Articles from Integral Leadership ReviewTransdisciplinary Reflections: It’s the End of theWorld as We Know It2013-03-14 13:03:43 Alfonso Montuori

Obama, Clinton, Pelosi, and the Creative (R)evolution.

Alfonso Montuori

When the Going Gets Weird…

Alfonso Montuori

When historians look back on the beginning of the 21st century, and around 2008, Ibelieve they will view it as a time of great historical significance. We are in a“postnormal age,” according to the British futurist Zia Sardar, a time when everythingis changing, uncertain, ambiguous, complex. Zygmunt Bauman, the Polishsociologist, calls ours Liquid Modernity. We’ve moved from the solid world to a liquidone, where everything we took as solid and reliable has melted and liquefied beforeus. The gold watch has become a Dali watch.

This postnormal age, with so much that appears chaotic and upside down andconfusing, has driven us to polarizations that often verge on, and regular fall into, theridiculous. Outrageous name-calling and a priori rejection of anything associatedwith the vile opposition (whether Democrat or Republican) has become the norm.

Look at the Grand Old Party, grand no more: After calling Speaker of the HouseNancy Pelosi “the most hated woman in America” for a while, for no particularreason except that she was the Speaker of the House, Republicans embarked onan invasion of the female uterus, this time presumably knowing that it would not begreeted with the kind of rejoicing Donald Rumsfeld was expecting in Iraq. And whilethis all out effort to colonize the female body was going on, President Obamasuddenly became a socialist of the worst kind. Whole Foods CEO John Mackeyreferred to “Obamacare” first as “socialist,” and then, upping the ante, as “fascist.”

In March of 2013 Americans are being asked to brace for sequester shock. In themeantime, Arizona’s immigration law, which essentially makes it possible foranybody who doesn’t look positively Scandinavian to hear the phrase “show me yourpapers,” is going ahead. It can’t be enforced because there are not enoughresources, and there is no real interest in deporting people who are not a threatbecause there’s plenty of serious stuff going on to keep law enforcement busy. Butit’s the thought that counts, and it’s an indication of the bizarre scapegoating climate.

Geoffrey Stone, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, lists some of themore ridiculous remarks about Obama from right-wing commentators: Obama hasthrown Israel under a bus full of suicide bombers, according to Sean Hannity; he hasa deep-seated hatred for white people, says Gordon Beck; and according to theGreat Oracle of Vicodin, Rush Limbaugh, Obama has nothing but contempt for thiscountry.

Of course, Stone goes on to point out that vitriol is not uncommon in US politics.Abraham Lincoln was called a “despot,” “liar,” “monster,” perjurer,” “tyrant,” andmore. He also shows that when Democrats, Independents, and Republicansassessed candidates for the 2012 election on a scale from 1 (most liberal) to 5(most conservative), there was surprisingly little difference in their assessment. Untilwe get to Obama, and then there’s a big difference between Republicans (1.5) andthe Democrats and Independents (2.75, 2.5). Why this difference?

Perhaps the most fascinating critics of Obama are the birthers. Obama was notborn in the US, they say, but in Kenya, or Indonesia. His papers aren’t in order(“Show me your papers!”). Obama is illegal, an illegal president, he can’t bepresident, and most fundamentally, he’s not one of us. If we’re going to talk aboutinvading aliens, surely Donald Trump’s eldritch hair deserves La Migra’s attention,but that’s a story for a different day.

Is this simply an attempt to hound the President and make his life a misery, likeWhitewater and the Vince Foster suicide were used to hound the Clintons? Forsome people, this whole birther thing is just bizarre, perhaps an attempt to foster aparanoid conspiracy mentality about Obama and get the crazies out of thewoodwork. I believe the vitriol and mind-boggling exaggeration is symptomatic of alarger issue. Most people might shrug at the Obama re-election, at the powerful roleof Clinton and Pelosi, even since the latter is not Speaker of the House any more,and at the historical significance of it all, particularly since for much of the left thisrabidly socialist President has swung over perilously close to the corporate right.

