- And, perhaps most importantly, relations with other humans based on creative interplay can replace competitive rivalries at all levels--from personal to international--with mutual respect, bringing together a diversity of backgrounds and material interests in spiritual harmony. The Olympic Games offer an apt example of this, and serve as perhaps my own best metaphor for the central sense I have of a "Creativity Revolution."
I myself have no doubt that the revolutionary transition from a social/economic/political system based on material self-interest and top-down regimentation to one that prioritizes individual creative self-expression would represent another giant step forward for mankind. It would make possible both an increased capacity for personal fulfillment and a higher quality of interpersonal relations. Moreover, the products resulting from creative collaboration would for the first time meet the high ethical standards inherent in the biological process of natural selection, which allows only those species to survive that have come into harmony with the diverse elements of their environment. Because the process of collaborative design also seeks to create harmony from diverse elements, it can never lead to such destructive technologies as mountaintop strip mining or the "fracking" process used to extract natural gas from protected recesses in the earth. Nor can it lead to the endless rash of perversely intriguing TV commercials designed to exploit for profit the readiness of a morally bankrupt audience to be titillated by illusions of sex and power.
The principle of "harmony in diversity" is an essential feature of all genuine human creation. Every work of art reflects this principle, in conveying both the artist's vision, and its own unity of impression, through the harmonious arrangement of the many elements composing it. The same principle, moreover, governs not only art in its traditional forms--music, dance, literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, etc.--but even incidental art, such as that often displayed in athletics.
Beyond their visceral attractions, sporting events at the highest level exhibit in their own right the magnificent effects of making harmony from diversity, often resolving the inherent drama of conflict with extraordinary grace and beauty. Any TV sports fan will cite such events as among his own most elevated moments. Just imagine the possibilities: The walk-off home run with two outs in the ninth that arcs majestically from the night sky into the farthest reaches of the upper deck. The pressured last-second three-point shot in basketball that catches nothing but string for the win. The last-second breakaway in hockey that completes an unlikely comeback with a winning goal. Or the Achilles-like quarterback in football, fighting free from a posse of tacklers to gain a moment's footing in open space, from which he hits his man in the end-zone for the winning touchdown. In all these cases, an artist athlete, by the grace of his own talents, overcomes a host of opposing forces to create the singular beauty of a triumphant end.
At the more prosaic level of solving problems in society, the economy, or international relations, one might not unreasonably hope that experts in high places, backed by a plethora of technological, political, institutional, and information resources, might achieve similar triumphs. But the difficulties involved in the real world are far more refractory than those encountered in the arts or athletics. Imagine what it will take in terms of creative ideas, technological innovation, political persuasion, and administrative planning to overcome the vast resistance of wide-ranging economic and geopolitical interests, and bring human industrial activity into harmony with the realities of the earth's changing climate.
Arresting global climate change will require its own "collaborative creativity," in which everyone gets on board with new ideas and tools to help bring conflicting interests into harmony with an overriding goal. But such efforts are also morally and spiritually transformational for those who participate in them. They provide not only the personal satisfaction that comes from tapping one's own best insight and talents to help solve problems, but also the excitement and joy of combining those contributions with the creative outputs of others.
So far on our conflicted planet, such a sense of unity with other humans, and perhaps through it, too, with the rest of nature, has only been hinted at. The day may come, however, when the liberated consciousness of humans can experience a rapture that is yet unimagined. I have in mind possible close encounters on far-away star systems with intelligent alien races and their creations. The creatures and plant life we would come to know there might well defy our sense of natural forms, but we would surely perceive that the intelligent beings among them are moved by the same creative urge that moves us. They too will want to explore through the creations of others what elements were brought to functional unity from the diverse conditions of their social, technological, and natural environments. Together, perhaps, we could celebrate an even more joyous harmony in diversity with such strange beings than any we or they have yet known.
In the end, of course, death must put an end to such ethereal possibilities for all intelligent beings. But for those who have engaged their own inborn insight and talents to bring new value to the world, it will have no sting. Such authentic creativity makes it apparent that personal redemption and fulfillment are not to be found in an imagined deity's promised gift of personal immortality, but in conscious extensions of the unplanned works of the non-conscious creative power of nature itself. By pursuing conscious creation from the wellspring of nature in our own individuality, we humans would no longer perceive "life" as simply a finite period of individual existence--a perspective which, as Camus tells us, is made absurd by the enervating anticipation and experience of continual adverse contingencies and ultimate death. Instead, we would perceive our own life as the outgrowth of a never-ending act of natural creation throughout the universe. Our own role in that life is to consciously produce--in addition to the many products needed to sustain human life at a comfortable physical level--new concepts, tools, facilities, institutions, works of art, and various other constructions that promote the joy of harmony with other humans and love for all living things. Since life in these terms is understood as a transpersonal power, and not our own accidental duration of personal existence, we naturally perceive our share of it as a fortuitous gift and our brief participation in it as our only reward.
For humans with this perspective, dim, largely despondent, hopes for personal immortality are overridden by the affirmative joys of a manifestly real and fulfilling role in the universe. Such humans do not fear death, because their vitality is undiminished by a continual effort to deflect the many threats to self-preservation. Instead, they look forward to new opportunities to express their own creativity in ways that harmonize with the creative inputs of others. With this change in perspective from the personal to the communal, they also rapidly come to terms with accepting death as a necessary condition of life. They take it as self-evident that, because thinking patterns in old people tend to ossify in the same way as their bodies, new creative harmonies can only be achieved by a cycling of human generations that allows the agile minds of the young to continually bring fresh ideas to the fore. For the human race as a whole, whose history we know, the shift from an overriding concern with survival to the headlong pursuit of joyous creativity would, if accepted, of course be transformational. After some 6,000 years of civilization, it would finally lift us from the misery that has been our common lot to the exhilaration of continual new adventure.
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