We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocus-pocus. In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.

Essays about creativity teach us a lot.  Not a whole lot about creativity, mind you, but they teach us a lot about the person writing the essay and also the social and political context.   Not that David Brooks is a particularly important person to learn a lot about.  Instead, treat this more of as an example of how the way in which we talk about unique people really says something more about the way we see ourselves in relation to unique people.  (Similarly, this essay will not teach you much about its main subject matter but it will probably reveal stuff about me.)

People, especially intellectuals, are obsessed with what makes people creative.  Mostly what makes other people creative.  We are surrounded by amazing people who are always coming up with ideas that seem to come from nowhere.  It gets worrisome when every day we hear people say ingenious things that would never have occurred to us in a million years.  It is comforting to adopt theories of the origin of creativity that puts us on equal footing with them.

These theories come in two varieties.

  1. Theories that say that those people who seem to be unique are really just ordinary.
  2. Theories that say that us ordinary people are in fact unique.

And of course these are two ways of saying the same thing.  And that’s why these essays don’t really tell us anything about creativity.  But the choice of which way to say it reveals a lot about the person saying it.