Dialogue Morris Berman and John Briggs This Dialogue Appeared in Toisème Millénaire, Paris 1994 JOHN BRIGGS: Is there a social creativity which would enable us to collectively approach the massive problems now facing the postmodern world? I thought we might start to answer this question by discussing a premise that has emerged for me out of studying creative process. I want to see if you agree with the premise, if you disagree with it, in what ways, and so on. The premise is that for each individual, life possesses a distinct existential feel, what you would call a "somatic" feel. Brain scientists are learning to appreciate the fact that--within limits--everyone's brain is organized in an eclectic way, not just in terms of what's in the brain in as experience and information but where data are stored and the idiosyncrasies of how their processed. In advancing his theory for multiple intelligences, for example, Howard Gardner stresses that even individual creators working in the same field bring to bear on the problems of that field very different talents and modes of perception. This is connected to the fact that each of us is, I believe, born with a unique window on the whole--a window that includes our perceptual apparatus, our genetic makeup, the accidents of cell division, history, culture and undoubtedly much more. To the extent that we look at the world through our unique window (from the position of our authentic self, if you will) we experience what I call an "omnivalence," a multidimensional, sometimes contradictory, sense of the whole. The feel of omnivalence is related to the feel of ambivalence but without the conflict. An experience of omnivalence is, I believe, the touchstone of creativity. For instance, I think omnivalence is involved in the creative "germ," the term Henry James used for the curious holistic insight, idea or sensation from which a creative piece unfolds. A sense of omnivalence constitutes kind of a "guide wave" that creators employ to home in on the "truth," which in Latin (veritas) meant "the whole." I believe the creative process by which a creator articulates that existential feel, that somatic feel, that omnivalent feel, into an artifact, reveals the creator's unique vision. I believe omnivalence is also, paradoxically, the creator's channel for discovering identity with the whole. That's why a novelist can create a character that is simultaneously unique among all other characters in fiction and universal. Ahab is an absolutely unique character but clearly connects us to the whole, to what is fundamental about human nature. So, long-windedly, that's my premise.   MORRIS BERMAN: I don't have any problems with that, except to add that in modern times in particular, Western creativity often has a heroic/neurotic aspect to it, what I've referred to as "Creativity II." The existential feel that you are talking about, played out in a different way, becomes what I call "Creativity III." This form of creativity need not be great or heroic; rather, it simply is something that can happen, and should happen, in everyday life. If we can get in touch with that somatic awareness or existential feel, whatever it is, then that form of creativity can occur in everyday life. One way of stating this comes from Ananda Coomaraswamy: "The artist is not a special type of person, rather each person is a special type of artist." The notion that the artist is a special type of person, that's Creativity II, in which you have a "winner's circle," and where the activity is heroic, addictive and driven, and done to heal an internal split.   JB: From the documents by and about creators and their process it's pretty clear that the actual process itself is an experience of what you call Creativity III. But the surrounding context--in the West, at least--transforms this into an heroic/neurotic activity. There are several reasons why contemporary creators in the arts often exhibit serious psychological problems. One reason is that psychology has become the subject matter of artistic exploration; that in itself raises these issues. In other periods when psychology wasn't the subject, creators were less tortured. There's no particular evidence, for example, that Shakespeare was a tortured or neurotic individual. But more deeply, I think there's a great disjunction for creators between the act of creation and the context with which they live out their lives as creators. Many creators talk about a sense of anonymity and quietude they have when they're creating. That's one expression of what I call omnivalence. The anonymity of the creative perception was a major theme in Virginia Woolf's life. Her characters are virtually anonymous voices of the soul. That has been a major criticism of her in the British Isles. British critics feel that she's a secondary writer because she doesn't make dramatic, heroic characters. But she does that quite purposefully; she is attempting to reach and write from what she calls "the common mind." Her last essay, just before her death, was about this rich anonymous common mind. It was called Anon.   MB: Well, I don't know. A number of creators have written about the process, and from their private diaries, we learn that it was, for them, extremely tortured; not quiet at all. I can think of a great number of creative people, from van Gogh to Sylvia Plath, who did not have the quietude you speak of, but rather a driven need to stamp their identity on the world. I don't think we can call that anonymous.   