What the Historians Will See…

Having said al that, we should consider the following:

Historians looking back at the beginning of the 21st century will note that for the firsttime in recorded history, the most powerful nation in the world was headed by ablack man and two white women.

It’s quite fascinating that this event of considerable historical significance has largelybeen ignored. I would argue that the reason it’s been downplayed (at best) isbecause in many ways it is so huge. We don’t quite know what to do with it, and withthe dramatic crises we’re experiencing right now, it’s become harder to focus on thebig picture because we’re so focused on resolving our immediate “bread and butter”problems.

The reason for all the ridiculous, disproportionate vitriol is in large part thesymbolism: the trio of Obama, Clinton, and Pelosi was a sign that the era of whitemale dominance is over, or at least deeply threatened. No matter what their actualpolicies are (and good policies are clearly the big losers in this political mess), nomatter that most big corporations are still run by white men and that white men arestill disproportionally represented in executive positions, in terms of high incomejobs, etc., this is the first breach. The first hugely symbolic event in a larger shift.The biggest job in the country has not gone to a white male. Twice in a row.

I believe the symbolism is painfully obvious to most white American men, even ifthey’re not entirely conscious of it—or even conscious of it at all. People who hateObama hate him for the same reason mountain climbers climb mountains.Because he’s there. In the White House. Obama is “the worst President in UShistory,” a man interviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle opined recently. Hehappened to be a relative of Franklin Pierce, generally seen as one of the worstPresidents in US history, so he should know.

What the whole birther issue points to is the more deep-seated feeling that Obamadoesn’t belong. Not there, anyway, not in the White House. Community organizing isone thing, and that was fine. Questioning his citizenship is simply a way of sayinghe’s not one of the Americans we expect in the role of President, “leader of the freeworld,” head of the Armed Forces. Telling us what to do. It’s true that Clinton wasalso hounded, and again, a visceral dislike of presidents is nothing new. George W.Bush certainly didn’t “feel the love from the left.” But the stakes here are even bigger.It’s not just that Obama is black, and Clinton and Pelosi are women. Put them alltogether, and, symbolically, this is the unimaginable end of an era.

For some whites therefore the Obama election is more than just the election of anAfrican-American and two women to three of the top positions in the country. It’s asymbol of a much larger change, one they feel is well underway. It is creatingtremendous anxiety that their time is over. The country is irrevocably moving awayfrom them, with white majorities becoming minorities, driven by the power ofdemographics, sheer numbers. This underlying anxiety is further fueled bymanipulative statements by right-wing pundits and the birthers, intended to increasefear, in a desperate effort to mobilize against this new and seemingly unnaturalorder.

Zero-sum Games

Let’s look at one reason the Obama presidency is terribly upsetting to some. In theU.S. whites now see prejudice against whites as a bigger social problem than

prejudice against blacks (Norton & Sommers, 2011). Significantly, the researchsurfaced the zero-sum assumption underlying this view: To the extent that prejudiceagainst blacks decreases, whites assume that it must go up for them. Whites nowsee anti-white prejudice as a bigger societal problem than anti-black-bias. Thatmeans also that when a black president is in office, prejudice against whites mustbe going up and their values undermined, because as Gordon Beck reminds us,Obama has a deep seated hatred of white people, and he has nothing but contemptfor this country, according to Rush Limbaugh. In a zero-sum game mentality, that’sexactly what you’d expect.

