Another Reality: the creative gift and the spiritual sense

In this perspective article I consider the need to develop new directions that are more moderate and benevolent and which take seriously long-enduring concerns about identity, community, place, and a higher sense of meaning and purpose. As the destructive norms of contemporary society become less and less tenable, we are charged with developing creative, positive alternatives because, unless such alternatives are forthcoming, those yearning for something more in life, beyond material well-being, may be drawn to populist ideas that are often narrow, divisive, and sometimes violent.

I discuss the historical roots of our current malaise, which are in large part rooted in the modern era's abandonment of tradition in favor of predominantly rationalistic, technological, and economic notions of “progess”. In the process, experiential, intergenerational wisdoms, situated ways of knowing, and spiritual–religious practices became marginalized—practices that had long nurtured community cohesion and addressed life's big questions.

The importance of these more traditional ways of knowing, and their relationship to community and bigger questions of life's purpose and meaning are examined. Their relationship to creativity and the arts is also discussed. These areas of human knowledge and experience allow us to understand ourselves in relation to others and the world and they draw on intuitive apprehensions and the human imagination to develop deeper ways of being.

Today, in the face of so many social and environmental ills, the arts, including the applied arts, can draw on these other ways of knowing to help restore a more balanced approach to human endeavors, and to cultivate new directions for design. Through such means, the arts can explore more holistic and more hopeful horizons and offer glimpses of another reality.

Our lives have become exceptionally frenetic, overloaded and, at times, disorienting. While change is inevitable, the pace of change today is unprecedented. It is a function of our modern preoccupation with progress, innovation, and the future, and is driven by consumerism and the urge to secure continuous economic growth and ever-increasing profits. The way of life that results can be overwhelming, partly because of the sheer volume of information we must deal with daily, and partly because many services that were once common have disappeared. Whether booking a flight, making a bank transaction, or checking out groceries, it is now a case of “do it yourself”. We have to make innumerable minor decisions, but it is difficult to know if they are the right decisions and what overall effects they will have.

Along with these developments is another unprecedented phenomenon—a society that has turned its back on its own spiritual heritage. This is of consequence because the spiritual sensibility is strongly related to creativity and, also, its demise inhibits our ability to make wise decisions. Since ancient times, people have asked questions about how we should live, and about life's meaning and purpose. Such questions are fundamental to being human and they point to something higher and nobler than our ordinary, everyday concerns. Today, we tend to disregard such questions. Governing elites in modern Western societies focus their efforts on more mundane things—material benefits, growth and, when convenient, human rights. This has led to a bland, homogenizing globalization that is dangerously dependent on rising levels of consumption. In the process, more profound questions—about where these agendas are taking us and why—are avoided.

It should come as no surprise that this state of affairs is proving to be not only extremely damaging but also utterly shallow. Deep down, we always knew that the promises offered by ever more consumer choice were not going to make us happier. If it is happiness we are after, then we should be more considerate and more generous toward others; it is this kind of behavior that is linked to greater happiness.2

Today, there is a need to develop new directions that are more moderate and benevolent and which take seriously long-enduring concerns about identity, community, place, and a higher sense of meaning and purpose. As the destructive norms of contemporary society become less and less tenable, we are charged with developing creative, positive alternatives because, unless such alternatives are forthcoming, those yearning for something more in life, beyond material well-being, may be drawn to populist ideas that are often narrow, divisive, and sometimes violent.3

Our contemporary worldview and the malaise it has generated are deep rooted. It is a worldview that has rejected tradition, mythical thinking, and practices that instill common understandings and shared values. The momentous developments in Europe from the early 16th to the start of the 19th century, through the Reformation and Enlightenment, led to fundamental and lasting change. The birth of the modern heralded, among other things, freedom of thought, civil liberties, and modern democracies.4 At the same time, a gulf was created between the physical and the spiritual, and there was a devaluing and ultimately a rejection of mythical and sacred understandings.5 But, as Adorno and Horkheimer have said, “the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity”.6

The modern sensibility has increasingly embraced rationalization, where theory, generalization, and quantification have undermined experiential, situated ways of knowing, and spirituality has been marginalized.7 Some might see this as positive, but we should not forget that shared spiritual practices have been a traditional way of building community cohesion and addressing life's big questions.