JB: But when I say the act of creation I mean the moment of creation, and I obviously don't mean it for every case. I'm leery of making sweeping generalizations about how people's process works because it works differently in different people. But take somebody like Emily Dickinson. She had opportunities to publish and she strove to avoid publication that would have been her attempt to stamp her individuality on the public mind.   MB: I just wonder how typical those people are. But certainly, the whole issue of the creative moment is an interesting point. It's sort of funny that we're talking about this, because three days ago, I went to see the major exhibition of Rembrandt's work now showing in Berlin. I had seen a good deal of this work in reproductions, but seeing it "in the flesh," as it were, was very different. One of the strongest paintings in the collection was one that's almost a cliché--it's the painting that appears on the Dutch Masters cigar box, The Syndics of Cloth Hall. It's a very large painting. And you see these men, the masters of Amsterdam's cloth guild, in their 17th century outfits with these white "bibs" and black hats and all, and it was incredible to stand two feet away from this painting, and take it in. You see six characters in the painting, and they're all looking at you the spectator, and you have the feeling that as they peer out of the canvas, they are asking: "Who are you?" The sensation is very striking. But there's something else in the painting, something more powerful than that, and that is that somehow Rembrandt captured a moment in which each of the six cloth masters is asking you, the spectator, at least two other questions: "Who am I?," and "How did I wind up in this ridiculous outfit?" When I saw that --   JB: So you get a mirroring loop there.   MB: Exactly, and it's a powerful feeling. I thought of John Berger's comment on the nature of oil painting, and on what Rembrandt achieved with oil painting. Oil painting was originally designed to paint objects, possessions, and artists like Rembrandt were commissioned by people of status to paint canvasses showing how wealthy they were. Oil, because of its viscosity, lent itself to that very tactile quality of "thing-ness." But in Rembrandt's work--for example his last self-portrait, painted when he was 63--he had pushed the genre of oil painting to the point that it went beyond property, to a metaphysical place, a place to which oil was never designed to go. I felt that that showed up in The Syndics of Cloth Hall, depicting these six wealthy burgers in their elegant outfits wondering how they got into those suits. This was the moment that you're talking about, where these famous people became anonymous in their universality. I thought I knew this painting; and I was wrong; it caught me completely by surprise.   JB: One of the things we may be talking about is the difference between creative activity as a cultural event and creative activity as a somatic event, to use your term. Those two may be quite different and you may have cultures in which they're not that different. We certainly have a culture in which they are very different.   MB: I think that split is very painful.   JB: It's also very destructive. Most modern artists don't survive very well. Making somebody special the way our culture has done with artists, is to say to them, "You go ahead and do that, for me the uncertainty's too painful. I don't want to engage in that pain we'll make you the people who go through it."   MB: It's actually a reverse scapegoat phenomenon.   JB: Exactly. "You do it, we're going to call you special but we're going to treat you like shit."   MB: You know. I was talking to someone here a couple of weeks ago who's a Brecht scholar, and he was telling me a story--I guess he read it in English--a story or essay that William Carlos Williams had written, about a visit from an English professor at some American university. The professor drove up in a new car and was very well dressed, and it was obvious that he was fairly well off. William Carlos Williams himself wasn't starving, but sort of lived out of paper boxes, and the man who came to visit him, to interview him, turned out to be a specialist in-- William Carlos Williams! How's that for irony?   JB: Usually the critics have to wait until the artist is dead before they make a killing on him, but that irony is everywhere in art. The question is what one can do to break into the locks that our culture seems to put on creativity. I guess I would agree with you that the need to make an artifact in order to prove that you're a valuable member of society is neurotic. I don't know that I would agree that artistic product itself is neurotic, if you see the difference. I mean there are forms that are dramatic but I think they have a universality that transcends the cultural bind that the creator himself is in.   MB: Sure, but at what price?   JB: There's no question the price is high.   