mercoledì 29 gennaio 2014
martedì 28 gennaio 2014
Dov'è finito il nostro Paese?
di Giorgio Cattaneo
«Questo paese è meraviglioso», disse la donna, allungando lo sguardo sul latte nebbioso che esalava dalle acque e dai canneti della Maremma nella luce cruda e ancora incerta del primo mattino. La voce della donna era incrinata dalla commozione, sul treno che - insieme a centinaia di altri ordinari apostoli - la stava trasportando verso la capitale, dove di lì a poche ore si sarebbe messa in marcia la più gigantesca manifestazione di massa della storia, milioni di cittadini in corteo per tentare di fermare la guerra, contro l'Iraq di Saddam e le sue inesistenti bombe atomiche.
Era il 15 febbraio 2003, mille anni fa. C'era quel treno. E c'era quella donna, intenerita dallo spettacolo naturale inesauribile dell'Italia e convinta di vivere in un paese speciale, a suo modo nobile e generoso - la storia siamo noi, dopotutto, quando ce ne ricordiamo. Un paese amico, solidale, abbastanza ricco da essere tollerante e aperto. Un paese sereno, con una sua vocazione alla felicità. Un paese che oggi non c'è più.
Lo stesso uso comune di quella parola - paese - è divenuto monopolio di statistiche prima astruse e poi atroci. Il Pil, lo spread, la deflazione, la moneta unica, il rigore, l'addio al welfare, l'austerity, la spending review. Il debito pubblico esibito come colpa, le privatizzazioni-truffa come virtù. Spenta l'allegria di un tempo, estinta la fiducia nel futuro. Scomparsa la politica, con i suoi partiti. Spariti i politici: ci si accontenta di intrattenitori (prima Berlusconi, ora Renzi). Sparita la verità, la scomoda verità delle strade. Ci sono gli speaker, i commentatori, le breaking news che non spiegano mai niente.
È così che dilagano le leggende. Il perfido Bin Laden, il perfido Gheddafi, il perfido Assad. La maschera di Mario Draghi, quella di Mario Monti. I mestieranti di Palazzo Chigi, la vuota ritualità di parole consunte di fronte allo strazio quotidiano che sbarca a Lampedusa e si trascina nelle piazze del nord mettendo in scena la rabbia e la disperazione di ex operai, ex insegnanti precari, ex commercianti, ex imprenditori, ex artigiani, ex cittadini italiani ridotti a sudditi di un'autorità dispotica e nemica, verso la quale il governo nazionale è impotente, se non complice.
Paese felice, lo definiva Primo Levi, nonostante tutto. Una terra con mille piaghe endemiche, catastroficamente ingovernabile e sempre dominata da potenti padroni stranieri - eppure popolata da un'umanità tenace, ottimista, operosa. Un luogo non ostile, dove l'odio fanatico non è mai stato di casa. Che fine ha fatto, oggi, questo paese? Si sta letteralmente disintegrando, in apparenza senza un perché. Crolla, l'Italia, giorno per giorno. Cede sotto il colpi di manovre possenti sempre decise all'estero, lontano dal popolo italiano, in nome del quale si sostiene ancora di amministrare la giustizia, di promulgare le leggi. Popolo relativamente sovrano, in passato, ma oggi non più.
Persino nella guerra fredda, quelli che si opponevano l'un l'altro - con terribile durezza - erano modelli di civiltà, ipotesi di convivenza sociale e civile. Mondi che disponevano di codici, di lingue. È muta, invece, la suprema barbarie del regime tecnocratico: pretende di liquidare con la falsa imparzialità dei numeri le sue anonime operazioni di genocidio selettivo, di pulizia etno-economica, di macelleria sociale.
Il nuovo feudalesimo instaurato dal potere egemone, che utilizza armi di distruzione di massa come il terrorismo economico e la disinformazione sistematica, pretende una platea di docili sudditi, di consumatori drogati, di telespettatori passivi, di ex cittadini ed ex lavoratori catapultati nell'indigenza, nel bisogno, nella paura del domani. E ora che il sistema sta franando, non avendo saputo mantenere le sue promesse di benessere, la prima preoccupazione dei grandi decisori - multinazionali, finanzieri, lobby invisibili e onnipotenti - è quella di disabilitare le residue funzionalità dei cittadini, rendendoli completamente inermi e abituandoli alla rassegnazione come condizione di assoluta normalità: la verità ufficiale non si discute, gli ordini si eseguono e si subiscono in silenzio.
Ai sudditi si impedisce persino di votare, di scegliere, di decidere di che morte dovrà morire il loro famoso paese, il paese meraviglioso di Primo Levi e di tutti gli apostoli che il 15 febbraio 2003 si ritrovarono a Roma per avvertire i signori della guerra che il popolo, il popolo italiano, non era più disposto a credere a nessuna delle loro sanguinose menzogne.
giovedì 16 gennaio 2014
I could have written this
This article was published in Salon a couple of years ago.
I could have written it.
Game over, my conservative friend
Dear Rick,
I guess it’s not going to work out. I guess this is goodbye.