The modern era's abandonment of tradition occurred on two fronts. In the Reformation, it was rejected as a source of religious truth8 and in the early 20th century because it was seen as an obstruction to progress.9 This has had severe consequences, not least, the erosion of a sense of continuity, which was grounded in and reified by communal, often religious, practices. Such practices helped foster shared values, a mainstay for reconciling differences.10 Perhaps even more importantly, they helped foster a sense of perspective and the long view because they raised one's sights toward that which is permanent, beyond self and short-termism.

The modern period, especially in Europe, has resulted in an inordinately pluralistic culture that has no substantive basis for mutual agreement about values, understandings of truth, and life's ultimate questions. Hence, it has no basis for meaningful ideas of society and governance that are rooted in shared beliefs.11 The role of government is reduced to that of management—tinkering with mundane agendas about comfort, economy, and defense but bereft of any deeper sense of purpose.12 13

All this makes us singularly ill-equipped to deal with today's most pressing challenges. Social and regional inequity remain prevalent in the world's wealthiest countries, and there are no substantial efforts being taken to address the causal links between our ways of understanding the world, which inform our actions and material expectations, and the severe environmental breakdown we are facing on a global scale. Clearly, we need something more profound than that offered by consumer culture, which is wholly dependent on the encouragement of individual acquisitiveness. Significantly, Gregory has argued that contemporary consumerism can be linked back to the fragmentation of Western religion during the Reformation.14 The decline in commonly held beliefs and subsequent marginalization of spiritual practices produced a society that increasingly exhibited materialistic values. Moreover, consumerism is not simply about needs and reasonable wants. In affluent societies especially, it is largely about distinguishing ourselves from others through material possessions. Driving this, advertising constantly stokes in us feelings of discontent with our lot, which flies in the face of all the wisdom traditions of the world. This is psychologically damaging because it normalizes dissatisfaction and selfishness.

A central focus of the major religions, mythologies, and philosophical traditions is concern for one's fellow human beings. They emphasize community over individualism and selfishness, and teach us how to live together in harmony.15 Such harmony is found not through imposition of rigid ideologies or control but through practice—communal, including spiritual, practices, rituals, and shared events. These involve imagination, visualization, symbolism, and the metaphorical language of myth, which is fundamental to a sense of permanence.

Hence, the damaging effects of our activities on others and the natural environment demand not just rational answers but also empathy and emotion. We are social beings and, as such, we have a moral responsibility to be concerned about the welfare of others. Consequently, today, a new philosophical outlook or worldview is needed: one capable of rebuilding community, mutual understandings, and cooperation. This requires communal practices that, in addition to practical matters, also attend to spiritual needs and deeper questions of purpose. And it is here that the language of myth becomes so important because it points to that which cannot be explained or rationalized but can, nevertheless, be intuitively apprehended.

In contemporary parlance, when we refer to something as myth, we mean it is untrue, or irrational. However, myths are important because they teach us how we should behave and enable us to adopt an appropriate frame of mind, spiritually or psychologically, for right action.16 Similarly, when we regard mythic stories and religious texts as either absurd fictions or historical facts, we misjudge their meaning. They are not meant to be descriptive accounts of events located in a particular time and place; rather they are timeless stories about how to lead a meaningful life. Myths are true because they are useful—but they are not factually or physically true. When they cease to “work” for us, they lose their relevance—at which point they are either revised or they fall out of use.

Today, we are more interested in facts than stories17 and tend to dismiss anything that is not scientifically provable. Consequently, traditional mythical thinking has become side-lined. However, these two should not be seen as in conflict because science strives to understand physical phenomena and materially based agency, whereas myths and religions are concerned with meaning, expressed as values, notions of truth, beauty and goodness, and questions about life's purpose. To address these areas of concern, we call upon the imagination and employ symbolism, allegory, and allusion. And, of course, imagination is as relevant in science as anywhere else. Advances often depend on mental pictures about ideas and directions that could be worth pursuing. We need science and myth and their interactions because they address different but complementary aspects of being human.

A myth can be understood as a story about something of import, the function of which is weightier than that of a legend or folktale.18 Typically, it is a traditional sacred story of universal or archetypal significance; it is not set in any specific historical time and its author is unknown.19 Indeed, the mythic stories that have come down to us may be the result of multiple contributors over many generations. They are told within communities, often in ritualistic settings, and they point to a unified and ordered understanding of the universe, society, and the meaning of an individual's life.20 They are concerned with that which is always true in human experience, whatever age we live in. They are related to the fact that we know that one day we will die and are closely associated with religion and ritual. Through community-based practices, mythological understandings allow us to transcend the hectic occurrences of an ever-changing world because they provide a stable foundation for wise judgments. However, their truths become known to us not through intellectual understanding or analysis but through ethical and emotional engagement and personal experience.

