Down With Creativity

In praise of Samuel Franklin and Ron Rosenbaum.

Nothing says “It’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s” like the presence of not one, not two, but three pieces by yours truly on the home page of The New Republic. The first two I’ve already promoted here in Backbencher: a piece arguing that no human on Planet Earth had a better 2023 than Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers; and a piece explaining, through the use of 2023 poll numbers, precisely how closely Nikki Haley’s Confederate interpretation of the Civil War tracks the opinions of latter-day Republican voters unaware of, or perhaps just indifferent to, their party’s founding 189 years ago for the express purpose of eliminating slavery. This was so much the case that the election of the GOP’s first president, Abraham Lincoln, was judged in itself a casus belli, answered with Southern secession and an attack on Fort Sumter that started what for some reason Southerners still insist on calling the War of Northern Aggression.

My third piece is about one of my favorite books of 2023, The Cult of Creativity, which (apart from a lengthy but stingy New Yorker review by the usually-excellent Louis Menand) didn’t get the attention it deserved. Samuel Franklin’s book is a wonderfully original and extremely well-written work of cultural history that explains how corporate America became obsessed with discovering and measuring and encouraging creativity in the 1950s and how the culture followed, creating an ethos that can be blamed for creating Elon Musk. (That last bit is my own addition; Musk’s name doesn’t appear in the book.) You can read my piece, which is minimally about Musk and maximally about Franklin’s book, here.

I don’t want to let 2023 end without mentioning another excellent work of cultural criticism published this year, Ron Rosenbaum’s In Defense of Love. Like Franklin, Rosenbaum demolishes an intellectual fad that seeks clumsily to render the intangible tangible, in this instance neuroscience’s reductionist campaign to pathologize or otherwise explain away romantic attachment. The book is wildly entertaining, as Rosenbaum’s writing never fails to be, and funny, and intellectually stimulating, and a sort of love letter not only to love itself but also to literature, which Rosenbaum rightly judges vastly superior to biology in exploring the mysteries of love. “Feelings are not chemicals,” Rosenbaum writes.

Chemicals are not feelings. According to Dr. [Helen] Fisher, [a biological anthropologist at the Kinsey Institute for whom Rosenbaum has little use], love can be “found” in the “ventral tegmental area” and the “caudate nucleus” of the cortex. But she fails to explain beyond incessant citing of dopamine how or why the feelings as opposed to just the chemicals got there or what the feelings, the qulia they induce, are. Or why the same chemicals can produce wildly variant feelings.

Amen. Happy New Year. I hope you ring in 2024 with somebody who can tickle your caudate nucleus and get your dopamine flowing. How this is achieved remains, I agree with Rosenbaum, a sublime mystery.