MB: I mean, I looked at Rembrandt's work, and I thought, you know, here's a case where the reputation is actually equal to the hype. I mean he deserved it! The sensation I had was that I was privileged to be seeing work like this. But consider the context: the work is locked up in a special place, under heavy guard, and it's all electronically tagged so that if you touch it, alarms go off. The context makes Rembrandt into a kind of religious figure, as well as a commodity; and despite all that, one can see that this is truly great work, work of incredible humanity.   JB: So the price is two-fold. For the creator it's having to live in a world where he's getting double messages--that he's special and and that what he's doing is crazy...   MB: ...And worthless.   JB: ...and worthless, right. But the price is also to the culture that locks up those things as special, makes them commodities, and in effect, locks its own young people out of participation in creative activity because it tells them that they're not special, creative, and they should be glad that they're not because being creative is suspect. How many of my students tell me, "Oh, I can't do it. I'm not creative."   MB: The whole context in which these paintings are hung and exhibited sends the message that there are only a very gifted few that can accomplish this sort of thing. That's why I think about it in terms of heroic versus non-heroic. One thing about what I call "Creativity III" is that it's a process in which ordinary life is rendered miraculous.   JB: But wait a minute. The Rembrandt paintings that you just called heroic are about people who may be privileged, but are quite ordinary. Many creators start with the premise that everyday, ordinary life is extraordinary---Proust, Corot, especially poets. Poets are always writing about the miracles of the mundane. In fact that may well be one of the complaints I have about Joseph Campbell's approach. Campbell was more interested in the myth of heroism than he was in what seems to me to be most fertile subject matter of art: the amazing quotidian, which is not heroic stuff at all.   MB: I agree; it's basically what Campbell never understood. He had a heroic grid that he superimposed on every story, such that life is seen as valuable only if it has this kind of epic or mythic quality; or that we should make it epic or mythic. This seems to be yet another version of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.   JB: I was just re-reading Gawain and the Green Knight, a piece that's presumably in the heroic tradition, the Arthurian tradition. But in its details it mocks that tradition. It's a very funny book. It shows the absurdity of all that heroic pretense, but it also shows the real aim of the heroic which is simply to get at the truth. Wolfram von Aschenbach's Parsival is similar. It ends with the realization that everyday relationship is the most important thing. I think a lot of creators know that this whole heroic tradition we just saw in Desert Storm where everybody's a hero, is very destructive. That's why they apply irony to it all the time. But the un-ironic version of the heroic supports the system that we've got, the politics that we've got, the hierarchical set-up that we've got.   MB: And also the notion, the vision, in which each person sees themselves as a hero, and feels that they have to go about doing some heroic thing in their life, whether it's rise to the top of the corporation or profession, or whatever to justify their existence. To feel you have to do that is to condemn yourself to a life of misery.   JB: If for no other reason that it so focuses you on the end goal that you miss being there. But that brings us to a point. This heroic approach seems at least partly responsible for the perilous state the world is in. It has been that way for awhile and is getting more so because of what we're doing to the planet under the heroic ideology. It seems clear that we've become dysfunctional as a species. I may not be as convinced as you are that we ever were functional. I don't know about how the hunter-gatherer societies, for example, whether they were functional in harmony. But all this raises a question. Can we put the heroic notion of creativity aside and contemplate the possibility that everyone has the capacity to be as creative as everyone else--though differently, uniquely. If that is so, is some kind of social creativity, a collaboration perhaps, possible, even necessary, to help us survive, or more importantly to help the diversity of life survive? Provided we're agreed that all this focus on the individual creator is not doing much except generating a lot of artifacts.   MB: That's right. With Rembrandt, or Virginia Woolf, you see this private moment, or anonymous moment or whatever, and the question that arises is--so what? Does it really amount to anything?   JB: I guess I would have to say that artists have served one function at least since the scientific revolution. Since religion wasn't there, art has kept alive the possibility that there was something other than a mechanical way to view the universe.   MB: Sure, I would have to agree.   JB: That's something.   MB: Absolutely; but I'm saying that with respect to the question you just raised...   JB: What good does it do the world?   MB: Yes, in a collective sense, and that raises a whole number of questions. One is our being part of a social milieu someday that would be very different. I'm thinking of Gregory Bateson's description of Bali, or possibly hunter gatherer societies in which art or creativity has a very different function. Those societies might be ones in which that moment that we're talking about is experienced pretty frequently.   