In this discussion, it is critical to recognize that to live without myth is to live without rootedness;21 as Gaiman has said, “Without our stories we are incomplete”.22 By rationalizing our myths out of existence and thereby rejecting our inheritance, we are left with no practices, symbols, or collective understandings to help us—so we have to face life's big questions alone, without guidance or direction.23

Mythic stories are not ends in themselves. Rather, they are means—imaginative pointers or signposts, and it is here that we find the link between myth and the creative process. Like myth, creativity also calls upon the imagination and, in doing so, can comingle with myth, which provides sustenance for ideas to flourish.24 To enable this to occur, we must get past the outer cladding of myths and religious stories, and ask ourselves to what inner truths they point. Their language is symbolic because what they refer to defies explanation. Taken literally, they may appear childish, cruel, or incredible—and this can be obstructive “for the feelings come to rest in the symbols and resist passionately every effort to go beyond.”25 The gulf between a naive, literal reading and deeper meanings and truths is breached when the outer symbolic interpretation is transcended.26 This is when we grow spiritually and find the core of who we are. In this, the creative disciplines can assist an individual in their journey toward this inner development.27 Mythical stories weave together the outer world with our inner world of imagination, memory, and intuitive apprehension. They help create a holistic, unified perspective in which there is no separation between outer and inner, subject and object. Hence, if our lives and accomplishments are to surpass mere utility and be meaningful, we must embrace these realizations and strive to incorporate them in our creative endeavors.

While we might be slowly moving away from the philosophical outlook of modernity, its influence is still powerful and its death throes are proving incredibly destructive. There is a need to break free of this view, to see ourselves and the world differently and, from this new perspective, develop substantially altered lifestyles. There is a need to become far less dependent on consumption and to learn again the importance of fellowship, stewardship, social justice, and individual flourishing—to reset our priorities—to see ourselves not as exploiters but as caretakers of the earth.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of engendering such a shift is being able to place ourselves outside current norms, to step beyond the strictures of convention in order to see our world anew. Only then can we experience our activities in the round and evaluate them in relation to the many serious challenges we are facing.

Spiritual development and questions of meaning need to be part of this new outlook, and this involves mythical thinking, traditional stories, imagination, and creativity. However, for myths to remain functional and potent, they have to be made relevant. They are then able to support, and be part of, a more positive, enriching direction. Likewise, probably the most important task for the creative arts today is imagining and articulating new ways forward that challenge the existing order and demonstrate new sensibilities and priorities. Unlike many other fields, creative disciplines, such as design, do not just tell they also show, and in doing so can engage us emotionally and aesthetically as well as intellectually. The visual arts in particular can have a remarkable potency because our response to them is intuitive and immediate.

Furthermore, when we combine the intuitive with the rational, and the imaginative with the factual, our endeavors become far more holistic and resonate at a much deeper level. This has always been an essential function of the arts—to speak to us in ways that touch the heart not just the head. Importantly too, creativity offers hope. Relentless media stories of impending disaster, resource depletion, and overpopulation are negative and counterproductive. They envelop us in a depressing pall and gnaw at our peace of mind, which can cause us to lose hope. Consequently, they can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

The conventional focus of disciplines like industrial and interior design has been on physical, practical solutions to perceived problems. Service design and co-design have maintained this emphasis on usefulness and extrinsic benefits. Such efforts can lead to improvements in standards of living, help drive growth, and yield innovative products and product–service relationships. Design research in universities has tended to align itself with such initiatives and has often played an integral role in their advancement. However, in doing so, it may also be contributing to a system that is often exorbitantly wasteful because it tends to overproduce short-lived, essentially disposable, products of no lasting value. Such approaches are in serious need of reform.

There have been indications of change in recent years with designers and others working at the grassroots level. Service design and social enterprise offer renewed emphasis on community and co-exploration of alternative ways forward, beyond anything offered by consumer capitalism. Examples include the International Design Network for Social Innovation and Sustainability,28 the Transition Network,29 Cohousing projects,30 and a revival of craft, designer-making, and repair.31 These are all concerned with restoring, revitalizing, and recasting elements of life that became devalued in the modern era. They are bound together by a shared focus on a transformation of values, perspectives, and society itself through the development of new cultural norms.

