Academia's rigid walls seemed designed to supress dissent, and thus,
originality. I wonder if I were an academic if I would have the courage to
publish at all. Some of my heroes were crucified for their ideas, especially if
any flaw at all was discovered in their proof. Hawking's 10 dimension version
of M theory comes to mind...sending him into seclusion for ten years! Yet when
he returned, he had 11 dimension M theory in hand, problem neatly solved.
Conformity always has been the enforced ideal.
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Academics generally hold that your average plonker is about as likely
to come up with anything original as a Pope is likely to be non-
Catholic (Francis will no doubt tell us some were!) - this actuality
runs somewhat in contrast with learning organisation myths and so on
that stress that we are all originals and it's just school that beats
it out of us. Quite why a bunch of inveterate plagiarists should hold
such views on other people's originality, I'm not sure. I seem to
have wasted much time discussing originality amongst people utterly
devoid of it. I have a sense of what it might be and that we ascribe
it to individuals falsely, as whatever we are as individuals is
clearly linked to culture and groups. The literature on creativity is
so boring and upitself as not to be widely accessible, but some facts
are about in it. In teaching I haven't been able to do much more than
offer people the chance to get into projects and self-expression and
not drop on them for re-inventing wheels and so on - along with some
nurture-criticism. I suspect something deeper than schooling (they
school horses don't they?) is afoot in our not trusting to community
creativity or allowing its greater expression. I find the notion of
innovatory entrepreneurialism particularly suspect here, but there are
no doubt babies and bathwaters.
I wonder if we have any anecdotes or historical notions of innovation
and its role in a more creative consensus on human living and what we
are about or want to be about? I'd start by saying the powers that be
are so frightened by innovation that they have shown and used
instruments of torture. Descartes quipped somewhere that they had
done dreadful things to Galileo - and he was an Italian - what might
they do to a Frenchman? Locally, I have found that a range of
votaries and bureaucrats quickly try to humiliate dissenting voices,
rather than get at the real evidence of a situation.
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