Multicultural or Liberal: Which Society Spawns More Creativity?

 

Which is better for artists, to live in a multicultural society or a liberal one? We should first examine how we define the two.

In a multicultural society, the collective comes together as individuals. In a liberal society, individuals come together as a collective. 

Let me unpack this further. Under multiculturalism, the individual is not asked to sacrifice his or her identity for the whole. The more prominent their identity, the stronger the multicultural model becomes. A good example is salad. You never want to diminish the uniqueness of the lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers. Their individuality is what makes it a salad. Liberal societies play by a different set of rules. In a liberal society, it’s about serving the whole, which requires one to sacrifice their identity or at least revise it. The vegetables no longer have the identity of the salad but the uniformity of a smoothie. 

How’s does all of this affect us as artists? How does it affect creativity?

As artists, our dissatisfaction with the status quo is what often motivates us to create. To paraphrase Toni Morrison, there’s a book that we want to read that has not been written, so we write it. In our effort to write that book, we don’t look to the tried and tested but the new and under-explored. In other words, uniqueness.

Liberal societies, on the other hand, encourages the melting pot, or as I like to call it, the smoothie model, where we assimilate to create a unified image. Again, this type of unification ignores fundamental differences that make us unique. The basic tenet of most artists, not only shuns this idea of identity-sacrificed uniformity, but we view and share our uniqueness from a high-resolution perspective. In other words, we take that which is not commonplace and we bring it to the forefront.

The smoothie model may be a convenient solution for the complexities of diversity and uniqueness. Still, as artists, the salad model allows us to repurpose our individuality into a new normal. 

The more diverse we are within our society, the more we're incentivized to embrace our uniqueness. The more unique our perspective, the more fertile our creative wells become. I call it the relay-effect. It's a win-win situation.