For 20 months now, since a few days after the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl and Gov. Scott Walker moved to crush public unions in Wisconsin and the protests began at the state capitol building in Madison, we have argued nearly every day of the week. We have argued late at night, in our underwear, with you full of Evan Williams and me full of French red wine. We have argued during your son’s football games. We have argued when my daughters have been playing Monopoly with me. We have argued at the mall, at the grocery store, out for dinner, out for a stroll with the dog, at work, at ballgames, at weddings, at funerals, in the sunshine, in the rain, in the snow, in sight of the beautiful summertime dew that clings to the grass here in Wisconsin, way early in the morning, even during that long drought in July and in August when rain was as scarce as good will toward people whose political views are not the same as our own. We never stopped, Rick. We never surrendered.
I should give you credit for being as tough and as unrelenting as you are, and I should give myself credit for hanging in there with you for as long as I have, but honestly, the whole thing, well, neither of us should feel proud. Maybe we have fought because our love is so intense, because is it not true that people with the most profound love generate between them the most inextinguishable hate? Maybe we should have stayed away from each other in the first place? Or at least, if were unable to contain ourselves, we should have argued in private?
As it is, each and every one of my Facebook friends thinks you’re a boorish, one-minded, undereducated asshole with no feelings for anything but numbers. At least 10 of my friends have blocked you and won’t allow me to mention you, ever, no matter the context, because they think you are embarrassing and a demeaning waste of my time and that the constant bickering makes everybody look bad. Same works the other way around, I am absolutely sure. I know your friends think I’m a jackass and a pompous, foulmouthed, rude prick who thinks way too much of himself. Lots of your friends have blocked me, too, and have no doubt told you to stay clear of me. People avert their eyes when we strike up the band, Rick. We are, in everybody’s estimation, a disgrace.
I could have written it.
Game over, my conservative friend
Dear Rick,
I guess it’s not going to work out. I guess this is goodbye.
For 20 months now, since a few days after the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl and Gov. Scott Walker moved to crush public unions in Wisconsin and the protests began at the state capitol building in Madison, we have argued nearly every day of the week. We have argued late at night, in our underwear, with you full of Evan Williams and me full of French red wine. We have argued during your son’s football games. We have argued when my daughters have been playing Monopoly with me. We have argued at the mall, at the grocery store, out for dinner, out for a stroll with the dog, at work, at ballgames, at weddings, at funerals, in the sunshine, in the rain, in the snow, in sight of the beautiful summertime dew that clings to the grass here in Wisconsin, way early in the morning, even during that long drought in July and in August when rain was as scarce as good will toward people whose political views are not the same as our own. We never stopped, Rick. We never surrendered.
I should give you credit for being as tough and as unrelenting as you are, and I should give myself credit for hanging in there with you for as long as I have, but honestly, the whole thing, well, neither of us should feel proud. Maybe we have fought because our love is so intense, because is it not true that people with the most profound love generate between them the most inextinguishable hate? Maybe we should have stayed away from each other in the first place? Or at least, if were unable to contain ourselves, we should have argued in private?
As it is, each and every one of my Facebook friends thinks you’re a boorish, one-minded, undereducated asshole with no feelings for anything but numbers. At least 10 of my friends have blocked you and won’t allow me to mention you, ever, no matter the context, because they think you are embarrassing and a demeaning waste of my time and that the constant bickering makes everybody look bad. Same works the other way around, I am absolutely sure. I know your friends think I’m a jackass and a pompous, foulmouthed, rude prick who thinks way too much of himself. Lots of your friends have blocked me, too, and have no doubt told you to stay clear of me. People avert their eyes when we strike up the band, Rick. We are, in everybody’s estimation, a disgrace.
domenica 17 novembre 2013
martedì 5 novembre 2013
Il malessere che percepiamo ha radici sociali
http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2013/11/05/futuro-il-malessere-che-percepiamo-ha-radici-sociali/766500/
Psicologia: il malessere che percepiamo ha radici sociali
“Non
esistono soluzioni personali, biografiche a contraddizioni sistemiche”
in questa frase del sociologo Ulrich Beck, ripresa nel libro Modernità liquida del collega e filosofo Zygmunt Bauman,
c’è racchiuso uno degli aspetti più paradossali del nostro tempo.
L’espressione, in apparenza complessa, è di una logicità disarmante, una
volta compresa e metabolizzata. Non esistono possibilità per il singolo
individuo di poter agire sul suo malessere, quando questo ha un origine sociale e non psicologica.
Le soluzioni non vanno ricercate nel biografico, in un’analisi della
propria vita, in quanto non è la persona a costituire il problema, ma il
sistema in cui vive e che la espone a messaggi disfunzionali.
La psicoterapia, canale preferenziale di cura e trattamento del singolo, della coppia, del sistema familiare o del gruppo ristretto, non può farsi carico di problemi non psicologici, non pertinenti il singolo, la coppia, il sistema familiare, il gruppo ristretto. La visione di un futuro in cui riporre sempre meno speranze è collettiva, un sentire comune, indipendente dalle problematicità del singolo e del suo ambiente più vicino, anche se queste ne vengono a essere esasperate.