Let me recapitulate here, in a slightly more serious vein. The Obama administrationis perhaps the most visible symbol that the country is changing, at a very deep level,and that the ruling elite has been, if not yet overturned, infiltrated. The old guard isn’tcompletely in charge any more, and the trickle down effect is that for many, an orderthat had been established since time immemorial has been disturbed and is aboutto be overturned. As the research findings suggests, the implications are perceivedas being dire. Now whites are allegedly at the receiving end of prejudice, moreprejudice than blacks, and things are only going to get worse. It’s a domination-switch. One hears the same sort of bizarre things in discussions of gender. If menhave historically been “superior” to women, dominated women, then the alternativeis that women will dominate men. I remember once asking for Riane Eisler’s (1987)The Chalice and the Blade in a bookstore, only to hear the owner respond with “Ah!Women good, men bad!” The “partnership” that is central to Eisler’s book is clearlynot a conceivable option. Zero-sum thinking is pervasive, particularly when it comesto race and gender.

The double whammy of an African-American and two women is particularlysignificant. We shouldn’t forget that the first thing on the agenda in any authoritarianfundamentalist system is putting women clearly in their place. That doesn’t mean incharge of foreign policy or being speaker of the house. Authoritarian systems, basedon the fear of a perceived external threat, of which we had plenty during the Bushadministration and which the state of the economy isn’t helping to assuage, arerigidly hierarchical, and involve polarized gender roles, with women on the bottom.Race and gender are still massive triggers.

During times of great change, threat, and anxiety, during postnormal times, whennothing appears normal, it is relatively easy to push generalized panic buttons thatcreate what we might call the Authoritarian Response. This means clearhierarchies, and either/or, reductionist thinking—isolating the enemy, and either youwin or I win (Montuori, 2005). There’s no alternative. Only a zero-sum game ispossible .

If this really is a zero-sum game, as some people believe, then they will inevitably bemade to suffer: prejudice against them will increase as prejudice against othersdiminishes, and they will end up rejected and disrespected and on the bottom of thefood chain. Obama, Clinton, and Pelosi are harbingers of chaos and confusion.Obama the “socialist” hates America and will take this country down the road toserfdom.

If this sounds depressing, there’s a positive side, and it really is much more positivethan we give it (and ourselves) credit for. Obama won. The American peoplerejected the sad hole the Republicans dug for themselves, and voted for the African-American man and the two women. Without much fanfare. People around the worldare still amazed. We might be a little bit more amazed ourselves, come to think of it.And some Republicans are fortunately beginning to question their party’s misguided2012 platform and wondering how they can begin to make sense again.

There is enormous pressure to fix the many problems we’re dealing with, from theenvironment to the economy to education, just to stick with the e’s. But there is verylittle if any awareness that this is a turning point in American, if not global, history. Aturning point at the beginning of a new era. And unless we embrace this as a turningpoint, an opportunity, a time to set asides band-aids, and hope, the fixes will be justthat—band-aids.

Hope for the Future and the Future of Hope

Remember that President Obama was elected on the promise of hope. Theaudacity of hope, even. Clearly besides Bush-fatigue, a majority of the Americanpeople saw in Obama a beacon of change and hope. But hope for what? Thatquestion hasn’t been answered yet.

Things have changed a lot in the last 30 years. When I went to graduate schoolstudying International Relations, the world was split into two: the U.S. and the SovietUnion. We were the good guys, they were the bad guys. The U.S. president was the“leader of the free world, “ engaged in a struggle to the death with the purveyors ofgulags and propaganda and rationing and collectivism and Marxist-Leninistindoctrination. We were the richest country in the world, and everybody wanted to belike us, come over to the US, the land of hope. Hope and possibility. While there arestill possibilities in this country, many Americans are now realizing that thosepossibilities are not available to everybody. China and India are “eating our lunch,”economically. And anybody who has been to China or Brazil or any emergingpowerhouse these days knows that we look like we’re in an existential crisiscompared to the level of vigor and hope one sees there. We’re not the military superpower any more. Yes, in a conventional war we can beat anybody. But where arethose wars? It’s all asymmetrical now. Keeping the peace in Iraq and elsewhere isnot what our armed forces are trained for, or should be doing.