JB: Navajo sand paintings.   MB: Exactly, and probably Tibetan as well. Why not us, then? But another thing that comes to mind with regard to all this is, What is the relationship between the type of art that we have in the modern period and destructiveness? I don't know if you are familiar with a small book by George Steiner called In Bluebeard's Castle. He wrote it in 1971 and it made an enormous impression on me. It's a very provocative essay. One thing he points out is that we really have to come to terms with the fact that the brilliance of art and literature has increased in proportion to the talent for destructiveness that modern societies have, and that it may not be true that the humanities humanize, but on the contrary, that they contain precisely those seeds of destruction that are also present in things we consider negative. Hence, Steiner would say, it's not an accident that the same society that produced Mozart, produced Hitler. This goes back to the whole question of Creativity II; and in Gregory Bateson's terms, the "schismogenic" tendencies that go on in the creative act in the modern period may not be a lot different from what was happening in the arms race.   JB: Well if you looked at scientific creativity as part of that picture--and I wouldn't make a hard and fast distinction in terms of the creative act between the process Einstein and Bohr were engaged in and that of an artist--the difference is clearly in the artifact and in how it's viewed. An artist creator tries to embody omnivalence or a sense of the whole, a sense of the more-ness of existence; the creative scientist may use his sense of the omnivalence of nature as a way of extracting something from nature that, an approach that has too offen turned out to be destructive in the end.   MB: Well, let me try to state this another way. There was a not-very-good movie about fifteen years ago called, Three Days of the Condor that starred Robert Redford, and, I believe, Max von Sydow. It's about internecine conflict within the CIA, and one faction wiping another out. There's a scene where Max von Sydow just very coldly and mechanically kills all these people and you see him next at home, enjoying classical music. The whole notion that this stuff will humanize...   JB: Hitler loved Wagner...   MB: Right. And Heidegger writing Being and Time, about these universal, timeless moments, all the while sitting within a stone's throw of a concentration camp, and in fact being an ardent Nazi and party member. Finally it's not clear what we're really talking about even if we do have this magical moment that's preserved.   JB: There are a lot of ways you can look at that. One is that this linear, judgmental, brutal approach that a Nazi would take towards his social environment is a kind of polarized reaction to Wagner. Art opens us up, we get nervous and seek certainty in a rigid, brutal worldview. I'm not saying that that's the case, but it's another way you can look at the correspondence between creativity and destruction.   MB: That linear, scientistic quality was certainly present in the Nazi phenomenon, but holism and mysticism were there as well.   JB: Right,in fact something like the Wagnerian spirit-world was incorporated into the Nazi ideology. But I think all this may stem from a profound misunderstanding about what artists are actually doing. Most people look at art--pictures, poems, novels or whatever--to get out of it some particular thing, some ideology, some moral. As soon as you do that, in my view, you're re-instantiating the very state of mind the artist is working so hard to get you out of. It may be like what happens when people get into ecstatic states and they come out of it and they say, "Aha, I just figured out the meaning of the world and by god, I'm going to force everybody come to the same conclusion." I noticed that with Krishnamurti, for example, many people who were most ardent about him come away with a mind set that had in fact subtly closed itself up from the open state he called for. It's almost like an action/reaction. That having gone into the openness, the reaction is to close. A psychiatrist friend of mine tells a story about a patient who was reading a novel which started to open up a lot of things for her. The patient said, "I can't stand it," threw the book down and went out and painted the garage. "It needed to be painted," she said. The openness was too much. She needed to do something fixed, concrete. We've got a culture that's schismogenic--so for every openness there will be an equal and opposite closedness.   MB: I'm sure that's there; I just think that Steiner is referring to something else, and I think it also relates to the question of Creativity II and the sense that structurally, a lot of this heroic creativity is the result of "riding out" a certain type of conflict. That's the schismogenic model, and it's embodied in much of what's going on socially and politically.   JB: Creators have to work with the material they're given, in effect. Its very hard to step out of your culture, and what you try to do as a creator is to heal those splits as best you can. But if the material that you're dealing with is violently conflictual, as I think is the case in our culture, then what you're going to end up creating will have a conflictual cast.   