Interview - David Gelernter

David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University, chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies, contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, and a member of the National Council on the Arts. He is co-author of two textbooks (on programming languages and on parallel programming methods), author of Mirror Worlds (1991), The Muse in the Machine (1994), Drawing Life (1997), and Machine Beauty (1998). His forthcoming book in the Masterclasses series is about aesthetics and computing. Gelernter has published articles in major newspapers and magazines across the country. He also paints and writes fiction. We asked Professor Gelernter about the fruits of his own creative impulses and what he thinks about creativity more generally.

In Character: How would you define creativity?

David Gelernter:The ability to see a relation between two seemingly unrelated ideas, and to draw conclusions. This is the standard definition in cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind; it’s the definition I used in my book about thought and creativity (The Muse in the Machine). But we also need to include visual and musical creativity – the ability to invent and manipulate images or musical phrases. These seem to well up by themselves out of mental freshwater springs, so to speak. But I suspect that if we studied them minutely, we’d discover that new visual or musical ideas are suggested by something or other – they do have something to do with unsuspected relations between thoughts. Some momentary image catches your eye and you remember it; a melody starts playing in your mind – at first you assume it’s a melody you know, one you’ve heard; then you notice that you’ve never heard it before; you invented it. But it might well have originated with some other melody you worked over or transformed without being aware of it.

You engage in a number of different activities that could be described as creative – painting, computer design, writing fiction, and even teaching. Do you think all these activities are creative ones? What do they have in common? Are they different creative processes for you?

Everything I do is a facet of the same underlying thoughts, ideas, “visions,” et cetera. A man only gets one head, one mind, one “cognitive personality.”

Creativity is the greatest curse a (basically happy, privileged, grateful) human being can suffer. You can only make progress in this world by making allies. Your natural allies are the people whose work your own work resembles. I’m naturally well-disposed to people who say, “Starting with the ideas you discussed in X, or the images in your painting Y, I did the following ... ” To the extent your work is original (to the extent that you are “creative”), you have no natural allies except for good-hearted people who are well-disposed to you for mysterious reasons of their own. I’m enormously lucky in having had the help and friendship of a number of such people over the years. Notwithstanding, my career has been a series of arguments, struggles, and disputes with people in many fields. And I don’t like to fight. I have no stomach for it.

What lies behind your creativity? Does religious belief play a role? Why do you think religious belief has inspired so much artwork through the centuries?

I’ve been trying for years in the studio to invent “Jewish art.” Jewish art is an art in which the letters of the Hebrew alphabet become intrinsically beautiful visual phrases. In a sense, art and religion are competitors: they’re two different ways for man to seek beauty and truth. In a sense they’re allies; religion is the power that draws man out of himself (kicking and screaming), that draws a man in the direction of transcendent absolutes. Anyway, we know that the very greatest artists, with only one exception (the remarkable case of Shakespeare), were deeply religious. Mencken once said something like “no great artist is a puritan.” He should have known better. Michelangelo, Bach, Beethoven, Dante, Milton, and Wordsworth were all deeply religious, and mainly they had strong “puritanical” tendencies too.

You have made the case that computers should be organized differently. Could you explain your work in this area a little? Many people associate creativity with a kind of free-form (perhaps disorganized) thinking. Do you think that this organizational impulse is a creative one as well?

I’ve argued that every electronic document in your life should be part of a single “lifestream” – one structure, a “timeline” that constitutes a sort of narrative documentary history of your life. If I rewind to one year ago, I find the documents I was working on, the e-mails I was sending and receiving exactly one year ago. The stream grows constantly as you create (and receive, mainly in the form of e-mail) new documents; your stream lives not on a particular computer but “in the cybersphere” – meaning that (a) you can “tune it in” from any network-connected computer, and (b) it’s stored, ultimately, on many computers – you can smash your home computer to bits with a sledgehammer and your stream is unaffected; the moment you buy a new home computer and plug it in, your stream is right there on the screen.

Do you think people tend to be more creative when they are young? Do you think your own creativity developed early or late in life?

Creativity centers on linking up two previously unconnected thoughts. No one knows how the process works; I’ve argued that it works by so-called “affect linking.” Every one of your memories is associated with a particular emotion or affect. Human emotions are vastly more subtle and nuanced than language suggests; the first warm day in spring causes a certain emotion – not just “happiness,” not just anything; a subtle combination of many different emotional flavors. Creativity occurs when I link two previously unlinked memories together; I do that when the emotion associated with one memory reminds me of the emotion associated with another. Two memories can be radically different (one, let’s say, of a particular spring day, the other of a person) and yet be associated with essentially the same emotion. When that happens, they’re ripe for “affect linking.” When my mental focus is at a suitably low level, I’m able to link the two, see a new analogy, have an original thought.

The mind is more supple when you’re young; you’re more apt to hit on novel combinations. But there’s a countervailing process: as you get older, you know more and you’ve experienced more. You don’t move through the branches as nimbly as you once did, but the forest is larger, which makes the possibilities greater.