Il malessere che si percepisce attualmente nelle persone non ha radici psicologiche, ma sociali. Se un uomo o una donna arrivano in consulenza o in terapia e il loro malessere è generato dal non riuscire a progettare una vita perché precari, la consulenza o la psicoterapia non possono risolvere la situazione. Non è un evento raro, per me terapeuta, incontrare, professionalmente e non, sempre più persone che subiscono disagi psicologici enormi a causa dell’incertezza lavorativa che li attanaglia e che cercano un sostegno. L’angoscia in loro presente non è di un esistenziale, che parte dall’interno, ma di un esistenziale che colpisce violentemente dall’esterno. Non hanno bisogno di un aiuto psicologico, ma di un lavoro, meglio se adeguato alle loro competenze ed aspirazioni.
Il modello di sviluppo occidentale si pone, come obiettivo, una crescita infinita in un mondo finito quale è il nostro. E’ follia spacciata astutamente per norma, il nostro essere coglie la contraddizione, ma non è in grado di gestirla trasformandosi in mal-essere. Nasce uno scontro tra il proprio sentire e quello che ci viene dal modello esterno. Un conflitto del genere avviene in molti contesti in cui il lavoro psicologico ha la sua utilità, ma qui non parliamo di un esterno che vede in sé stessi, nella propria famiglia e nelle relazioni più vicine e intime, una possibilità di operatività concreta.
La cornice è molto più allargata rispetto a quelle che sono le reali possibilità della persona di agire nella sua prossimità, dove ha un potere maggiore o lo può comunque riconquistare. I messaggi dove la propria salute passa attraverso il consumo (più acquisto e più acquisto io senso) ci bombardano. Ogni volta che si avverte un vuoto dentro si proverà a riempirlo, consumando e consumandosi di un piacere fugace ed effimero. Appena l’effetto della novità sarà scomparso, il vuoto si farà nuovamente avanti e si ricomincerà a cercare le soluzioni nelle cose anziché nelle relazioni. ”Se sto bene, non ho bisogno di consumare” è un principio ineludibile, il mio equilibrio è direttamente proporzionale alla mia capacità di dare e ricevere come persona, indipendentemente dalle cose materiali e dall’immagine che agli altri voglio dare di me.
Bauman parla della scissione tra cittadino e individuo avvenuta nella modernità. Il cittadino che si sentiva parte di una polis, i cui problemi erano i problemi della comunità alla quale appartiene e viceversa, si è trasformato in individuo, il quale si sente separato dagli altri, non di rado entra con essi in lotta e competizione, e di conseguenza tende a fare i suoi esclusivi interessi personali, segue un egoismo di difesa. In una realtà sempre più precaria e competitiva, dove la persona viene ridotta a merce o, nel migliore dei casi, a consumatore di merce, il senso di inadeguatezza cresce. Il rischio concreto è che questo venga interiorizzato a tal punto che lo si accetti, lo si consideri inevitabile. Di fronte a quel che si è convinti di non poter cambiare si soffre e/o si prova ad accettarlo, ma non a combatterlo. E’ il meccanismo per cui la rabbia viene a essere sedata o meglio introiettata anziché esternata, creando una pericolosa assuefazione al continuum di disagio quotidiano dove è sempre tutto un lottare per arrivare alla fine del mese o avere l’ultimo smartphone.
E l’industria del vuoto è sempre la più fiorente. L’assenza della propria essenza ci deve far riflettere sull’essenza della propria assenza. Non smettere mai di desiderare è l’inferno dei tanti vuoti individuali che convergono in una voragine sociale. Sempre Beck afferma: “Chi arranca nella nebbia del proprio io, non è più in grado di notare che tale isolamento, tale segregazione dell’ego, è una condanna di massa”. Ci si convince di essere responsabili del proprio fallimento, la critica ricade su sé stessi, si cerca di darsi sempre più da fare, ma il contesto è tale per cui non è la nostra operosità a portare il cambiamento, quindi decade la fiducia nelle nostre potenzialità. Il singolo individuo è impotente di fronte al sistema nel suo complesso e, a breve termine, non può che rimanerne sconfitto. Egli non deve lavorare su di sé, ma sul cogliere le contraddizioni del sistema e consapevolizzarle come altro da sé.
Deresponsabilizzare la persona rispetto a quel che subisce non significa non responsabilizzarla in merito a dove invece può svolgere un ruolo attivo. Cultura,educazione, corretta informazione, gruppi di autoconsapevolezza sono gli unici strumenti adeguati per agire a livello sociale. Non è un’epoca facile e non immagino cambiamenti rapidi e sicuri. I tempi del cambiamento sono l’unico paragone che penso sia sensato associare alla psicologia. In terapia il cambiamento è tanto più efficace quanto più diventa stabile, ecco perché chi comincia un percorso terapeutico ne conosce l’inizio, ma non la fine. Il tempo è garanzia di stabilità, ma non come mero dato quantitativo bensì qualitativo perché sottintende la complessità dei processi in corso. Se abbiamo o meno tempo, prima di eventuali stravolgimenti sociali dovuti al modello di sistema imperante, è una domanda alla quale non so però rispondere.
La psicoterapia, canale preferenziale di cura e trattamento del singolo, della coppia, del sistema familiare o del gruppo ristretto, non può farsi carico di problemi non psicologici, non pertinenti il singolo, la coppia, il sistema familiare, il gruppo ristretto. La visione di un futuro in cui riporre sempre meno speranze è collettiva, un sentire comune, indipendente dalle problematicità del singolo e del suo ambiente più vicino, anche se queste ne vengono a essere esasperate.
