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162 Creativity

particular belief, this will affect the space of possibilities explored by that system.
Within the sciences, the assumption that the heavenly bodies, being perfect,
necessarily move in perfect circles locked astronomy into the Ptolemeian par-
adigm for a millennium and a half, and Empedocle’s idea that the four ultimate
constituents of matter, the elements, are water, fire, air and earth, kept chemis-
try back for even longer. 60, 61 The assumption that a painting is supposed to be
a picture of something constrained Western art (but not Islamic or Australian
aborigine art) from its stone age inception to the early years of the 20th cen-
tury. Western Europe during medieval times is often depicted as an era in
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which the production of novelty was prevented by the constraining influence
of church dogma. In the middle of the 19th century, Japan found itself scram-
63
bling to catch up with Western inventions after two centuries of adherence to
the axioms of samurai society. 64
But the relation between what individuals believe and what a historical
entity like a scientific discipline, an army or a market “believes” is not straight-
forward. No community is so homogenous that all its members share one and
the same belief system. The official position of a large collective is a complex
function of its mode of organization and the individual participants’ beliefs;
simple majorities seldom prevail. Of the many organizational factors that can
contribute to stagnation, entrenched interest is perhaps the most powerful.
When concepts and principles are embedded in the very design of institutions
and practices, including accountability and incentive systems, they become
obstacles to creative change. The severity of this kind of impasse is, in part,
a function of the degree of authoritarianism that characterizes the system.
Enforcement of religious or political axioms can slow the production and dis-
semination of new ideas.
The blocking of modern genetics in the Soviet Union is the classi-
cal example. Trofim Denisovich Lysenko proposed agricultural practices
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(“vernalization,” changing plant characteristics by operations like heating,
watering, planting early or late, etc.) that contradicted established facts and
principles of plant physiology and claimed a greater degree of malleability for
agriculturally important plants like wheat than could be accommodated by the
principles of genetics. Lysenko’s vernalization concept appealed to the Soviet
political leadership, both because it fit thematically with the Marxist principles
that everything in both nature and society is dynamic, changeable and shaped
by its environment, and also because it implied that it was possible to obtain
practical results in agriculture and elsewhere that went beyond the results of
Western agriculture. The political support for Lysenko’s false ideas and use-
less practices created an impasse for Soviet biology in general and agriculture