MB: And also the mode of creating may be conflictual. This is what I suspect did not exist in, for example, hunter-gatherer societies, and that raises the question, If there were a different type of creativity, could a society engage in it without it becoming a guru phenomenon, a sinking of the identity into the mass?   JB: Which would eliminate creativity. One issue here is the size of the group. Hunter-gatherer societies are relatively small. The Tasaday society were 30 or 40 individuals. Usually when the groups got too big they would split off. In place of that we now have corporate societies, vast assemblages of people. Is there anything to the notion that consciousness moves as a whole, as Bohm has proposed? He says that human consciousness as a whole is the reality and that individual human consciousness is the abstraction. It's worthwhile entertaining since it's obvious that most of the things that are in my head sort of are a flow through of everything I've read, heard, experienced. I mean you're in my head, my students are in my head. They're part of consciousness as it works its way through me . MB: I would have to say that I experience it oppositely, that is, I experience "total consciousness" as an abstraction...   JB: Well that's the usual way of thinking about it. But consider what happens when somebody who is violent and negative comes onto a bus. Everybody on the bus is affected by that. Similarly, if your attitude towards a difficulty is optimistic, alert, open to the potentials in the situation, I think that will affect other people. Now, that may be a part of a social/creative act and the difficulty here is how does one collaborate on a social level. Can you only do it locally, in a small group, or is there, as in quantum mechanics, a non-local phenomenon, that might operate over a mass society?   MB: I think one of the safety valves involved in hunter-gatherer societies was precisely that they were small. To create a group mind within a mass society--we have a lot of examples of that, and they aren't exactly happy ones.   JB: Yes, it's very dangerous. But I think the creative state of mind is a very different state of mind from the sort of mass, hypnotic state, the collective state...   MB: I'm sure of it; but tell somebody in that state that that's the case.   JB: Clearly we have not even attempted to develop people's sensitivity to what creativity really is. How could they tell the difference? How could we envision a collective, non-conflictual creative process? Virginia Woolf has a line in her book Between the Acts that suggests how collective creativity might work without falling either into conflict-based dramas or into mass hypnosis. Woolf's proposal is that by each of us thinking differently we could come collectively to think the same. In other words, she suggests that we could create a society that is an aesthetic event in which people pursue their differences quietly, contemplatively, attempting to express their differences in a coherent way by getting in touch with the absolute, fundamental, rich uncertainty that surrounds each of us as individuals. She evokes that contemplative moment of immersion in the rich uncertainty through her metaphor of a life lived "between the acts" where one would discover the "common mind."   MB: You know, I don't know much about Eastern societies, but the two examples that come to mind for me in the West of what you are talking about are 16th century Europe, where basically the medieval Scholastic model had collapsed, and you have this enormous ferment, for about a century. The other is the 5th century B.C. in Greece where again, rationalism hadn't yet crystallized, but the Greeks were emerging from a mythical period, and so you have people like Aeschylus and Euripides doing this kind of dance between myth and reason. Here we have two concrete examples of societies that lived life as an aesthetic event.   JB: Interestingly, the societies you cite are ones that might be described as "in transition" from one paradigm to another. Perhaps I could make an analogy. When my friends have gone through divorce I notice a period when they're really open, when they're looking inward and we have wonderfully deep conversations about life. Then they get a new boyfriend or girlfriend and that's the end of it. In that transition there was a kind of opening. A spontaneous order appeared that was creative, not predictable, that was an unfolding "order in chaos," to use a phrase from the new science. The old order had lost its defining quality and new, unfathomable dimensions of arranging things were being explored.   MB: This is a crucial point. We call those situations "transitional," or we see something negative about them, when I think they are revealing a natural order--if we can just stay with it. By the 4th century B.C., in Greece, you have the Platonic and later Aristotelian classification of everything; all of that sliding between myth and reason that was going on earlier has pretty much closed down, at least on the public level. And in the case of the 17th century, what you have is a natural, "alchemical" chaos being translated into mechanism, the mechanical philosophy of modern science. And unfortunately, the same thing has happened today. Now holism is an artifact: The new world view. The period of transition was about five years in this case.   