Il malessere che si percepisce attualmente nelle persone non ha radici psicologiche, ma sociali. Se un uomo o una donna arrivano in consulenza o in terapia e il loro malessere è generato dal non riuscire a progettare una vita perché precari, la consulenza o la psicoterapia non possono risolvere la situazione. Non è un evento raro, per me terapeuta, incontrare, professionalmente e non, sempre più persone che subiscono disagi psicologici enormi a causa dell’incertezza lavorativa che li attanaglia e che cercano un sostegno. L’angoscia in loro presente non è di un esistenziale, che parte dall’interno, ma di un esistenziale che colpisce violentemente dall’esterno. Non hanno bisogno di un aiuto psicologico, ma di un lavoro, meglio se adeguato alle loro competenze ed aspirazioni.
Il modello di sviluppo occidentale si pone, come obiettivo, una crescita infinita in un mondo finito quale è il nostro. E’ follia spacciata astutamente per norma, il nostro essere coglie la contraddizione, ma non è in grado di gestirla trasformandosi in mal-essere. Nasce uno scontro tra il proprio sentire e quello che ci viene dal modello esterno. Un conflitto del genere avviene in molti contesti in cui il lavoro psicologico ha la sua utilità, ma qui non parliamo di un esterno che vede in sé stessi, nella propria famiglia e nelle relazioni più vicine e intime, una possibilità di operatività concreta.
La cornice è molto più allargata rispetto a quelle che sono le reali possibilità della persona di agire nella sua prossimità, dove ha un potere maggiore o lo può comunque riconquistare. I messaggi dove la propria salute passa attraverso il consumo (più acquisto e più acquisto io senso) ci bombardano. Ogni volta che si avverte un vuoto dentro si proverà a riempirlo, consumando e consumandosi di un piacere fugace ed effimero. Appena l’effetto della novità sarà scomparso, il vuoto si farà nuovamente avanti e si ricomincerà a cercare le soluzioni nelle cose anziché nelle relazioni. ”Se sto bene, non ho bisogno di consumare” è un principio ineludibile, il mio equilibrio è direttamente proporzionale alla mia capacità di dare e ricevere come persona, indipendentemente dalle cose materiali e dall’immagine che agli altri voglio dare di me.
Bauman parla della scissione tra cittadino e individuo avvenuta nella modernità. Il cittadino che si sentiva parte di una polis, i cui problemi erano i problemi della comunità alla quale appartiene e viceversa, si è trasformato in individuo, il quale si sente separato dagli altri, non di rado entra con essi in lotta e competizione, e di conseguenza tende a fare i suoi esclusivi interessi personali, segue un egoismo di difesa. In una realtà sempre più precaria e competitiva, dove la persona viene ridotta a merce o, nel migliore dei casi, a consumatore di merce, il senso di inadeguatezza cresce. Il rischio concreto è che questo venga interiorizzato a tal punto che lo si accetti, lo si consideri inevitabile. Di fronte a quel che si è convinti di non poter cambiare si soffre e/o si prova ad accettarlo, ma non a combatterlo. E’ il meccanismo per cui la rabbia viene a essere sedata o meglio introiettata anziché esternata, creando una pericolosa assuefazione al continuum di disagio quotidiano dove è sempre tutto un lottare per arrivare alla fine del mese o avere l’ultimo smartphone.
E l’industria del vuoto è sempre la più fiorente. L’assenza della propria essenza ci deve far riflettere sull’essenza della propria assenza. Non smettere mai di desiderare è l’inferno dei tanti vuoti individuali che convergono in una voragine sociale. Sempre Beck afferma: “Chi arranca nella nebbia del proprio io, non è più in grado di notare che tale isolamento, tale segregazione dell’ego, è una condanna di massa”. Ci si convince di essere responsabili del proprio fallimento, la critica ricade su sé stessi, si cerca di darsi sempre più da fare, ma il contesto è tale per cui non è la nostra operosità a portare il cambiamento, quindi decade la fiducia nelle nostre potenzialità. Il singolo individuo è impotente di fronte al sistema nel suo complesso e, a breve termine, non può che rimanerne sconfitto. Egli non deve lavorare su di sé, ma sul cogliere le contraddizioni del sistema e consapevolizzarle come altro da sé.
Deresponsabilizzare la persona rispetto a quel che subisce non significa non responsabilizzarla in merito a dove invece può svolgere un ruolo attivo. Cultura,educazione, corretta informazione, gruppi di autoconsapevolezza sono gli unici strumenti adeguati per agire a livello sociale. Non è un’epoca facile e non immagino cambiamenti rapidi e sicuri. I tempi del cambiamento sono l’unico paragone che penso sia sensato associare alla psicologia. In terapia il cambiamento è tanto più efficace quanto più diventa stabile, ecco perché chi comincia un percorso terapeutico ne conosce l’inizio, ma non la fine. Il tempo è garanzia di stabilità, ma non come mero dato quantitativo bensì qualitativo perché sottintende la complessità dei processi in corso. Se abbiamo o meno tempo, prima di eventuali stravolgimenti sociali dovuti al modello di sistema imperante, è una domanda alla quale non so però rispondere.
lunedì 14 ottobre 2013
What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise.
