Art, Craft, Science, Engineering

And a god-shaped hole

In The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin writes:

If you know what you want to do and you do it, that’s the work of a craftsman. If you begin with a question and use it to guide an adventure of discovery, that’s the work of the artist. The surprises along the way can expand your work, and even the art form itself.

This pronouncement is apt, if restricting. Craftsmen, too, explore and discover and go on adventures of creation that they did not foresee. That said, as a rule of thumb, the distinction is useful: art is more completely open to possibility, while craftsmen have a product in mind.

How about if I change Rubin’s subjects, but nothing else:

If you know what you want to do and you do it, that’s the work of an engineer. If you begin with a question and use it to guide an adventure of discovery, that’s the work of the scientist. The surprises along the way can expand your work, and even the science itself.

Again: apt, if restricting. Engineers, too, explore and discover and go on adventures of creation that they did not foresee. That said, as a rule of thumb, the distinction is useful: science is more completely open to possibility, while engineers have a product in mind.

Art, craft, science, and engineering: All are beautiful human endeavors. They produce beauty and truth, functional forms and ways of understanding the world that are useful and, sometimes, unexpected.

In some ways, art and science have more in common with one another than either do with craft or engineering. Thus: Art is to craft, as science is to engineering.

Art and science are driven by exploration and discovery and openness to possibility, while craft and engineering are driven by outcome: by the desire to solve a particular problem, or bring a particular thing into being.

While all four of these ancient human endeavors require creativity, in science, creativity is at the forefront. Science asks “why” and “how,” “what if” and “if that, then what else?”

It is a common mistake, made by people who call themselves creatives but also by those who do not, even by many people who call themselves scientists, to believe that science does not require creativity.

Science requires creativity and openness, of a sort that we see little of in the brash hubris of the lab-coated #FollowTheScience types. They who would pass themselves off as the new arbiters of truth. They who would have us believe everything that they say, no questions asked.

Seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously wrote—although not precisely in these words—of the God-shaped hole that is left in humanity’s heart when it abandons religion. Attempts to fill that hole have been many and varied, including by those who invoke an anti-creative, pro-authority “science” that demands to be followed. That God-shaped hole is being filled with something calling itself science, but that thing is based on authority and dogma, rather than on openness and exploration. It is not science at all.

In this authoritarian pseudo-science that would take the place of God, we have the death of wonder, and the rise of the unquestionable expert. Religion, for all of its flaws, at least had the wisdom to retain wonder in its ranks.

We need to recognize the creativity and messiness inherent to science and the scientific process, and wrest it back from the credentialed thugs who would claim it as their own.