JB: Everything goes so fast now it seems pretty bleak, accelerated by the mass society. But it may not be quite as bleak as you're painting it. I agree that what you call "cybernetic holism" is a dreadful danger. Frightening in many ways. But in working on my book on fractals and chaos I was pleased to discover both scientists and artists excited about an aesthetic rather than a mechanical appreciation of nature, moving toward appreciating qualities rather than quantities.   MB: I certainly know that that's happening, and I think it's a good thing, of course; but I'm really trying to get at the issue that you were raising with your friends getting divorced, which is a classic case of the structure opening up, and the availability of new possibilities. About three years ago, I had finished writing Coming to Our Senses, and I had a feeling emptiness, of this large space opening up, and nothing to fill it with. The feeling I had was, "Oh, I don't like this, if I had something else to do then I would know what I'm doing, have my life organized," and so on. I was in England, at the time, and I was talking to James Lovelock, and he asked me how my work was going. And I told him, "Well I'm kind of frustrated right now; I finished this book and I feel like I'm hanging in a large empty space, and wish I had a sense of direction instead." Jim said, "Let me give you some advice from an old man. It's going to sound strange. You know that empty space you're in? Try to prolong it as long as you can." Of course, I knew what he was talking about--I had even written about it--but there's no "expertise" in this sort of area. His words really hit home. To use your example, in the case of a divorce, if you don't rush out and find a girlfriend or boyfriend immediately, the possibility opens up of living in a type of limbo situation that is profoundly fertile, and which should perhaps not be regarded as a transition, but as a true perception.   JB: I would agree.   MB: To take the whole notion of 5th century Greece or 16th century Europe, of playing with possibilities and of extending that: suppose we didn't have Plato and Aristotle to close them down, or Newton and Descartes, or contemporary holism; suppose we didn't have those things. It is then that the chance of that aesthetic event, of society being "between the acts," opens up.   JB: That's precisely how Woolf meant the notion, I believe. She was arguing--not arguing but portraying--that between the acts is where the action is; it's where the truth is. That is what creators have said again and again. Keats' notion of "negative capability" is very much that idea. But it appears human nature is geared toward closing that down the gap between the acts; there's a lust for completing the transition to the new society.   MB: That's where I'm not-- and I hope I'm not romanticizing other societies-- but that's where I'm not sure, because it may be the case that hunter-gatherer societies lived that kind of experience of being between the acts as a result of being in fairly constant motion. I believe that does something to one's mental space. I wonder, if you're walking all the time, how that affects perception and consciousness. Since the Agricultural Revolution, the human goal has been to construct a safe framework which lasts forever.   JB: To eliminate uncertainty. That's what the scientific revolution was all about. There are people who are still pursuing that goal of total knowledge with no conscious recognition that all the fun is in the uncertainty. I get a kick out of NASA scientists saying, "Wow, the Voyager flyby just blew up all of our theories and isn't it great," and yet somehow science as a whole doesn't see that what keeps it going is the mystery. Scientists are busy converting everything into knowledge without trying to build into the process something that would keep the mystery alive as well. But that's what artists do; they make artifacts that keep the mystery alive. The question is, can we do that as a society at our level of abstraction? Clearly we can't go back to the hunter-gatherer...   MB: No, and I think that's really the heart of our problem, that we're condemned to think about what the possibilities are, of the eternal moment and all of that, in the context of a mass society.   JB: So have you got any thoughts? I mean do we have to break up the mass society on one level in order to unite it at another level?   MB: I suspect that psychologically and ecologically, the earth was never designed for a carrying capacity of six billion people. Right now any attempt to multiply that magic moment into a totality-- it's far too dangerous, there are just too many examples of this. One of the people who really struggled with this in a way that was far more courageous and sophisticated than Heidegger because it was integrated into his personal life, was Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was one of the few philosophers to argue that philosophy can be both abstract and something that you live out of.   JB: Utterly misunderstood by the...   