There’s a new book out on creativity that’s getting attention, but in all the discussion, there’s no mention that everything important invented in the past few hundred years, including ideas, has come from whites.
As Steve Sailer wrote:
For his encyclopedic Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century, Peter Watson interviewed 150 scholars from around the world about who was responsible for the great innovations. Watson recounted that “…all of them—there were no exceptions—said the same thing. In the 20th century, in the modern world, there were no non-western ideas of note.”
LAT: Writer Joshua Wolf Shenk seems to be asking a good-natured, almost ingenuous question in his new book: Where does creativity come from? But in a time when creativity — and its corporate cousin, “innovation” — has become commodified and merchandised, these may be fighting words.
Shenk’s “Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs” (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28) is already stirring up fascination and disapproval. Unlike books that look at muses or author’s friendships, it doesn’t simply consider a pair of creative figures. Rather, it sees the two-person collaboration as the essential creative act.