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/13/ted_talks_are_lying_to_you/
The writer had a problem. Books he read and people he knew had been warning him that the nation and maybe mankind itself had wandered into a sort of creativity doldrums. Economic growth was slackening. The Internet revolution was less awesome than we had anticipated, and the forward march of innovation, once a cultural constant, had slowed to a crawl. One of the few fields in which we generated lots of novelties — financial engineering — had come back to bite us. And in other departments, we actually seemed to be going backward. You could no longer take a supersonic airliner across the Atlantic, for example, and sending astronauts to the moon had become either fiscally insupportable or just passé.
And yet the troubled writer also knew that there had been, over these same years, fantastic growth in our creativity promoting sector. There were TED talks on how to be a creative person. There were “Innovation Jams” at which IBM employees brainstormed collectively over a global hookup, and “Thinking Out of the Box” desktop sculptures for sale at Sam’s Club. There were creativity consultants you could hire, and cities that had spent billions reworking neighborhoods into arts-friendly districts where rule-bending whimsicality was a thing to be celebrated. If you listened to certain people, creativity was the story of our time, from the halls of MIT to the incubators of Silicon Valley.
The literature on the subject was vast. Its authors included management gurus, forever exhorting us to slay the conventional; urban theorists, with their celebrations of zesty togetherness; pop psychologists, giving the world step-by-step instructions on how to unleash the inner Miles Davis. Most prominent, perhaps, were the science writers, with their endless tales of creative success and their dissection of the brains that made it all possible.
It was to one of these last that our puzzled correspondent now decided to turn. He procured a copy of “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” the 2012 bestseller by the ex-wunderkind Jonah Lehrer, whose résumé includes a Rhodes scholarship, a tour of duty at The New Yorker and two previous books about neuroscience and decision-making. (There was also a scandal concerning some made-up quotes in “Imagine,” but our correspondent was determined to tiptoe around that.) Settling into a hot bath — well known for its power to trigger outside-the-box thoughts — he opened his mind to the young master.
*
Anecdote after heroic anecdote unfolded, many of them beginning with some variation on Lehrer’s very first phrase: “Procter and Gamble had a problem.” What followed, as creative minds did their nonlinear thing, were epiphanies and solutions. Our correspondent read about the invention of the Swiffer. He learned how Bob Dylan achieved his great breakthrough and wrote that one song of his that they still play on the radio from time to time. He found out that there was a company called 3M that invented masking tape, the Post-it note and other useful items. He read about the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and about the glories of Pixar.
And that’s when it hit him: He had heard these things before. Each story seemed to develop in an entirely predictable fashion. He suspected that in the Dylan section, Lehrer would talk about “Like a Rolling Stone,” and that’s exactly what happened. When it came to the 3M section, he waited for Lehrer to dwell on the invention of the Post-it note — and there it was.
Had our correspondent developed the gift of foresight? No. He really had heard these stories before. Spend a few moments on Google and you will find that the tale of how Procter & Gamble developed the Swiffer is a staple of marketing literature. Bob Dylan is endlessly cited in discussions of innovation, and you can read about the struggles surrounding the release of “Like a Rolling Stone” in textbooks like “The Fundamentals of Marketing” (2007). As for 3M, the decades-long standing ovation for the company’s creativity can be traced all the way back to “In Search of Excellence” (1982), one of the most influential business books of all time. In fact, 3M’s accidental invention of the Post-it note is such a business-school chestnut that the ignorance of those who don’t know the tale is a joke in the 1997 movie “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”
*
These realizations took only a millisecond. What our correspondent also understood, sitting there in his basement bathtub, was that the literature of creativity was a genre of surpassing banality. Every book he read seemed to boast the same shopworn anecdotes and the same canonical heroes. If the authors are presenting themselves as experts on innovation, they will tell us about Einstein, Gandhi, Picasso, Dylan, Warhol, the Beatles. If they are celebrating their own innovations, they will compare them to the oft-rejected masterpieces of Impressionism — that ultimate combination of rebellion and placid pastel bullshit that decorates the walls of hotel lobbies from Pittsburgh to Pyongyang.
Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves. Year after year, new installments in this unchanging genre are produced and consumed. Creativity, they all tell us, is too important to be left to the creative. Our prosperity depends on it. And by dint of careful study and the hardest science — by, say, sliding a jazz pianist’s head into an MRI machine — we can crack the code of creativity and unleash its moneymaking power.
That was the ultimate lesson. That’s where the music, the theology, the physics and the ethereal water lilies were meant to direct us. Our correspondent could think of no books that tried to work the equation the other way around — holding up the invention of air conditioning or Velcro as a model for a jazz trumpeter trying to work out his solo.
And why was this worth noticing? Well, for one thing, because we’re talking about the literature of creativity, for Pete’s sake. If there is a non-fiction genre from which you have a right to expect clever prose and uncanny insight, it should be this one. So why is it so utterly consumed by formula and repetition?