MB: Completely, in fact the British (and Austrian) idea of what he was doing was about 180 degrees from what he was actually doing...   JB: What happened to Wittgenstein--how his work could be interpreted in a 180 degree turn--is an example of how holism got co-opted, how the closed-mind urge takes over the openness.   MB: In the example of Wittgenstein, you had students and even colleagues, walking around Cambridge imitating his body language, dropping Wittgensteinian phrases, making all the appropriate gestures and remarks--a parody of what he was trying to say and do. When you see that kind of thing, you realize, shit, there's no way out. If people are going to do that, they are missing the entire point. Yet in a mass society, it's inevitable. I don't think it's wired into the human nervous system, but I do think that's the way mass societies operate...   JB: So mass societies function like a drug. Look at the power that mass society has had to co-opt tribal societies.   MB: I think that you've really put your finger on it. They do function as a drug, and Wittgenstein's solution was to live his vision in a private, "religious" way. He wasn't concerned about whether it could be generalized. He just simply had a commitment to the notion that you can only see the truth to the extent that you're not involved in self-deception, so that's what you try to do. But that translates into living out your own possibilities, not trying to be a Wittgenstein (unless you're Wittgenstein).   JB: I remember experiments on hypnosis by a psychiatrist named Herbert Spiegel that impressed me. He'd studied former POWs in Korea, One of his findings was that the prisoners who had gone to war with serious doubts about whether it made any sense for them to do it, either couldn't be brainwashed at all, or if they were forced to make statements, bounced back very quickly and didn't suffer much psychological damage. In contrast, the soldiers who were most patriotic were brainwashed almost immediately. Spiegel said he thought most people's minds were up for grabs, subject to being influenced very easily by the ideas of their social group or society. The reason was that they never dealt with the anxiety and the uncertainty of having to think something through. When you did confront that anxiety, his experiments showed, you couldn't be brainwashed or hypnotized.   MB: It reminds me of a book that Milton Rokeach did many years ago called The Open and the Closed Mind, in which he studied people's ability to live with ambiguity, or paradox--the sort of open, creative moment we've been talking about. Our whole discussion, in a societal sense, points to a number of options. One is, we could try multiplying that "eternal" insight on a very wide scale and probably wind up with fascism. Another is that we give up. In other words, we say (I don't know who "we" is, but let's assume there is a "we"), "Mass society is a drug, there's no way out of this, and therefore the only thing that we can hope to do is have subsets or subgroups in society that simply try to live the best that they can within Caesar's world." So they'll pay lip-service to the larger structure and stay out of harm's way, but basically, they understand it's a load of shit.   JB: Well the truth of the matter is I think most people understand it's a load of shit.   MB: On some level. If that's true, that also has to be balanced with the fact that it's a "drug" society. If they understand it's a load of shit, then how do we have a drug society?   JB: Part of it is despair, and not having any options. It's a load of shit, but you see, you and I might have an option because for different reasons we've come to believe that creativity and openness is possible. A lot of people either just don't have that experience or don't have much confidence in it, so they're in despair. I've been running an honors seminar on the environment at my University and I'm finding the students are very moving; they're very tender. They're hurt by all this; they're suffering and they know it. They see what's going on. And they, like us, look around and they say, "What can we do? We've got a corrupt body politic; we've got this machine that we're supposed to go out and make a living in, and what can we do?" I think that's part of it; you don't get off the drug; you stay on the drug because you don't see any other options.   MB: But I think finally the awareness of the drug also disappears.   JB: For a lot of people it does most of the time. But I must say that, particularly since the Gulf War,I've been surprised to hear how very near the surface this despair and thoughtfulness is in people--people I wouldn't expect would have given it any thought whatsoever. Again, it's clear they feel they don't have any options. They fall into cynicism or some optimistic delusion. But the point is, I'm not ready to write anybody off in terms of creative potential because I think its always there. Maybe if enough people decided that they weren't going to give their allegiance to the nation state anymore...   MB: I just don't see that happening in the near future, and it means that there may be subsets or islands of people, or more simply, just individuals--for even subsets can get into the "drug" phenomenon--who will be trying to do their best within the structure, living the kind of life they want. That may have been the case since civilization--i.e., agricultural civilization--began.   