Creativity Begins to Flow

1
Creativity Begins to Flow
Civilization
2
Civilization and personal creativity

• The psychological conditions which make a
  society or an epoch creative and consistently
  original have been little studied, but it seems
  likely that social conditions analogous to those
  seen in individual creativity are important.
  Freedom of expression and movement, lack of fear
  of dissent and contradiction, a willingness to
  break with custom, a spirit of play as well as of
  dedication to work, purpose on a grand scale
  these are some of the attributes which a creative
  social entity, whether vast or tiny, can be
  expected to have.
• Frank Barron, Institute of Personality
  Assessment and Research, University of
  California, Berkeley

3
Civilization Creativity

• At certain epochs man has felt conscious of
  something about himself body and spirit which
  was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence
  and the night-to-night struggle with fear and he
  has felt the need to develop these qualities of
  thought and feeling so that they might approach
  as nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection
  reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in
  equilibrium. He has managed to satisfy this need
  in various ways through myths, through dance
  and song, through systems of philosophy and
  through the order that he has imposed upon the
  visible world.
• Kenneth Clark, Civilization

4
Civilization (general)

• When did civilization begin?
• Status about 4000-3500 BC
• Stone Age society
• People were living as hunter-gatherers
  (non-stationary)
• What was the creative event that allowed this
  change?
• Agriculture (domestication of grains)
• The greatest invention of pre-history

5
Agriculture

• Allowed localization of population into cities
• Allowed increased population density
• Led to technological developments
• Agronomy
• Plow
• Wheel
• Materials development

6
Cities Advantages and Disadvantages

• Began to be concerned about reason, justice,
  beauty, rise above mere survival, environmental
  concerns
• Creativity became more important
• Conflict of safety and submission
• "Interestingly, the Shang Chinese ideograph
  for a city, yi, incorporates the symbols for an
  enclosure and a man kneeling in submission,
  suggesting that, as was often the case elsewhere,
  the fort in China was an institution of social
  control as well as of defense."
• John Keegan, The Art of Warfare, 1993, 145.

7
Essential features of civilization

• A means of producing sufficient food
  (agriculture)
• Without requiring that everyone was involved in
  farming
• Includes a distribution system linking the urban
  and agricultural sectors
• Specialization of labor
• Includes trade, manufacturing, and other creative
  endeavors
• Farmers, artisans, priests, soldiers, etc
• An established social order or hierarchy
• Usually based on government, religion or a
  combination of the two
• Provides protection but requires submission to
  authority
• A system of written communication

8
Writing

• The "lubricant" that let all the other elements
  of society work together
• Examples of early writing
• Hieroglyphics
• Cuneiform
• Chinese characters
• Phoenician alphabet
• Greek alphabet
• Roman alphabet

9
Writing

• Invented for
• Easier preservation of information
• Religion
• Egyptians
• Commerce
• Sumerians
• History, culture and science
• Greeks
• Romans

10
Types of writing systems

• Logograms symbol represents a whole word
• Chinese characters
• Egyptian hieroglyphs
• Sumerian cuneiform
• Symbols , ,
• Syllabaries symbol represents a syllable
• Shorthand
• Text for blind readers
• Japanese script
• Alphabet symbol represents a sound
• Roman, Greek, Cyrillic alphabets

11
Civilization

• Why civilization began at rivers?
• River silt
• Irrigation
• Supplementary food supply (animals and birds)
• Transportation
• Communication
• All led to the ability to grow sufficient food to
  feed your family and to sell the excess

12
River Societies

• Fertile Crescent
• Mesopotamia
• Egypt
• India
• China

13
Thank You