The bi-polar era is over, and the world is much more complex now. I believe it istime to do some serious soul searching because we are clearly in a transitionalmoment globally and nationally. Discussions of American decline are rampant, andwe are now in the position to explore not just how to avoid further decline, but whatwe’d like to be and do when we’re not declining. What can we move towards? Whatdoes better look like? Hoping we don’t do ourselves in isn’t enough. For a countrylike America, it’s certainly not audacious. And let’s face it, Americans like to andwant to dream. They dream of greatness. They want to be great. What greatness dowe have to dream for now? What does it even mean to be a great nation, or a greatperson? What would a great future look like for America? What would a great future

look like for individual Americans? For the planet as a whole?

It’s not just white males who are scared and concerned about the future right now.Almost all the young people I speak to these days can barely even think about thefuture. And when they do, it’s often in apocalyptic tones. Forget for a moment thatthey’re going to deal with massive debts if they go to college. Put aside, just for amoment, as hard as it is, these crushing and immediate practicalities like work anddebt and fear of environmental collapse. Sure, they’re all there, these very real fears.

But when I speak to young people who can barely think of the future, let alone abetter future, and when parents I speak to confirm this is the their kids’s experiencewithout batting an eyelid, there’s something terribly wrong. It’s one thing to havesizable bills. It’s another to wonder whether the planet is going to go to hell and stillget stuck with the bills.

If young people are feeling this, surely we should keep in mind the plight of oldermen and women who have worked hard all their lives, looking forward to retirementin the fairly homogeneous communities they grew up in, where they knew theirneighbors, and so on. I see little effort on the left to understand the condition of theallegedly gun-toting redneck fundamentalists (the left’s version of the old commiepinkos). Little effort to understand what they’re experiencing, empathize with them,and attempt to reach out, and even consider that they may not be utter lunatics andthat they are attempting to address some real issues. There’s little effort to dialoguein a generative way, in a way that is based on the premise that we are, in the end, allin the same boat.

So where is the hope going to come from? To make matters even more complex,the era of heroic leadership is over. The visionary hope is not going to come fromPresident Obama, or at least, not Obama alone. But he can increase awareness ofthe need for people to begin generating visions, and provide some guidelines for ourcollective dreaming.

What young people are lacking, what the white men are lacking, and what just abouteverybody is lacking at this point, is some idea of what desirable futures might looklike. What will this “new” America look like, if there is going to be one? Will webecome a Blade Runner country, a Philip K. Dick nightmarish, dystopian scenario?Is it all over? Are we experiencing the revolution of lowered expectations? Did wepeak, and are we now on the big slide down? Or are we facing a great transitiontowards a better, if by no means perfect, world?

The trio of Obama, Clinton, and Pelosi, presaged a different America, but right nowthere is no real vision of what that America might look like. No wonder people youngand old are scared. We see change and we hear ominous talk of decline. Youngpeople have lowered expectations; they are part of post-progress generations thatwill not automatically make more money and live better and healthier lives than theirparents.

The talk is of getting the economy going and of “sustainability.” Sustainability is awonderful concept, to be sure, but it’s not enough. Neither is universal health care,

as important as it is. Where’s our motivation? Avoiding catastrophe, whetherenvironmental or medical, is not enough to get us motivated.

Psychologists distinguish between avoidance and approach motivation (Elliot &Covington, 2001). Avoidance motivation involves doing things in order to avoid pain.We’re motivated to go to the dentist, but we don’t run through the streets cheeringour dentist, making plans to visit more often than we really need to. Many if not all ofthe motivators we have now are avoidance motivations, making sure we don’t crashand burn. We have to “fix” education, the environment, government, health care…but “fixing” is not very motivating.

It’s time to mobilize the grassroots imagination and get Americans to dream again,to dream together, as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and evenmore, as planetary citizens. Envisioning better futures, envisioning what inclusivefutures can be like, futures that give kids and those who feel marginalized—of allcolors, shapes, and sizes—something to hope for and work towards.