JB: But we haven't had the communication to know that people are doing that. What if humanity as a whole is subject to creative transformation just as anything else is, then it wouldn't necessarily take everybody agreeing at a certain point, because that process is very complicated and a gestalt shift of some sort could take place. But the solution would have to be individual as well as global.   MB: Well that's part of the problem. That this gestalt shift should turn into a mass holistic formula, what's the gain, really? So we took one formula, threw it out, and picked up another one. Some change!   JB: I agree that formulas usually end up being fascistic. But suppose the societies you described in 5th century Greece and 16th century Europe were not "transitional" societies but fundamentally open and questioning societies. What if the belief is that one's activities should be creative and that questioning is fine and that there are all kinds of realities to explore and that no one is going to be without a job because there's plenty to do exploring them?   MB: That would be--remarkable. Please go on.   JB: What I'm proposing is not formulaic. I think it's embedded in the paradox of real holism (as opposed to formula holism) which is diversity and multiplicity--the whole expressing itself in multiplicity.   MB: I'd prefer to have a word that didn't end in "ism," but go on. I'm with you here.   JB: What is the right action for us as individuals? The answer seems implied in the question.   MB: Yes, although one of the things that one has to be careful about here is overestimating one's influence. I mean even if we knew...   JB: We can't estimate that at all.   MB: Right, but then the thing is, so what? We have no control over the historical process...   JB: Well, yes and no. We're part of it.   MB: Sure, but it's not like, once I would figure out how we're going to get to this creative society that I could then say, "this is what we've got to do." I might be able to say that, but I don't know that it amounts to anything, except in very small ways; which may, of course, be enough for any one (nonheroic) person. Teaching is a good example of this. Sometimes I'll come into a situation, I don't know if you've had this happen, in which the students have one form of ideology or another, depending on where I'm teaching. In the last assignment I had,many of the students were open and questioning, but the general ethos tended to be green-socialist-vegetarian-feminist. One thing I tried to do was to break up the ideological quality of that configuration, not because I necessarily disagreed with it, but because it had been swallowed whole. I kept coming back to that line from Rilke about living in the question, asking, what does it mean to do that? I don't know to what extent it's going to make a difference in a larger sense, but I honestly felt that as an individual on this planet, that was probably the most I could do.   JB: But you engaged in the fundamental creative act, which is that you proposed irony, you made the situation ironic. Irony, paradox, metaphor, all partake of the undercutting of whatever the ideology is. It's the reason that Plato, ironically, threw the artists out of the Ideal State because artists are always subversive, no matter what the ideology, no matter how good it is. Even in the perfect state you don't want artists because they'll reveal to you that your perfect state is a tyranny. Introducing irony seems to me an authentic creative gesture on a societal level. Why should we have to know what our participation in the collective creativity amounts to? Wouldn't it be in a sense a purer projection of the creative act to allow yourself to live in the uncertainty of not knowing what effect that act will have on the historical process. Because we can't know anyway.   MB: You're right. And I had no choice about that, in any case. I couldn't know the larger outcome; I could only teach as creatively as I knew how.   JB: We have this utility, probably left over from Protestantism: If I do something it must be in the service of creating some particular goal.   MB: But isn't that similar to what you're saying about how you'd like to be able to get society go in that direction? That also has a utilitarian flavor, no?   JB: Exactly, exactly. I'm not arguing that I'm less guilty of it than you are, but that it's what you call Creativity II, that is, creating the artifact, as opposed to another kind of creativity that, in effect, operates without an artifact in mind. Rather, in the presence of the particular situation it moves toward irony or metaphor, creating society as an aesthetic act.   MB: Where do I sign up?   References Berman, M. (1989). Coming to Our Senses. New York: Simon & Schuster. Berman, M. (1990). The Reenchantment of the World. New York: Bantam. Briggs, J. (1988). Fire in the Crucible: The Alchemy of Creative Genius. New York: St. Martin's Press. Briggs, J. (1992). Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster. Briggs, J., & Monaco, R. (1991). Metaphor: The Logic of Poetry. New York: Pace University Press. Briggs, J., & Peat, F. D. (1984). Looking Glass Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster. Briggs, J., & Peat, F. D. (1989). Turbulent Mirror. New York: Harper & Row.