What our correspondent realized, in that flash of bathtub-generated insight, was that this literature isn’t about creativity in the first place. While it reiterates a handful of well-known tales — the favorite pop stars, the favorite artists, the favorite branding successes — it routinely ignores other creative milestones that loom large in the history of human civilization. After all, some of the most consistent innovators of the modern era have also been among its biggest monsters. He thought back, in particular, to the diabolical creativity of Nazi Germany, which was the first country to use ballistic missiles, jet fighter planes, assault rifles and countless other weapons. And yet nobody wanted to add Peenemünde, where the Germans developed the V-2 rocket during the 1940s, to the glorious list of creative hothouses that includes Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Belle Époque Paris and latter-day Austin, Texas. How much easier to tell us, one more time, how jazz bands work, how someone came up with the idea for the Slinky, or what shade of paint, when applied to the walls of your office, is most conducive to originality.
*
But as any creativity expert can tell you, no insight is an island, entire of itself. New epiphanies build on previous epiphanies, and to understand the vision that washed over our writer in the present day, we must revisit an earlier flash of insight, one that takes us back about a decade, to the year 2002. This time our future correspondent was relaxing in a different bathtub, on Chicago’s South Side, where the trains passed by in an all-day din of clanks and squeaks. While he soaked, he was reading the latest book about creativity: Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class.”
Creativity was now the most valuable quality of all, ran Florida’s argument, “the decisive source of competitive advantage.” This made creative people into society’s “dominant class” — and companies that wished to harness their power would need to follow them wherever they went. Therefore cities and states were obliged to reconfigure themselves as havens for people of nonconformist tastes, who would then generate civic coolness via art zones, music scenes, and truckloads of authenticity. The author even invented a “Bohemian Index,” which, he claimed, revealed a strong correlation between the presence of artists and economic growth.
Every element of Florida’s argument infuriated our future correspondent. Was he suggesting planned bohemias? Built by governments? To attract businesses? It all seemed like a comic exercise in human gullibility. As it happened, our correspondent in those days spent nearly all his time with the kinds of people who fit Richard Florida’s definition of the creative class: writers, musicians, and intellectuals. And Florida seemed to be suggesting that such people were valuable mainly for their contribution to a countercultural pantomime that lured or inspired business executives.
What was really sick-making, though, was Florida’s easy assumption that creativity was a thing our society valued. Our correspondent had been hearing this all his life, since his childhood in the creativity-worshipping 1970s. He had even believed it once, in the way other generations had believed in the beneficence of government or the blessings of Providence. And yet his creative friends, when considered as a group, were obviously on their way down, not up. The institutions that made their lives possible — chiefly newspapers, magazines, universities and record labels — were then entering a period of disastrous decline. The creative world as he knew it was not flowering, but dying.
When he considered his creative friends as individuals, the literature of creativity began to seem even worse — more like a straight-up insult. Our writer-to-be was old enough to know that, for all its reverential talk about the rebel and the box breaker, society had no interest in new ideas at all unless they reinforced favorite theories or could be monetized in some obvious way. The method of every triumphant intellectual movement had been to quash dissent and cordon off truly inventive voices. This was simply how debate was conducted. Authors rejoiced at the discrediting of their rivals (as poor Jonah Lehrer would find in 2012). Academic professions excluded those who didn’t toe the party line. Leftist cliques excommunicated one another. Liberals ignored any suggestion that didn’t encourage or vindicate their move to the center. Conservatives seemed to be at war with the very idea of human intelligence. And business thinkers were the worst of all, with their perennial conviction that criticism of any kind would lead straight to slumps and stock market crashes.
*
Or so our literal-minded correspondent thought back in 2002. Later on, after much trial and error, he would understand that there really had been something deeply insightful about Richard Florida’s book. This was the idea that creativity was the attribute of a class — which class Florida identified not only with intellectuals and artists but also with a broad swath of the professional-managerial stratum. It would take years for our stumbling innovator to realize this. And then, he finally got it all at once. The reason these many optimistic books seemed to have so little to do with the downward-spiraling lives of actual creative workers is that they weren’t really about those people in the first place.
No. The literature of creativity was something completely different. Everything he had noticed so far was a clue: the banality, the familiar examples, the failure to appreciate what was actually happening to creative people in the present time. This was not science, despite the technological gloss applied by writers like Jonah Lehrer. It was a literature of superstition, in which everything always worked out and the good guys always triumphed and the right inventions always came along in the nick of time. In Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” (2010), the creative epiphany itself becomes a kind of heroic character, helping out clueless humanity wherever necessary:
Consider, then, the narrative daisy chain that makes up the literature of creativity. It is the story of brilliant people, often in the arts or humanities, who are studied by other brilliant people, often in the sciences, finance, or marketing. The readership is made up of us — members of the professional-managerial class — each of whom harbors a powerful suspicion that he or she is pretty brilliant as well. What your correspondent realized, relaxing there in his tub one day, was that the real subject of this literature was the professional-managerial audience itself, whose members hear clear, sweet reason when they listen to NPR and think they’re in the presence of something profound when they watch some billionaire give a TED talk. And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world.
The writer had a problem. Books he read and people he knew had been warning him that the nation and maybe mankind itself had wandered into a sort of creativity doldrums. Economic growth was slackening. The Internet revolution was less awesome than we had anticipated, and the forward march of innovation, once a cultural constant, had slowed to a crawl. One of the few fields in which we generated lots of novelties — financial engineering — had come back to bite us. And in other departments, we actually seemed to be going backward. You could no longer take a supersonic airliner across the Atlantic, for example, and sending astronauts to the moon had become either fiscally insupportable or just passé.
