Stephen Kirchner, and how silly arguments limit our creativity ...

There's provocation, idle provocation, and then there's the scribbles that routinely emanate from the Centre for Independent Studies.

The latest to hit the in-tray is A small Australia limits our creativity, wherein one Dr Stephen Kirchner argues that size correlates to creativity, and so we need to get bigger so that our creativity can also get bigger. Here it is in a nutshell in his closing par:

To advocate a small Australia is to deny the opportunities for economic, scientific and cultural advance that can flow from great concentrations of people and their inexhaustible reserves of creative potential. It is to undervalue humanity itself.

Let's leave aside the bigger question, which is to say that a bigger population is for the good. Without trotting off to the Dick Smith reform sustainable population camp, it's possible to wonder whether a world packed with nine billion people is going to be much fun, and to wonder whether the creativity that might be put on display will involve even grander and cleverer killing machines than those devised for the second world war.

The smaller question is whether creativity is linked directly to 'big', whether big populations, societies or empires.

The problem here is the confusion between markets and production mechanisms, and actual creativity, and Kirchner commits every howler it's possible to commit in a short piece:

Entrepreneurs, scientists, writers, artists, actors and filmmakers often find Australia too small for their talents. They move to other countries, even if it is with reluctance. While their talents are not lost to the world, Australia is the poorer for them leaving.

But actually filmmakers - to take one example - simply move to a bigger market to play with bigger toys. Is Phillip Noyce's Salt more creative than The Quiet American or Rabbit-Proof Fence? Or is it just another tedious blockbuster designed as a tentpole for many mindless tribal tents, where too much creativity can be frowned upon? Is it a question of smallness? Is Hollywood the repository of creativity (as it was in the nineteen thirties when Germans and other Europeans hit town) or is it now a machine for making money out of ten year old boys?

What to make of the Scandinavian countries, all generally with low populations. always willing to punch above their weight in terms of entrepreneurial projects, or scientific efforts like the Halden reactor. Which is not to be confused with the large Hadron collider tucked away near the Franco-Swiss border, amongst those rampantly large populations to be found in France and Geneva, Switzerland.

Indeedy without going into the absurdity of artificial devices like the multi function polis, there's a tendency for clustering and villages, often in relatively underpopulated places, so that thinkers can get on with the business of thinking, whether doing computery things in the likes of Silicon Valley or building an atomic bomb at Los Alamos. Sure a large population can deliver the market grunt required for such activities, but not always ...

Similarly, New Zealanders move to Australia because it provides opportunities that are either non-existent or in insufficient supply in a country with a population no greater than Sydney.

Or they can stay behind like Peter Jackson, make out like a bandit and own half the country, and produce feature films that make the Australian industry look positively sick. Because in the end creativity isn't correlated to population size, and there's a fair argument Jackson was doing better work with his early splatter movies than he did with the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Australia's relatively large and crowded cities are beacons to New Zealanders. While New Zealand enjoys the same institutions and a similar culture to Australia, few Australians would choose to make a new life there. The reluctance is hard to explain with reference to anything other than the limiting effects of scale on life and opportunities in New Zealand.

Which in turn makes it hard to understand why so many Chinese people and Indians would up stakes and head off to a much smaller Australia to make a new life in many areas. And without any reluctance at all. Perhaps they can't see the limiting effects of scale on life and opportunities in Australia.

What on earth made J. M. Coetzee, double Booker Prize and Nobel Prize in literature, head off to Adelaide to live? Was it a complete lack of imagination, a willingness to embrace the limiting effects of scale on life and opportunities in that small town?

It so happens that here at the pond we like living in a large city, with all its congestion and chaos, and nothing wrong with that, but we don't feel a sudden surge of creativity each time we step into the traffic:

The residents of New York, London and Tokyo no doubt lament congestion and lagging infrastructure as much as those living in Sydney and Melbourne, yet people are still drawn to these cities because they offer opportunities found nowhere else.

Yes, they're drawn by labor and capital markets, and facilities and infrastructure, but of course none of this guarantees creativity, which can bubble up in a small village as easily as a big city, provided the genes and the environment somehow come together.

And really, rather than brood about the creativity of van Gogh, wandering around Belgium and France and doing up Arles in fine style, but never actually finding a market for his work, truth to tell, it's the markets that get Kirchner going:

Like the US, Australia provides an environment in which people and their ideas can flourish. But while the tyranny of distance has receded with advances in communications technology, Australia's small scale remains an obstacle to economic and other forms of progress. How often do Australian innovators complain about a lack of local commercialisation opportunities and local markets? How often do customers complain of an apparent lack of competition in industries dominated by a small number of companies?

Such nebulous, meaningless words. "Forms of progress". What does that mean? Since he's led with the arts, how do the arts progress? Is old art and its insights somehow redundant and useless, to be replaced by new art, with fresh replacement insights. Out with Shakespeare and Beethoven, in with punk? Or maybe they could rub shoulders and get along? Does Jackson Pollock's ability to piss in the fireplace of his patron render Rembrandt null and void?

Is it wrong to note that Kirchner is a senior lecturer in economics, and probably doesn't have a first clue about his ostensible justificatory subjects, namely writers, artists, actors and filmmakers? Or scientists and entrepreneurs? Or small countries that have delivered much to the world, by way of people who've stayed in said small countries ...

By all means argue for immigration. By all means argue for empires, and perhaps cite the experiences of the ancient Greeks as they grew in size and turned the Mediterranean into a pond, and then perforce had to turn the pond over to the Romans. By all means argue for larger populations, but don't come out with doozies like this:

It is surely no accident that the United States is not only the third largest country in the world but also dominant in most areas of human achievement. While China and India have larger populations, they are held back by the legacies of communism and socialism.

Uh huh. But what about China and India before communism and socialism. China, it so happens, was the largest country in the world in 1900, with a population of 400 million. Was it being held back then by the emperors, or by the nineteenth century colonialism that produced the Opium Wars? Or was China host to any number of creative people, without that creativity impinging on the west? What about India, 234 million strong in 1900, the second largest country in the world? Was it held back by the bloody British and their imperialistic ways?

Way back when, in the Tang and Song dynasties, the Chinese were issuing paper money and building navies and exploring the world, but then decided to set up a relatively closed shop.

So are we talking about the potent effects of immigration rather than actual size of population, in the way that the wave of post-war European migrants helped Australia to abandon the nineteen fifties (except for John Howard)?

The industrial, scientific and cultural dominance of the US owes a great deal to its sheer scale built on historical openness to immigration, including to those seeking refuge from fascism and communism during the 20th century.

Yes, yes, but let's not confuse a case for immigration with a case for very large populations with a suggestion that somehow all this links together to explain or cause creativity, on the simplistic basis that you're more likely to find one ingenious curious person amongst four million than four hundred persons. In China during parts of the Ming dynasty you could roam amongst a population of four hundred million and find a remarkably inward looking and self-sustaining culture.

Creativity, its causes, and cures for it (unless you want to live like Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky and Ingmar Bergman) can get a dinner party going for hours.

But when it's trotted out in support of a writer's personal belief in immigration or big cities or large populations, it's time to shriek enough already ....

On the other hand, having read Kirchner's arguments, I suddenly realised that Australia was seriously lacking in decent academics capable of decent, finely drawn, informed arguments, and maybe it was time to leave town ...