Social Innovation and the Evolution of Creative, Sustainable Worldviews

Abstract: The ideas that we forge creatively as individuals and groups build on one another in a manner that is cumulative and adaptive, forming open-ended lineages across space and time. Thus, human culture is believed to evolve. The pervasiveness of cross-domain creativity--as when a song inspires a painting--would appear indicative of discontinuities in cultural lineages. However, if what evolves through culture is our worldviews--the webs of thoughts, ideas, and attitudes that constitutes our way of seeing being in the world--then the problem of discontinuities is solved. The state of a worldview can be affected by information assimilated in one domain, and this change-of-state can be expressed in another domain. In this view, the gesture, narrative, or artifact that constitutes a specific creative act is not what is evolving; it is merely the external manifestation of the state of an evolving worldview. Like any evolutionary process, cultural evolution requires a balance between novelty, via the generation of variation, and continuity, via the preservation of variants that are adaptive. In cultural evolution, novelty is generated through creativity, and continuity is provided by social learning processes, e.g., imitation. Both the generative and imitative aspects of cultural evolution are affected by social media. We discuss the trajectory from social ideation to social innovation, focusing on the role of self-organization, renewal, and perspective-taking at the individual and social group level.