What would a generative, environmentally conscious, thriving, win-win America looklike? An America that draws on its most precious talent, its creativity, to createAmerica the beautiful? We can ask and explore this question in many different ways,without wanting to impose one overriding story. We can create contexts whereindividuals and groups can create many different stories, many different visions ofbetter futures in our personal lives, our families, our communities, and begin toenact them. It’s time to mobilize America’s creativity, and particularly its socialcreativity, dreaming and working together to envision and enact new worlds. It’s timeto explore and dialogue about our deepest values and assumptions, time to be bothpractical and philosophical, to engage the underlying differences that threaten to tearus apart. It’s time to engage young people in this adventure, This quest has alwaysbeen at the heart of America’s identity, and at the heart of its youthful spirit.Cosmetic surgery will not recapture this youth. We can create a win-win game, if weuse our creativity, and skip reductionist scapegoating and either/or thinking in favorof complexity, creativity, and the recognition of how interconnected we are.

We don’t need massive new inventions and technology or even ridiculous amountsof money to get this going. The emerging creativity is grassroots, as I have pointedout elsewhere, no longer dependent on the lone genius, the great man. Mysuggestion is to develop opportunities for Creative Inquiry, to get people to dreamindividually and collectively about what a better—not perfect, but better—future mightlook like, explore our deepest assumptions about who we think we are, what mattersin life, what a better world would look like, where we want to go, and begin todialogue both face to face and through social media to represent what these futuresmight look (and sound and feel) like…I believe artistic representations, through shortstories, skits, videos, flash mobs, anything that can get us talking and dreamingtogether are one particularly way to foster this creativity at a grass-roots level.

Readers of this journal possess many of the skills needed to elicit creativity, fosterdialogue, collaborative work, the exploration of values and assumptions, envisioningpossible and desirable futures, as well as utilizing the arts to do so. The efforts don’tneed to be huge initially. With the power of social media we can create networks of

possibilities, learning from each other, dialoguing, exchanging information, solutions,and visions. Some efforts are already underway, using search conferences,appreciative inquiry, scenario planning, non-violent communication, and many of theother approaches our readers are familiar with. Integral theories and approachesoffer particularly rich sets of possibilities and remind of us the need to think in waysthat are comprehensive rather than fragmented, address Shadow issues, andgeneral bring some of the best and most creative ways to bear on how we canenvision possible futures.

This proposal to foster grass-roots futures creativity obviously makes no pretense tobe a solution to all that’s ailing us, and I’m barely scratching the surface of mysuggestions for reasons of space (in greater depth in Montuori, 2011a,b, in press).On one level, I am proposing an approach to the future that can be fun, artistic,creative, and convivial, as well as drawing on some of the best thinking available.What I am proposing can begin very simply, as a grassroots, educational, creativeproject, started anywhere by anyone. At the same time, the very process ofengaging the future, and going beyond our present impasse, can be used as aneducation in a new way of thinking, and a new way of being in the world, with itsfocus on the collaboration, complexity, and creativity necessary to generate futuresthat are win/win, that recognize the uncertainty and ambiguity of our condition,where we begin to shift away from entrenched power dynamics and move towardsdesirable collective goals that truly reflect the human potential.

Underlying the creative process of envisioning futures there is also an attempt topromote postformal, complex, networked thinking that goes beyond the tireddichotomizing between individual and society, individualism and collectivism, andbeyond the impasse of power-based zero-sum thinking to introduce win-winapproaches. It involves fostering an attitude of ongoing learning and self-re-creation Ihave called Creative Inquiry (Montuori, 2011c, 2012; Montuori & Donnelly, 2013).Creativity is mostly thought of in the context of the arts and sciences. But we’reincreasingly seeing it applied to social issues. After all, the creative process involvesbringing together ideas and perspectives that are usually not “thought” together.Opposed viewpoints become new syntheses. An impasse that is created by twointransigent perspectives that define themselves in opposition to each other—I amme because I am not you, I’m a boy because I don’t do “girly” things (I act like a boyis supposed to), and I’m a girl, because I don’t do boyish things (I act like a boy issupposed to), I am a Democrat because I reject Republican initiatives, etc.)– can beaddressed by creative, collaborative work that is framed beyond the particularinterests of the opposing sides, but for the benefit of both individuals and the largersystem. Oppositional identities can make way for identities informed by relationalcreativity. At the same time, there’s an attempt to move away from homogenizingviews of unity to unity in diversity, so that pluralistic communities with at times verydifferent perspectives can not only co-exist, but become generative preciselybecause of these differences.

