Time to use our creativity ethically, responsibly!
I recently attended a charity event where Deepak Chopra was speaking. I left his informative chat with one sentence that struck a chord reminding me that I wanted to post something about ethical creativity. Deepak referred to our time now as one of "Creativity on Crack". When we consider now that creativity is our species vehicle for evolution and we stop for a moment and take a look at the state of the world, we recognize that creativity has not to this point, only resulted in good things. In fact I would argue our creativity has resulted in a fair number of horrible things both physically and conceptually. Our creativity has the potential to wipe us off the planet. The industrial practices we use to create our ‘stuff’ are having a terrible impact on our global ecosystem. Thinking of such concepts as the slave trade, detailed rules regarding all the ways black people should not interact with white people and harkening back to Hitler and how he invested significant creative energy with the ultimate goal of annihilating and entire species, creativity is frightening. Creativity has the power to create suffering and misery. Sometimes the efforts of our creativity are not intended to do harm, but do so anyway. John Sylvan, the inventor of the Keurlig coffee pods disclosed in an interview with As it Happens, that he would not have invented it if he knew how much waste would come of his idea.
I was very excited to see discover that the idea of ethical creativity was being explored by scholars who are active in the field. “Numerous recent examples of creative ideas or products let loose in society have resulted in destructive consequences, some which continue to spread” (Moran, Cropley and Kaufman, 2014). A creative free–for- all is not the inevitable. In fact, many eastern cultures consider moral contributions to society a key requirement for creative work (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2010). What would happen if we began to take responsibility for our creative outputs? What if we began to think about all the ways they might be used, all the ways they could have an impact on life as we know it? Kaufman and Beghetto (2013) likened creativity to a superpower and suggested that there were times when it was appropriate to use it and times when it is not useful at all. They advocate we need to teach the difference. I would add that we must learn to harness this superpower for a real benefit to the planet. I feel that like Stan Lee, “with this power, comes great responsibility.”