Can fundamentalists be creative? That's the question posed by Kenneth M. Heilman, a world-renowned neurologist, and Russell S. Donda, a noted technological entrepreneur, in an article in Tikkun in 2007. And, predictably, the religious blogs have produced electronic howls of outrage. To sort matters out, we need to get some definitions.
First, the easy one. What do we mean by creative? (Heilman, by the way, is the author of a fine book on creativity.) He and Donda use phrases like "the ability to question--and to conceive of things beyond--the status quo," "questioning, searching, and discovering innovative alternatives," "an individual's ability to diverge from what is familiar and move beyond the known into a new understanding."
Fundamentalism is the harder one. Heilman and Donda call it, "Being stuck in a doctrinal belief system which is intolerant of one's own or another's personal interpretation, or one which dispels science and foments intolerance of others while setting its followers apart as elite and uniquely special." Once someone was stuck in such an intellectual environment, "Personal interpretation and imagination were to be marginalized. Deviation and creativity were unacceptable."
Their description fits a well-known idea from psychoanalysis: ego restriction. Linda Brakel defines it this way: "The person with an ego restriction . . . avoids psychological pain triggered from an area in the outside world by restricting activity in that area." And the person becomes that much poorer in possibilities.
Heilman and Donda compare this kind of inhibition to what neurologists know as "adherence behavior." Some patients with frontal lobe limitations have trouble letting go of people and things. They reflexively touch and grasp objects even when inappropriate. Does slavish adherence to a doctrine suggest the same kind of damage to the frontal lobes? Heilman and Donda put the question this way: "Do extremism and an unconditional adherence to religious dogma result from a failure of a portion of the frontal lobe to fully develop or, if fully developed, to activate?" And they answer yes. People who unconditionally obey any dogma, they say, may be relying on on the phylogenetically older, more posterior portions of the brain that store knowledge and enable consistent or stable behaviors and neglecting the more evolved frontal regions that embody our capacity for divergent, that is, creative thinking or, at least, the Eureka! moments of creativity. People with frontal lobe damage score lower on tests of divergent thinking, and conversely individuals who produced the most creative responses on tests had more frontal lobe activation.
Avoiding limitation of the capacity for divergent thinking is particularly important with children whose brains are still developing. Heilman and Donda refer to an Israeli study that showed students who attended secular schools had higher scores in divergent reasoning than those who attended religious schools. "Based on what we know about brain growth, it is possible that a child taught only to follow, and not to personally wonder about or question doctrine, will suffer from an abnormal development of the frontal lobes." But even adults whose divergent capacities have been stunted can "try to explore their capability to . . . practice our evolved capacity for divergent thinking."
But wait a minute!
We have had long periods in our history when total religious conformity was enforced, when divergent thinking could get you burned at the stake. I'm thinking, obviously, of the Middle Ages and at least the early stages of the Renaissance. Every child was brought up to be an absolute believer. While I cannot guarantee my knowledge of the early education of, say, Dante, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Corelli, or Vivaldi, I feel pretty sure that whatever schools they prepped at did not encourage religious dissent. And there were all those wonderful painters of the Renaissance from Giotto on, who do religious pictures of the most restricted orthodoxy and conventional iconography. Shakespeare himself operated under what amounted to a rigorous religious and political dictatorship (although Marlowe may have snuck off to dabble in the forbidden). One could even point to a religious philosopher like Thomas Aquinas who made major innovations within the tight confines of orthodoxy. These were surely creatives of the highest order who would seem to disprove Heilman and Donda's thesis.
And yet, when we look round us at the world today, Heilman and Donda are surely right. We see the stifling effect of the creationists (or not-so-intelligent-designers) in America and of the Taliban and other Islamists abroad. History shows us a brilliant Islamic civilization in the 11th-13th centuries stifled by Koranic fundamentalism. And in the West one could cite many more examples than Galileo of scientific inquiry stifled in the name of religion.
The issue, then, gets complicated. Apparently some kinds of enforced dogma stifle frontal lobe creativity, and some don't.
What was it about the innovators I've mentioned that let them, so to speak, get away with being creative? Chaucer or Shakespeare would have gotten into trouble big-time had they questioned the idea of monarchy. But they could, and did, explore the problems of various kingly actions. And Aquinas did not question deity; he showed that reason reinforced what faith taught and what the powers-that-were demanded. The painters used traditional iconography, but introduced perspective. The composers wrote masses but introduced new forms of polyphony and combinations of instruments. These creators created within the intellectual limits of their day.
Then, too, in the societies these geniuses inhabited, religious forces did not intrude on every aspect of life in the manner of, say, the Taliban or some extremely orthodox Christian and Jewish societies. Nor did political forces shape every move in daily living as in Stalinist Russia or Maoist China.
In short, the creative minds were guarded in their creativity, and the fundamentalist forces were not quite so coercive. There was give and take. And who knows? The limitations that society and religion imposed may actually have aided creativity. As Robert Frost famously said, "Writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net." It may be that restrictions, something for the artist or thinker to push against, actually encourage creativity.
In other words, if the creator doesn't go to extremes and bring down unbearable pain, and if the society and religion surrounding that creator, even if fundamentalist, don't threaten unbearable pain for even slight innovations, then the ego need not be severely restricted. In that setting, an imaginative ego has room to play and to enjoy divergent thinking and to reward the rest of us with the fruits of creativity. And it may even be that the limitations, like the fourteen lines of a sonnet, can bequeath us a Petrarch or a Shakespeare.
Psychological items I have referred to:
Brakel, L. A. W. (2004, Sept.). Ego constriction. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 64(3), 267-77.
Heilman, K. M. (2005). Creativity and the brain. New York: Psychology Press.
Heilman, K. M., & Donda, R. S. (2007, Sept.-Oct.). Neuroscience and fundamentalism. Tikkun, 22(5), 54-60.