Too idealistic? Not realistic enough? Well, I’m not quite sure how realistic thepresent course is, frankly. And to paraphrase Edgar Morin, what could be moreidealistic than claims of realism?

Is it possible to move beyond the tired stalemate of butting heads and overheatedrhetoric? Can we take some time to put some of our assumptions aside, whetherabout “rednecks with guns” or “socialists” and creatively, empathically, explore newworlds? To work together towards goals that are meaningful and inspiring? If wecreate generative spaces and contexts where people are willing to explore and takerisks, find out what they really care about, and allow their creativity to flourish, wecan begin to make a step in the right direction.

I conclude with these words from the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2008, p. 20)who writes that,

Our lives, whether we know it or not and whether we relish the news orbewail it, are works of art. To live our lives as the art of life demands, wemust, just like the artists of any art, set ourselves challenges which are(at the moment of their setting, at any rate) difficult to confront point-blank. We must choose targets that are (at the moment of theirchoosing, at any rate) well beyond our reach, and standards ofexcellence that vexingly seem to stay stubbornly far above our ability(as already achieved, at any rate) to match whatever we do or may bedoing. We need to attempt the impossible.

References

Bauman, Z. (2008). The art of life. London: Polity Press.

Eisler, R. (1987). The chalice and the blade. San Francisco: Harper Collins.

Elliot, A. J., & Covington, M. V. (2001). Approach and avoidance motivation.Educational Psychology Review, 13(2), 73-91.

Montuori, A. (In Press). Creativity and the Arab Spring. East West Affair.

Montuori, A., & Donnelly, G. (2013). Creative Inquiry and scholarship: Applicationsand implications in a doctoral degree. World Futures, 69(11), 1-19.

Montuori, A. (2011a). Beyond postnormal times: The future of creativity and thecreativity of the future. Futures: The Journal of Policy, Planning and Future Studies,43(2), 221-227.

Montuori, A. (2011b). Complexity, epistemology, and the challenge of the future. In S.O. Johannessen & L. Kuhn (Eds.), Complexity in Organization Studies. Volume 2:Theorizing about complexity in organization studies. Los Angeles: Sage

Montuori, A. (2011c). Creative inquiry. In N. M. Seel (Ed.), The encyclopedia of thescience of learning. Heidelberg: Springer.

Montuori, A. (2005). How to make enemies and influence people. Anatomy oftotalitarian thinking. Futures, 37, 18-38.

Norton, M.I. & Sommers, S.R. (2011). Whites see racism as a zero-sum game thatthey are now losing. Perspectives on Psychological Science. 6, 3, 215-218.

About the Author

Alfonso Montuori, PhD, is Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies,where he designed and teaches in the Transformative Leadership M.A. and theTransformative Studies Ph.D. He was Distinguished Professor in the School of FineArts at Miami University, in Oxford Ohio and in 1985-1986 he taught at the CentralSouth University in Hunan, China. An active musician and producer, in a former lifeAlfonso worked in London England as a professional musician. He is the author ofseveral books and numerous articles on creativity and innovation, the future,complexity theory, and leadership. Alfonso is also a consultant in the areas ofcreativity, innovation and leadership development whose clients have includedNetApp, Training Vision (Singapore), Omintel-Olivetti (Italy) and Procter and Gamble.

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