Creative Matrix

What we lose by regulating culture

Virginia Postrel from the August/September 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

This not simply a matter of great work but of the milieu from which it springs. To get the good stuff, you have to put up with the experiments that fail and the junk produced to pay the bills. Alongside the hack work of Greene and Dekker, even Shakespeare wrote some dogs. But crush Titus Andronicus, and you will lose King Lear. The same process produced them both.

How does it matter that in the 15th century China turned its back on exploration and innovation, that the world’s most technologically creative nation became a backwater by decree? We cannot know for sure. But the loss, to the Chinese people and to the world, was surely significant.

When congressional pressure and anti-competitive opportunism created the Comics Code, declaring American comic books an inherently childish medium, EC Comics was destroyed and its readers bereft. That was the short-term effect. The larger loss was in the stories untold, the techniques unexplored. We can infer something of its magnitude by looking at the development of graphic storytelling in Europe and Japan. But we can never know what might have been.

In The Future and Its Enemies, I argue that individual creativity and enterprise are not only personally satisfying but socially good, producing progress and happiness. For celebrating creativity and happiness, I have been called a fascist by critics on both coasts. It is a peculiar charge, since fascism entails subordinating the individual to the nation–hardly a recipe for either self-expression or joy. But the charge expresses a coherent worldview, one that imagines freedom as the will to power and the good life as docile obedience.

This view quite naturally leads to crusades against popular art, particularly American art, since our native culture is anti-authority. Writing in The American Spectator, movie critic James Bowman denounces The Matrix, whose science fiction setting he clearly does not understand, for teaching "kids contempt for the values of work and sobriety and conformity to social norms." This critique condemns not just the movie but the inventiveness that made it possible. It is a prescription for the death of creativity and an attack on the American spirit. By this standard, Hamlet is safe. But what about Huck Finn?