And yet the troubled writer also knew that there had been, over these same years, fantastic growth in our creativity promoting sector. There were TED talks on how to be a creative person. There were “Innovation Jams” at which IBM employees brainstormed collectively over a global hookup, and “Thinking Out of the Box” desktop sculptures for sale at Sam’s Club. There were creativity consultants you could hire, and cities that had spent billions reworking neighborhoods into arts-friendly districts where rule-bending whimsicality was a thing to be celebrated. If you listened to certain people, creativity was the story of our time, from the halls of MIT to the incubators of Silicon Valley.
The literature on the subject was vast. Its authors included management gurus, forever exhorting us to slay the conventional; urban theorists, with their celebrations of zesty togetherness; pop psychologists, giving the world step-by-step instructions on how to unleash the inner Miles Davis. Most prominent, perhaps, were the science writers, with their endless tales of creative success and their dissection of the brains that made it all possible.
It was to one of these last that our puzzled correspondent now decided to turn. He procured a copy of “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” the 2012 bestseller by the ex-wunderkind Jonah Lehrer, whose résumé includes a Rhodes scholarship, a tour of duty at The New Yorker and two previous books about neuroscience and decision-making. (There was also a scandal concerning some made-up quotes in “Imagine,” but our correspondent was determined to tiptoe around that.) Settling into a hot bath — well known for its power to trigger outside-the-box thoughts — he opened his mind to the young master.
*
Anecdote after heroic anecdote unfolded, many of them beginning with some variation on Lehrer’s very first phrase: “Procter and Gamble had a problem.” What followed, as creative minds did their nonlinear thing, were epiphanies and solutions. Our correspondent read about the invention of the Swiffer. He learned how Bob Dylan achieved his great breakthrough and wrote that one song of his that they still play on the radio from time to time. He found out that there was a company called 3M that invented masking tape, the Post-it note and other useful items. He read about the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and about the glories of Pixar.
And that’s when it hit him: He had heard these things before. Each story seemed to develop in an entirely predictable fashion. He suspected that in the Dylan section, Lehrer would talk about “Like a Rolling Stone,” and that’s exactly what happened. When it came to the 3M section, he waited for Lehrer to dwell on the invention of the Post-it note — and there it was.
Had our correspondent developed the gift of foresight? No. He really had heard these stories before. Spend a few moments on Google and you will find that the tale of how Procter & Gamble developed the Swiffer is a staple of marketing literature. Bob Dylan is endlessly cited in discussions of innovation, and you can read about the struggles surrounding the release of “Like a Rolling Stone” in textbooks like “The Fundamentals of Marketing” (2007). As for 3M, the decades-long standing ovation for the company’s creativity can be traced all the way back to “In Search of Excellence” (1982), one of the most influential business books of all time. In fact, 3M’s accidental invention of the Post-it note is such a business-school chestnut that the ignorance of those who don’t know the tale is a joke in the 1997 movie “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”
*
These realizations took only a millisecond. What our correspondent also understood, sitting there in his basement bathtub, was that the literature of creativity was a genre of surpassing banality. Every book he read seemed to boast the same shopworn anecdotes and the same canonical heroes. If the authors are presenting themselves as experts on innovation, they will tell us about Einstein, Gandhi, Picasso, Dylan, Warhol, the Beatles. If they are celebrating their own innovations, they will compare them to the oft-rejected masterpieces of Impressionism — that ultimate combination of rebellion and placid pastel bullshit that decorates the walls of hotel lobbies from Pittsburgh to Pyongyang.
Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves. Year after year, new installments in this unchanging genre are produced and consumed. Creativity, they all tell us, is too important to be left to the creative. Our prosperity depends on it. And by dint of careful study and the hardest science — by, say, sliding a jazz pianist’s head into an MRI machine — we can crack the code of creativity and unleash its moneymaking power.
That was the ultimate lesson. That’s where the music, the theology, the physics and the ethereal water lilies were meant to direct us. Our correspondent could think of no books that tried to work the equation the other way around — holding up the invention of air conditioning or Velcro as a model for a jazz trumpeter trying to work out his solo.
And why was this worth noticing? Well, for one thing, because we’re talking about the literature of creativity, for Pete’s sake. If there is a non-fiction genre from which you have a right to expect clever prose and uncanny insight, it should be this one. So why is it so utterly consumed by formula and repetition?
What our correspondent realized, in that flash of bathtub-generated insight, was that this literature isn’t about creativity in the first place. While it reiterates a handful of well-known tales — the favorite pop stars, the favorite artists, the favorite branding successes — it routinely ignores other creative milestones that loom large in the history of human civilization. After all, some of the most consistent innovators of the modern era have also been among its biggest monsters. He thought back, in particular, to the diabolical creativity of Nazi Germany, which was the first country to use ballistic missiles, jet fighter planes, assault rifles and countless other weapons. And yet nobody wanted to add Peenemünde, where the Germans developed the V-2 rocket during the 1940s, to the glorious list of creative hothouses that includes Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Belle Époque Paris and latter-day Austin, Texas. How much easier to tell us, one more time, how jazz bands work, how someone came up with the idea for the Slinky, or what shade of paint, when applied to the walls of your office, is most conducive to originality.
