RE: [Futurework] FW: Pari Center Newsletter

[Karen Watters Cole]

Arthur, thank you for sharing this once again.  Brian Eno’s essay The Big Here and Long Now  @ http://www.paricenter.com/library/papers/eno01.php was very interesting - and new - to me. “Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. When Martin Luther King said "I have a dream…", he was inviting others to dream it with him. Once a dream becomes shared in that way, current reality gets measured against it and then modified towards it. As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world, we begin behaving differently – as though that world is starting to come into existence, as though, in our minds at least, we’re already there. The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it starts to come true. The act of imagining something makes it real. This imaginative process can be seeded and nurtured by artists and designers, for, since the beginning of the 20th century, artists have been moving away from an idea of art as something finished, perfect, definitive and unchanging towards a view of artworks as processes or the seeds for processes – things that exist and change in time, things that are never finished. Sometimes this is quite explicit - as in Walter de Maria’s ‘Lightning Field’ – a huge grid of metal poles designed to attract lightning. Many musical compositions don’t have one form, but change unrepeatingly over time – many of my own pieces and Jem Finer’s Artangel installation "LongPlayer" are like this. Artworks in general are increasingly regarded as seeds – seeds for processes that need a viewer’s (or a whole culture’s) active mind in which to develop. Increasingly working with time, culture-makers see themselves as people who start things, not finish them. And what is possible in art becomes thinkable in life. We become our new selves first in simulacrum, through style and fashion and art, our deliberate immersions in virtual worlds. Through them we sense what it would be like to be another kind of person with other kinds of values. We rehearse new feelings and sensitivities. We imagine other ways of thinking about our world and its future.” Following that, read Mary Catherine Bateson’s interview in Global Business Network, Listening to Change, where she discusses cultural diversity, globalization and her credo “you are what you are willing to learn” in the face of constant change, which we are gradually accepting as a positive in society, she says, not resisting it, as in the past - except for those who want us to live in the past.  She also presents GW Bush as a “learner” whose pose as such “charms” many Americans, because he defers to his elders.  See http://www.gbn.org/ArticleDisplayServlet.srv?aid=430 and go to the pdf download. Which makes this reply to an academic paper’s public airing interesting, given the debate about conservatism and liberalism here and everywhere else, and the roots of our differences of opinions.  - KWC Political Opinion, Not Pathology By Arie W. Kruglanski and John T. Jost, Thursday, August 28, 2003; Page A27 @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56563-2003Aug27.html In the May issue of Psychological Bulletin, we published a review that statistically summarizes dozens of studies conducted over 50 years dealing with psychological differences associated with left- vs. right-wing thinking.  Based on this literature, we found that the likelihood of adopting conservative rather than liberal political opinions is significantly correlated, among other psychological dimensions, with a sense of societal instability, fear of death, intolerance of ambiguity, need for closure, lower cognitive complexity and a sense of threat. Apparently without reading our original articles or attempting to contact any of us, many commentators and syndicated columnists, including Ann Coulter and Cal Thomas -- George Will [op-ed, Aug. 10] apparently read but misunderstood our work) -- assumed that such a psychological analysis of ideology entails a judgment that conservatism must be abnormal, pathological or even the result of mental illness.  The British media seem to have settled on the highly stigmatized and equally inaccurate term "neuroses."  All of this reflects a crude and outdated perception of psychological research. Historically, some of the better known psychological analyses of right-wing thinking, especially the famous Adorno et al. volume on "The Authoritarian Personality" (1950), assumed that anti-Semitism and racial intolerance were consequences of faulty parenting styles and traumatic childhood experiences.  The German psychologist Erich Jantsch in 1938 had described liberalism as morbid. We part ways with these and other theories based on a "medical model" that ranks political orientations on dimensions of abnormality.  All the variables we have reviewed pertain to normal cognitive and motivational functioning. We would argue that all beliefs have a partial basis in one's needs, fears and desires, including beliefs that form one's political ideology.  Our research has identified several factors that seem to underlie the propensity to find conservative vs. liberal thought systems appealing. It's wrong to conclude that our results provide only bad news for conservatives.  True, we find some support for the traditional "rigidity-of-the-right" hypothesis, but it is also true that liberals could be characterized on the basis of our overall profile as relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity -- all of which may be liabilities in mass politics and other public and professional domains.  Because we assume that all beliefs (ideological, scientific and otherwise) are partially (but never completely) determined by one's needs, fears and desires, we see nothing pathological about this process.  It is simply part of what it means to be human.  Our "trade-off" model of human psychology assumes that any trait or motivation has potential advantages and disadvantages, depending on the situation.  A heightened sensitivity to threat and uncertainty is by no means maladaptive in all contexts.  Even closed-mindedness may be useful, provided one tends to have a closed mind about appropriate values and accurate opinions; a reluctance to abandon one's prior convictions in favor of new fads can be a good thing.  The important task for social scientists is to identify the conditions under which each of these cognitive and motivational styles is beneficial, rather than touting one or the other as inherently and invariably superior. Our findings highlight the importance of situations and historical factors that can produce political shifts by affecting psychological needs pertaining to uncertainty and threat.  The need to achieve closure and to resolve ambiguity, for example, are heightened under conditions of destabilizing uncertainty (for example, with the outbreak of terrorism, economic turmoil or political instability).  Thus our research is best understood as addressing the cognitive and motivational bases of conservatism (and liberalism) rather than the personalities of conservatives (and liberals). We readily acknowledge that identifying the motivational underpinnings of a belief system does not constitute a valid argument in a political debate any more than it does in scientific debates.  What counts is the cogency of the political arguments and the degree to which they fit with independently verifiable facts and reasonable assumptions.  When the dust settles on the current debate, we hope that these important messages will be seen as the real focus of our research. Arie W. Kruglanski is distinguished university professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. John T. Jost is an associate professor in Stanford's Graduate School of Business. This article was written in collaboration with Jack Glaser and Frank J. Sulloway, both of the University of California at Berkeley.