Creative intelligence is the ability to generate new and valuable ideas, bridge gaps between familiar things in unexpected ways, and provide practical solutions to unfamiliar problems.
Artists do this every damn day.
Do civic leaders and politicians? No, not when they’re swinging around on the monkey bars of rigid partisanship, dogmatic orthodoxy, transactional subservience, and stagnant traditionalism.
Oh my … did I put that print? I did!
Let’s go somewhere with all this thinking. Become a member of Res Creativa, a new alliance forming for individual artists and arts enthusiasts.
It’s free to do.
At Its Core, Jazz is a Living Dialogue in a Community
In a recent PBS interview, Wynton Marsalis stated that, although music is vibrant and alive, our democracy is threatened. There are warning signs everywhere.
“We’re lost. We’re blindly flailing about the world,” says the trumpeter and composer, who is in his final season as the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
If you do not know his work, allow me to hand you some receipts. Marsalis is the only musician to have won a Grammy Award in both jazz and classical categories in the same year. His 1997 oratorio Blood on the Fields made history as the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
“Our music takes us away from [being lost] into the feeling of community, which is shared responsibility, shared rights and the creation of space for others to be creative and to be a part of the process,” he adds.
“Terrible leadership is easily corrupted.”
“We need to be figuring out a creative vision that brings us together.”
That’s why Marsalis launched JazzCall for Freedom.
And that’s why we have launched Res Creativa.
Storytellers Articulate What Americans Would Like Society to Look Like
Last month, Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson joined political commentator Jon Stewart on The Weekly Show. She also speaks about community through the arts and storytelling.
“Even in the darkest periods, one of the things that carries us through is art and music and the communities that those things create,” observes Dr. Richardson.
“Where is the relationship between people on the ground and [political] leadership?” she asks. “A lot of people think that leaders just tell people at the bottom what to think and there are people who think that it’s the other way around.”
“The more people recognize that there’s a problem with their government, the more they start to formulate a way to think about that.”
And here is where the historian sends Stewart reeling back in his chair. Richardson adds, “So the connection between those two things are the storytellers, the ones who take that inchoate frustration and say, ‘This is not our society.’”
“Storytellers like Abraham Lincoln, for example, who say, ‘This is not the way our society should be.’”
Our civic and political society could benefit from the storytelling of Res Creativa members. Our narratives can help shape the policies, programs, and best practices of the body politic.
People Feel Like Nobody Cares
Sometimes I am late to the game. This became clear as I pre-ordered a book (through my local independent bookstore, thank you) by author and speaker Jeremy Lent.
Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All drops May 26, 2026. In reading about it, I came across a new-to-me phrase that has apparently been in circulation since the 1980s: deliberative democracy.
It turns out that many major U.S. universities and academic journals are keen on this concept. (No wonder the current administration in Washington, DC wants to shut them down.)
About his book, Lent writes that our current political system isn’t broken, it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. “At its core is a belief in unrestrained markets, perpetual growth, and the idea that human activity is best guided by the logic of competition and profit. It’s a system that’s been built around extraction, exploitation, and elite wealth accumulation,” he observes.
“People increasingly intuit that this system isn’t working for them. Angry and desperate, they turn to the only voices that seem to recognize their plight—extremist authoritarians promising to dismantle the structures that have immiserated them.”
“Ultimately,” he says. “What we need is a system built on an entirely different foundation. What would it look like? What would be its organizing principles?”
He suggests reinventing democracy so regular citizens—rather than oligarchs—shape our collective destiny. I’m down with that.
“Deliberative democracy rests on the recognition that laws and policies gain their legitimacy not merely from a vote, but from a process of careful deliberation among citizen peers leading up to that vote,” Lent has written.
“Around the world, activists, organizers, scholars, and communities are already building these alternatives, often without realizing they are part of the same larger movement.”
Deliberative democracy presents a model Res Creativa can use to build a think factory for individual artists (of all disciplines) and arts enthusiasts.
Let’s connect at the level of creative intelligence and infuse civic life with the skills and compassion we have in abundance.
Thank you for your consideration.
A version of this post was originally published on Substack, May 24, 2026
Banner image: Detail from aerial picture of Tuttomondo, a mural created by Keith Haring, Pisa, IT, Photo 2020 by Guglielmo Giambartolomei, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
