I’ve been mulling over Zoë Westhof’s recent post Midnight Blogging from the Bathroom: Do We Have to Choose?
Here is her framing of her key question:
“The dilemma it leads me to is this: I cannot decide if I want to devote myself to supporting creative endeavors or to supporting deep-rooted social issues. When it comes down to it, I adore giving my attention to both. So my question is this: Do we have to choose?“
Should we be creative, or should we save the world?
What if the only way to save the world is to be more creative?
The Big Problems
The most profound problems we face as a global society are complex, hard-to-understand, and require ‘non-linear’ solutions. Small solutions fail as we scale them up to the size of the need.
For example, how do I reduce my carbon footprint? I know how to do that. How do we get nation-states to do the same in a coordinated and effective way? That’s hard.
How do we prevent one pregnant HIV-positive mother from passing the virus on to her child? We know the answer to that. How do we prevent 20 million mothers in the next five years from passing the virus on to their children? We don’t know the answers to that yet — financially, socially or logistically. It’s still too big for us.
We can make big problems little through cooperation, attrition and persistence, but sustaining those efforts requires creative and non-linear approaches.
Personal Choices
In a sense, this question of choosing is a personal version of a classic political question: how can a society spend a cent on space exploration or some other long-term investment when there is a single person hungry?
It is a moral riddle with many unsatisfactory answers. The most satisfactory answer for me: we invest in basic research in the hope that it will help us learn something that will dramatically reduce hunger in the future, and we balance that with what we can do to help our fellow citizens today, in this moment.
When we make this societal dilemma personal, when we place the goal of long-term progress on one shoulder, and instant relief on the other, we may wilt under the pressure, and not achieve either one. While a sense of duty and obligation can be motivating, and keep us from inertia and apathy, too much can tear us apart.
Choosing is excruciating for the curious mind. There is so much to know, so much to learn, so much that needs to be done.
Do we personally have to choose? In a given moment, for a specific period of time, I think the answer is yes. There is no reason you can’t lean from one side to the other over your lifetime, as your skills and opportunities allow. But in terms of effectiveness, if you constantly feel the tug of all the other undone things, will you be able to do your best work in a particular moment?
Do we want a scientist, on the verge of a breakthrough in discovering an HIV vaccine, to feel an obligation to stop researching, leave the lab and spend a month working in a soup kitchen? And do we want someone who genuinely enjoys running a soup kitchen to leave that critical job to study biology so that they might know enough to do vaccine research in five or ten years, even if they don’t feel they have an aptitude for it?
This dilemma is a variation of the ‘too many ideas’ theme I started exploring in my last post. In this case, the problem is too many worthwhile projects and needs. I’ll be returning to the exploration of ‘too many ideas’ in the next few posts. I wanted to respond to Zoë’s post first, while it was fresh in my mind.
Your Role
We each have a role to play. Creative exploration can help us find it.
What if your role in solving a particular problem is not navigating the complexities of international law, but helping a legal expert think more creatively?
If you are writing about the creative process, maybe there is a lawyer somewhere reading your work, and it gives her a new insight into how to approach a tricky human rights advocacy issue? Would that make your writing human rights-focused, or still ‘just’ creative? Maybe it is both?
You can’t know the effect of the ideas you share. You can do your best to craft your ideas, and share them widely.
Sowing Seeds
For the past few years, Mercy Corps has used a quote by Gandhi: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
I’d like to suggest a slightly altered version: Seed the change you want to see in the world.
To me, the verb ‘be’ implies an immediate and localized effect: by embodying our values, we change those around us, who, in turn, change those around them.
The word ’seed’ reminds us that results take time. Different seeds take root in different seasons. We don’t have to limit ourselves to one kind of seed. When we fling the seeds of our ideas far and wide, they can spread beyond our reach, out of our sight.
We cultivate those seeds, whatever they may be, because that’s what we do best.
And we sow the seeds of our beliefs, with no assurances we’ll be there for the reaping.
Related: This article is part of a series on creative surplus.
Update: A hat-tip to Sunday Oliver for pointing out the difficulty of ’sewing’ seeds, and reminding me the correct spelling is ’sowing’ seeds. I tend to think aurally, and the homophones always trip me up. (And yes, I did mean aurally, and not its homophone orally!)
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Matt,
This is a beautiful exploration of the deep, complex points I alluded to, but didn’t fully examine in my post. Thank you for this post, which has honestly helped me better understand where I stand and what vision feels right.
Actually, even reducing our own carbon footprints can require a vast and imaginative perspective on our worlds. A few years ago, everybody here was hot on biodiesel. But as it turns out, biodiesel raises the price of corn and other fuel plants so that poor people can no longer afford to eat them, and some of those same poor people around the world are clearcutting so they can plant the new monocrop big-soil-appetite income-earners.
I like the “seeds” idea. Even those of us who resist the immediate gratification mandate in our culture have to deal with our own resistance; at least I do. “What we resist persists” as they say. Being anti-immediate-gratification continues to throw the light on immediate gratification instead of getting somewhere new (or old). Sowing seeds and waiting for the harvest is a notion our culture keeps trying to bypass, yet it’s a fact of nature and happens anyway.
In retrospect, it seems the times I’ve been most useful in either way (and sometimes both) was when I was having tons of fun. I think in our puritan, production-oriented culture we often forget that the deepest and truest kind of pleasure is also a good navigation indicator.