Have there been particular moments in your life when you felt more creative? Were there moments of inspiration that led, for instance, to your writing a particular story or painting a particular subject?

Every story I’ve written and every painting I’ve made is associated with a particular split second in which I saw something or thought something new. Last summer I published a novella in Commentary called “Swan House.” The piece grew from an image of a girl dressed in a certain way standing alone on the roof of a house, looking east. The novella grew from that image, like a paper flower unfolding out of a shell dropped in water – a little made-in-Japan gimmick that most people nowadays have probably never seen or heard of, but it had a certain wistful beauty. I have a feeling that most writers work in this same way. Something strikes them, often an image. Then they ask, “What’s behind this image? What’s the girl doing, why is she alone up there?”

Do you think America is a creative society? Would you agree that America hasn’t produced as many great works of art or music, as, say, Europe, but we do have perhaps a stronger tradition of scientific innovation than other countries? If you agree, what do you think is the reason? If not, how would you rank America on these scales?

The greatest American artwork I know is a particular moment involving several artists – the whole set-up is typically American. It happens in the middle of a Fred Astaire solo in the film Swing Time. The greatness of this moment has to do with Astaire’s greatness as a dancer and artist, Jerome Kern’s greatness (he wrote the score), and (in a general way) the greatness of Hollywood in the 1930s – of RKO where the film was made, the producer Pandro Berman, Astaire’s assistant Hermes Pan, his dancing partner Ginger Rogers. It’s characteristically American, too, insofar as Astaire is a WASP, Kern a Jew – and this particular dance is a tribute to “Bojangles” Robinson, who’s black.

But a large part of America’s difference from Europe where art is concerned has to do with American indifference to American masterpieces. For example: you can get all sorts of garbage on DVD – but of the nine Rogers-Astaire movies, the crown jewels of American art and American moviemaking, not one has been cleaned up and transferred to DVD. That’s typical. The greatest American visual artists of the twentieth century were Joseph Cornell, Stuart Davis, and Willem de Kooning – all three badly represented in American museums. Many of their greatest works are privately owned; many others live their lives in basements and warehouses (especially at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art – two first-class scandals in the form of art museums).

America has produced no single artist on the order of Michelangelo, Beethoven, or Shakespeare (or for that matter, Schubert, Titian, or Wordsworth). But we ought to remember that the greatest religious figure of the last two or three centuries is probably Abraham Lincoln – although (characteristically) we rarely think of him as such.

Do we have a stronger scientific tradition than Europe? We have a stronger engineering tradition. It seems to me that Europe and America are about equally strong scientifically – traditionally. But European universities (for the most part) are no longer serious, having been turned into state institutions. In America, it’s only the arts and humanities sectors of the universities that are unserious – politicized, Europeanized. Science, engineering, and medicine are strong. More important, America has the institutional creativity to produce new institutions to replace moribund old ones. Institutions like Fox News and talk radio are good examples. But the Internet will be the locus of institution-creating in the future.

Sometime soon some existing institution will use the Internet to turn itself into a new university. No doubt a conservative institution will be the host; progressive thinkers nowadays are nearly all on the right. Some institution like Commentaryor the American Enterprise Institute or the Public Interest, or one of a few dozen others – with visionary directors and a strong cast of authors or fellows – will offer a few graduate courses in modern history, philosophy, public policy. It will need a new kind of software to provide for an “electronic campus”; it’s easy to see how the software ought to work. (This was one of the goals of our Lifestream project.) Some of the smartest students in America will want to be students at this new university – which before long will offer a full graduate program in a few areas, and will then transform itself step by step into a full-blown university. America has the creativity and energy to pull this off – but the first such New University will quickly acquire faculty from all over the world.

Do you think a particular form of government can encourage creativity?

Not so much a form of government as a form of society. After all, art is mainly a private matter between the artist and himself. Art can be political, but the greatest art rarely has any goal other than truth and beauty – truth about mankind in general, universal truth embodied in concrete form. A tolerant society that allows everyone to mix in, everyone to become as educated as he wants to be, encourages art. For example, with the emancipation of the Jews in Europe, Jews quickly became a dominant force in the music world. This was true all over Europe, from (intermittently) republican France to authoritarian Austria.

People have argued that a repressive government brings out the best in art. That might be true to some extent: consider the brilliance of Russian literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But on closer inspection, the greatest Russian novelist of the nineteenth century (and of all times and places) was Tolstoy, who was rich enough to call his own shots and to live in a world of his own design. The greatest Russian novelist of the twentieth century was Nabokov, who fled from communist tyranny to democratic Europe and America.

Are there things we could be doing as a society to encourage more creativity?

There’s an implicit theme underlying these questions, and I don’t buy it – the idea that creativity is good for people and we ought to encourage it. It’s good for society, sometimes, up to a point. But it’s rarely good for any particular human being. There’s no way to generate or inculcate creativity; there can’t be. But if there were such a way, I’d think long and hard before using it.

