophical systems manage this better than others. Plato’s notion of eternal forms does a lousy job of accounting for time, and industrialization struggles with it as well. Science depends on reproducible results, but how meaningful can such a standard be when the whole world is in flux?

Fortunately, humans have a profound capacity for responding to time and change. Many people neither recognize nor understand this capacity, and there are constant attempts to stamp it out. But it is an important part of what makes us human, and our own efforts cannot extinguish it. I am going to refer to this capacity as precocious creativity.

Precocious creativity is what allows an artist to create a thing of beauty where there once was emptiness. Musicians, writers, painters and others all begin with a blank medium, and from mysterious, unknown depths they find beauty with which to fill it. No one, not even the artists themselves, really understand where this inspiration comes from.

Precocious creativity is also what allows a clever criminal to penetrate civilization’s defenses. Innovative criminals find behaviors that society had not anticipated– often these are behaviors that were not possible before certain changes took place. Some causes of the current financial crisis depended on a certain level of development in the financial markets, and took advantage of system shortcomings that rational thinking had not anticipated. Precocious creativity possess a form of intelligence that is stronger, more cunning, and more nimble than plain logical reasoning.

The trouble is, it cannot be controlled, and its results are unpredictable. This is clearly illustrated by the arts. J.S. Bach composed enough music to fill entire bookcases with notation sheets. Quite naturally, some of his compositions are better than others.

 

But, then, what is so natural about that? Why should there be deviations in the aesthetic quality of his work? A factory can produce parts of uniform quality, why cannot artistic genius do the same?

It cannot do the same because precocious creativity is not mechanistic. It is pliable, and adapts to the ever-changing conditions brought about by time. A factory is mechanistic, it is not pliable, and it ignores time; a factory is built on the premise that the world does not change from one cycle to the next.

Another difficulty with precocious creativity is that it resists control.  Brilliant flashes of genius do not come made-to-order. They simply come, and we either accept them or we do not. Mathematicians and physicists would like an analytical solution to what are called multi-body problems. We can predict the forces exchanged between two interacting bodies and all the actions that result. If a third body is involved, we no longer have the mathematical tools to describe it. We can understand the physics, but we cannot make precise mathematical predictions. Now someday, we should hope, someone will have an insight that overcomes our difficulties. It will probably be a talented, intelligent individual who comes up with that solution, but there is little reason to think that he will be more talented and intelligent than those who came before. There are plenty of brilliant minds working in mathematics and physics today, and most of them have the raw intellectual horsepower it would take to solve a multi-body problem. They just have not actually done it yet. The solution they seek cannot be conjured up on demand; no one can control precocious creativity in that way.

As it happens, this also contrasts sharply with a factory. The production equipmemt of a factory can be tooled to fabricate virtually any part we want. That a part has never been made before is not a problem; if we know what part we want, we simply dial it in. A factory can do this because it has a limited range. Factories make parts, or they make machines made of parts, or they make other articles.

Precocious creativity does not operate with such bounds. Precocious creativity manufactures ideas, and these have infinitely more dimensions than physical objects. There is no limit to the range of a creative mind’s output; it is possible for a physician to write a sonnet, for a general to measure the stars, for a film director to choreograph a ballet. (In fact, there have been periods in history when even broader repertoires were common.) It is not possible for a magnesium casting plant to turn out steel ball-bearings, let alone, say, a simple exegesis on Deuteronomy.

We live in a time of industrialization; factories produce virtually every man-made thing in our lives. The world’s economy is oriented around industrialization. And factories, as I pointed out, are designed on the assumption that change can be neglected, that time does not happen. There are certain flows that have to be slowed (or virtually stopped) for a factory to operate. Of course, we cannot stop change perfectly, so people are needed to tend to the machines and keep them running.

The way these people organize themselves tend to be very machine-like, for efficiency’s sake. Where a machine has a motor, a drive belt, and a feed chute, the company that operates the machine has a process engineer, a factory supervisor, and an electrician. These positions are not interchangeable; if the engineer malfunctions, he can only be replaced by another engineer. Many companies are organized this way, even companies that do not operate a lot of machines.

There are other ways of organizing. Many military teams are an assortment of generalists, rather than a clockwork-like team of specialists. The squad leader can be replaced, as can the machine gunner, the radio operator, the designated medic, and so on. Each team member might have an area he is particularly good at, but he also knows the basic skills of the other roles on his team. The advantages of this in a combat situation should be obvious.

Now, if a company does not have machines it needs to run, should it organize itself like a machine– with a precise number of specialists– or like a combat team– with a loose collection of generalists?

If it organizes the first way, with high specialization of each of its members, it will have performance and needs similar to a factory; prescibable output of uniform quality over a limited range. Once it has begun regular functioning, it will have progressively less room for precocious creativity; it lacks the pliability.

An interseting thing happens under the second arrangement. In a team of generalists, special skills are not as important as they are with a team of specialists. This makes generalists easier to replace; all that is needed is another generalist. In fact, a team member’s best asset is his ability to function positively as part of the team. In such a scenario, interpersonal accord quickly becomes vital, and there is a disincentive to retain an individual who is unpleasant to work with.

On a highly specialized team it is different; any given member is harder to replace. A process engineer can only be replaced by another process engineer, and usually one with considerable special experience. The ability to get along with the team as a whole is less important than the ability to fulfill one’s narrowly designated role. An unpleasant team member– even a caustic and demoralizing one– will be retained so long as he functions well within his specific role. This is how machines operate.

Perhaps this helps explain why the workplace these days is such an unpleasant place. A company that is organized like a machine will stamp out precocious creativity, and it will also allow its employees to behave unpleasantly, so long as they perform well. Both of these are dehumanizing.

Ultimately, such arrangements cannot last. Time happens, we cannot stop it, and the world is irreversibly changing into something new. Every machine will fail, eventually.

When machines fail, what hapens to its parts? All those cogs and gears– the engineers, the supervisors, the electricians– what becomes of them? I mentioned briefly above that it does not matter what we are, it matters what we do. Removed from the machine, it is nonsensical to say that a man is an engineer. He is an engineer only when he is doing engineering; he can’t fill that role independent of the machine. He will have to do something else. Conditions at the time will dictate what that is, rational forethought cannot predict it.

Precocious creativity, however, can find advantages in any situation. It exploits change and time in order to move in ways that defy explanation. If the cog, free from the machine, has not already choked off all his human talent, then he can free this creativity and survive.

When not in the grip of disaster, freeing such creativity is, for some people, hard to do. Those for whom it is easy become artists. The rest of us have to find inspiration where we can. I mentioned that I do not post to this blog often enough; this has been due to a lack of ideas, a lack of creativity. I mentioned that we do not know where inspiration comes from. We have a word for their source anyway; inspiration comes from a muse. If a muse were to inspire me, I would be moved to write– just like I have written this, for example.

Thank you.