In addition to such pragmatic initiatives, design research in the academy can also explore broader, foundational issues and ways of expressing new realizations and issues of purpose and meaning. I have been doing just this in my own practice-based research. Rather than focusing on practical utility, I create objects that are a form of argument or display rhetoric.32 33 Objects and images have the benefit of being immediately accessible and, as such, can have virtually instantaneous impact and emotional effect. They can be variously interpreted because the knowledge and contentions they express are less categorical than the explanatory kinds of knowledge conveyed in text. Here, it is important to bear in mind that rational argument and evidence are not enough to motivate change—they never have been.34 However, objects and images combined with text address intellectual and intuitive ways of knowing, drawing on rationality, emotion, and empathy.

The cumulative effects of many small, locally based initiatives can be substantial. At the same time, there is a need to progress thinking and ideas about a bigger narrative, one that reaches beyond self-interest and is capable of galvanizing emerging perspectives into a shared worldview; one that reflects a more responsible value system. The fact that there is growing interest in restoring community and locally based endeavors is recognition of both their loss and their importance. But perhaps an even greater loss is that, in many Western cultures, their foundational stories and spiritual traditions have been allowed to erode. The continued decline of this “perennial philosophy”35 can be attributed, in part, to the continuing influence of Enlightenment thinking and the false dichotomy that arose, which pitted science against religion. It can also be attributed to the fact that traditional teachings are often inherently incompatible with the values and priorities of modern, individualistic society. Even so, we have always needed such traditions because they offer a stable basis for wise decision-making in an ever-changing, unpredictable world. But it is not simply a case of reviving these teachings from the past; if they are to be relevant, they have to be reinterpreted and re-formed so they become capable of speaking to us in our contemporary context. Only then can they inform our values and actions; only then can they give us hope.

Our reinterpreted stories also need to become more convincing than the alternatives, especially those of the market, which foster discontent and selfishness. They must valorize ethical responsibilities, community, and self-transcending values and, in this, there is a role for creativity and the development of new, compelling productions, stories, and practices, including those of the fine and applied arts. Through such means, we become part of a community that has participated in such endeavors down the ages and, through them, occasionally glanced beyond the veil to apprehend a deeper sense of purpose and truth.

An excellent example of just such a creative reinvention comes from the indigenous peoples of North America. A Separate Reality by Norval Morrisseau36 is a visual artifact that is functional, but this function rises above mundane utility. It is concerned with the inner person, values, tradition, and fundamental matters of being human. Morrisseau combines material expression with spiritual sensibilities in order to enhance collective understandings. He achieves this by reinterpreting and revitalizing the spiritual traditions of his people—to make the stories and teachings relevant and to convey Ojibwa values and perceptions to a contemporary audience.37 The painting depicts the visible cosmos and the invisible, timeless world of myth, spirit, and imagination. Morrisseau transmuted traditional stone and birchbark iconography to easel painting and,38 in doing so, he reinvented his traditions through vibrant colors and striking imagery. In the process, he also founded a new school of painting— the Woodlands School of Art.39 A Separate Reality demonstrates how creative endeavors can contribute to new realizations and the renewal of traditions that had fallen into decline.

Mythical thinking encourages ways of understanding ourselves in relation to others and the world. It draws on intuitive apprehensions and the human imagination to develop deeper ways of being. To revitalize and restore mythical thinking and profundity in today's overly rationalized, overly distracted, and spiritually impoverished world, we need powerful new interpretations and new forms of practice capable of touching our lives and our hearts. In this endeavor, there is a vital role for the artist, the designer, the storyteller, and the poet. But here, too, we must sound a note of caution for, in our consumption-oriented world, even the arts have capitulated to the curse of commodification. Yet, despite instances of crass commercialism, it is in the arts that we are capable of presenting new, imaginative possibilities, especially when they are enriched by history and spiritual tradition, unencumbered by self-absorption, and grounded in community and place. Imaginative, values-laden directions can be animated through communal practices and combined with the possibilities revealed by science. Through such means, opportunities arise for developing more comprehensive and more profound ideas about “advancement” and “progress”. Through image, form, text, symbol, and metaphor, the arts can explore more holistic and more hopeful horizons, and offer us glimpses of another reality.

*An extended version of this paper appears in Stuart Walker's latest book, Design Realities: Creativity, Nature and the Human Spirit, published by Routledge, 2019. [Correction added on 12 February 2019 after first online publication: the preceding statement has been added upon request of the book's publisher.].