Creativity is a fundamental aspect of a human being’s personality. The only way we could directly encourage it is by manipulating the human body or genome. One day, physiologists will understand the “cognitive spectrum,” and will know how to induce “low focus” states. In a way, they know this already: certain sedatives have this effect.

As for genetic manipulation, it poses the greatest threat to humanity we’ve ever known. Oblivious scientists are putting all the necessary techniques in place right now – some of them out of pure-hearted (but in this case ethically misbegotten) love of science, others because there will be piles of money in “designer babies.” If society doesn’t mobilize to stop this trend now, man will be capable of doing away with himself astoundingly fast. In only a few generations (each with far-higher-quality genes than the previous one), human dignity will be dead.

We can encourage creativity indirectly by stocking the human brain (like a trout pool) with the information it needs in order to exercise whatever inborn creative faculty it was born with. I’m not sure I’m in favor of encouraging creativity, but I’m definitely in favor of education.

There’s nothing whatsoever that will produce “creative” children – just as there’s no way to produce children who are math or science whizzes or chess champions. The schools’ only role is to make sure that children who are born with these gifts are able to use them. Children who are born creative won’t be creative in practice unless their brains are well-stocked with learning. Creative children are born with the ability to swing like chimpanzees through the branches of the “memory forest”; they’re able to travel far and fast through the canopy. But they need a large enough forest to travel through. If they live in a puny forest, their remarkable gift for branch-swinging won’t ever come out. A good education creates a large, lofty forest.

Do you think your own parents and teachers encouraged your creative impulses? When you were a child, did you notice yourself thinking very differently from your peers? Did you have any imaginary friends, for instance?

In many respects my parents (and grandparents!) encouraged me strongly. Any creative child is radically different from his peers, and spends half his time worrying about it and the other half gloating over it. I think every boy without exception creates imaginary girls in his mind, but not solely in the interests of sex fantasy; also to talk to – the “perfect understander.” Girls don’t seem to do the corresponding thing, but my guess is that they do something else that’s fundamentally similar. But I’m still (to my very great annoyance) not sure what it is.

Do you think that men are more creative than women?

Men are more aggressive and self-important than women, and both traits are crucial to creativity (or, more precisely, to making use of the creativity you’re born with). Sheer aggression is the most misunderstood, most overlooked aspect of our mental makeup. A masterly writer dominates the language – there’s no other way to put it. A creator in any field dominates his material and ideas. He may be absolutely mild-mannered (even meek and wimpish) in most respects, but no original thinker or doer gets anywhere in any field without aggression and stupendously high self-regard. An original thinker has got to be able to say (or at least think): everyone else in this whole damned field is wrong, and I’m right. Men are more likely than women to be willing to think (and say) that kind of thing.

Do you think computers can ever be as creative as human beings?

No. It will be possible to build software with fake emotional responses; those faked emotional responses will make it possible for the computer to free associate, hallucinate – and be creative. But fake emotions will never be as nuanced and sophisticated as real ones; and fake memories will never be as nuanced and sophisticated as real memories.

Computers will never have real emotional responses because human emotions aren’t just a matter of disembodied mind; emotions are physical phenomena – you feel them. Emotions as we know them require a human body. Unless and until we build an entire fake body, we’ll never build a machine that can be as creative as highly creative people. On the other hand, if we do ever build a fake human body, it will not be a “computer.” So computers as we define them today will never be as creative as human beings.

With all of your commitments, you are probably often working under time pressure. Do you think having deadlines makes creativity harder or easier?

Deadlines in themselves neither help nor hurt. There’s only one external factor I know that can make a person more or less creative; someone to talk to. Countless thinkers have noticed that sometimes they don’t think a thing unless and until they have an occasion to say it. Conversation pulls thoughts out of your mind, untangles mental kinks and traffic jams.

Can a group of people be creative or is the creative process by definition an individual one?

A group can certainly be creative – not surprising, given the central role that conversation plays in helping the creative process along. It seems nearly incredible, history’s bizarre little practical joke, that Michelangelo and Leonardo should have known each other – history’s two greatest visual artists – and that Mozart and Beethoven should have known each other.


Does creativity for you involve more sudden inspiration or hard work?

The imbalance between inspiration and realization is one of the deep inherent tragedies of human life. It takes so little time to conceive something new, and so damned long to do anything about your conception. I guess there’s an analogy in nature: it doesn’t take long to conceive a child, but to rear one is another story. (No doubt a million people have made this particular comparison.)

The most creative period of my life was my early twenties (which is true of most people); I had ideas during that period that I still haven’t succeeded in working out satisfactorily – images I still haven’t painted the way I see them; stories I still haven’t written the way I want to write them. Even now I can close my eyes and come up in a few minutes with enough images or story lines to keep me busy (literally) for the rest of my life. I’m positive many other people have had the same experience. The result is that you’re perpetually running late; you’re always running to catch up with yourself – and you never can.