*
But as any creativity expert can tell you, no insight is an island, entire of itself. New epiphanies build on previous epiphanies, and to understand the vision that washed over our writer in the present day, we must revisit an earlier flash of insight, one that takes us back about a decade, to the year 2002. This time our future correspondent was relaxing in a different bathtub, on Chicago’s South Side, where the trains passed by in an all-day din of clanks and squeaks. While he soaked, he was reading the latest book about creativity: Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class.”
Creativity was now the most valuable quality of all, ran Florida’s argument, “the decisive source of competitive advantage.” This made creative people into society’s “dominant class” — and companies that wished to harness their power would need to follow them wherever they went. Therefore cities and states were obliged to reconfigure themselves as havens for people of nonconformist tastes, who would then generate civic coolness via art zones, music scenes, and truckloads of authenticity. The author even invented a “Bohemian Index,” which, he claimed, revealed a strong correlation between the presence of artists and economic growth.
Every element of Florida’s argument infuriated our future correspondent. Was he suggesting planned bohemias? Built by governments? To attract businesses? It all seemed like a comic exercise in human gullibility. As it happened, our correspondent in those days spent nearly all his time with the kinds of people who fit Richard Florida’s definition of the creative class: writers, musicians, and intellectuals. And Florida seemed to be suggesting that such people were valuable mainly for their contribution to a countercultural pantomime that lured or inspired business executives.
What was really sick-making, though, was Florida’s easy assumption that creativity was a thing our society valued. Our correspondent had been hearing this all his life, since his childhood in the creativity-worshipping 1970s. He had even believed it once, in the way other generations had believed in the beneficence of government or the blessings of Providence. And yet his creative friends, when considered as a group, were obviously on their way down, not up. The institutions that made their lives possible — chiefly newspapers, magazines, universities and record labels — were then entering a period of disastrous decline. The creative world as he knew it was not flowering, but dying.
When he considered his creative friends as individuals, the literature of creativity began to seem even worse — more like a straight-up insult. Our writer-to-be was old enough to know that, for all its reverential talk about the rebel and the box breaker, society had no interest in new ideas at all unless they reinforced favorite theories or could be monetized in some obvious way. The method of every triumphant intellectual movement had been to quash dissent and cordon off truly inventive voices. This was simply how debate was conducted. Authors rejoiced at the discrediting of their rivals (as poor Jonah Lehrer would find in 2012). Academic professions excluded those who didn’t toe the party line. Leftist cliques excommunicated one another. Liberals ignored any suggestion that didn’t encourage or vindicate their move to the center. Conservatives seemed to be at war with the very idea of human intelligence. And business thinkers were the worst of all, with their perennial conviction that criticism of any kind would lead straight to slumps and stock market crashes.
*
Or so our literal-minded correspondent thought back in 2002. Later on, after much trial and error, he would understand that there really had been something deeply insightful about Richard Florida’s book. This was the idea that creativity was the attribute of a class — which class Florida identified not only with intellectuals and artists but also with a broad swath of the professional-managerial stratum. It would take years for our stumbling innovator to realize this. And then, he finally got it all at once. The reason these many optimistic books seemed to have so little to do with the downward-spiraling lives of actual creative workers is that they weren’t really about those people in the first place.
No. The literature of creativity was something completely different. Everything he had noticed so far was a clue: the banality, the familiar examples, the failure to appreciate what was actually happening to creative people in the present time. This was not science, despite the technological gloss applied by writers like Jonah Lehrer. It was a literature of superstition, in which everything always worked out and the good guys always triumphed and the right inventions always came along in the nick of time. In Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” (2010), the creative epiphany itself becomes a kind of heroic character, helping out clueless humanity wherever necessary:
Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.And what was the true object of this superstitious stuff? A final clue came from “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention” (1996), in which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi acknowledges that, far from being an act of individual inspiration, what we call creativity is simply an expression of professional consensus. Using Vincent van Gogh as an example, the author declares that the artist’s “creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art.” Innovation, that is, exists only when the correctly credentialed hivemind agrees that it does. And “without such a response,” the author continues, “van Gogh would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.” What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise.
Consider, then, the narrative daisy chain that makes up the literature of creativity. It is the story of brilliant people, often in the arts or humanities, who are studied by other brilliant people, often in the sciences, finance, or marketing. The readership is made up of us — members of the professional-managerial class — each of whom harbors a powerful suspicion that he or she is pretty brilliant as well. What your correspondent realized, relaxing there in his tub one day, was that the real subject of this literature was the professional-managerial audience itself, whose members hear clear, sweet reason when they listen to NPR and think they’re in the presence of something profound when they watch some billionaire give a TED talk. And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world.
mercoledì 2 ottobre 2013
Rima della rabbia giusta - Bruno Tognolini
Tu dici che la rabbia che ha ragione
È rabbia giusta e si chiama indignazione
Guardi il telegiornale
Ti arrabbi contro tutta quella gente
Ma poi cambi canale e non fai niente
Io la mia rabbia giusta
Voglio tenerla in cuore
Io voglio coltivarla come un fiore
Vedere come cresce
Cosa ne esce
Cosa fiorisce quando arriva la stagione
Vedere se diventa indignazione
E se diventa, voglio tenerla tesa
Come un'offesa
Come una brace che resta accesa in fondo
E non cambia canale
Cambia il mondo.
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