Getting dressed for Halloween is a challenge, when one hasn’t planned in advance. I’d been thinking of revisiting my identity as Cecil Featherstone, Professor of Morbid Poetry, who spends the day reciting the various death-themed poems I memorized as a teen, but I didn’t get around to buying a tweed jacket. Instead, I ended up with cats’ ears plus my “I Like to Think Inside the Box” t-shirt.
And that brings me to my topic for today, that “box.” No, not the coffin from my t-shirt, but that metaphorical box that we try to transcend when we’re being creative – our routines, habits, ordinary and expected ways of doing things and seeing the world.
I was recently reading a very interesting 1964 book by Arthur Koestler: The Act of Creation. Koestler sees intriguing similarities between humor, scientific discovery, and art. With humor, there’s a clash between the rules governing two contexts – we value “thinking outside the box” but skeletons belong inside their “boxes.”
Science (at least the new discoveries part) and art also involve two contexts. We start by mastering the usual rules and expectations for our field, and then – typically inspired by a second context – we may get new insights. Astronomy was limited by geometry for a very long time, until Kepler realized that physics, like the laws of gravity, could teach us even more.
Pablo Picasso, considered one of the greatest artists of modern times, started by totally mastering the practices of representational art. Here’s an example. Realistic, right?
Once he had thoroughly learned all the rules and expectations of art-as-it-was, he could play with those rules to convey his understanding of a very different context:
Now Picasso is violating convention and showing us the horror of chaos – the fascist slaughter of the village of Guernica. The government of Spain had violated all the rules of supposedly civilized warfare and invited its ally, Nazi Germany, to bomb this village and teach the Spanish people not to question the government’s power.
In other words, Picasso creatively violated the rules of one context to show us what can happen when governments violate the rules in another.
Order… and chaos. In our personal lives, we need a balance. We want many things to be predictable, because it saves us time and effort and lets us better cope with things that are unpredictable. That’s why we have routines. Steve Jobs famously wore basically the same outfit every day – it saved him time and thought. I eat basically the same meals most days – it’s faster and easier. But that’s my personal choice. I’m always free to just order a pizza instead. And then with that time and energy we’ve saved, ideally we’re ready to be creative, bringing together different contexts for new insights.
When we’re thinking about the bigger picture, though, we value order. We need things to be predictable – we want our supermarket shelves to be stocked, our flights to be on time, and our government to follow the laws that our representatives have agreed to, and to work within normal channels in conventional ways. There’s already plenty of chaos – hurricanes, terrorism, war, wildfires.
One of our presidential candidates is clearly in favor of even more chaos. As Heather Cox Richardson put it yesterday, “Ending a campaign with a promise to crash a booming economy and end the Affordable Care Act, which ended insurance companies’ ability to reject people with preexisting conditions, is an unusual strategy.”
Meanwhile, we’ve got Vladimir Putin funding chaos in our information system – telling people who don’t know any better things like “Kamala is a godless heathen” and “Trump’s tariff idea won’t dramatically raise prices.”
I’ve written elsewhere about the value of small-c conservatism, expecting things to work a certain way and hoping things won’t change. Building on that, here are my points for today, the day I turned in our family’s ballots for the 2024 general election:
It is actually more small-c conservative to choose a leader who values order.
It is actually more small-c conservative to go with the party that recognizes actual risks and plans to address them proactively, like climate change. If you don’t like immigration now, just imagine what it would be like if Bangladesh, a nation of 170 million people, was submerged by water.
And above all, whether we want things to be comfortable and familiar or whether we’d rather shake things up, we need systems that give us a place for us to have our say – and that means we need leaders who respect the rule of law.
So… speaking of sports teams, I’m a fan of the University of Oregon Ducks. My immediate family (parents, uncle, sister, and sons) and I have all attended the university, which is just a couple miles north of where I live right now. In fact, if I’m correctly remembering when my sister graduated, we’ve had someone at the U of O in each of the past eight decades. I’m the only one in the family who cares about sports, though. Go Ducks!!
The Meta-Narrator 