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TAMIL NATION LIBRARY:
CULTURE
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[see also Tamil Culture: the Heart of
Tamil National Consciousness and
Ha
Ha, Aha & AAh...! - Nadesan Satyendra]
""Imagination is more important than knowledge,"
declares Albert Einstein...Two Aspirins and a Comedy explores the movement of ideas
and feelings back and forth - from subjective experience into objective,
empirical reality, which in turn stimulates new subjective experiences, and
so on, ad infinitum. The interaction between objectivity and subjectivity
interests me... Culture contains only those ideas that have been manifested
objectively, at least in a fleeting way. Culture originates in the
imagination, but its existence must also be physical, objective, so as to
move from one mind to another... Live culture consists of this ongoing
motion of ideas from one mind to another.."
 This
is a supplementary article for Metta Spencer's book Two Aspirins
and a Comedy: How Television can Enhance Health and Society
(Boulder: Paradigm, 2006) |
index of
chapters and extra web articles |
intro page
from twoaspirinsandacomedy.com
Imagination and Culture
"Imagination is more important than knowledge," declares
Albert
Einstein on a poster that can be found in thousands of university
dormitories. The physicist's great breakthrough came from imagining
what he might see if he were riding a photon through the depths of
space. It made sense for him to give credit to imagination, although
in everyday discourse a contrary position is taken for granted -
that wise people are those realistic types who keep "their feet on
the ground." We have all been warned against indulging our
imaginative tendencies: we should not daydream or even speculate
much about what might have been, or what may yet happen. The ability
to distinguish between the two is supposedly the main difference
between sanity and insanity. Sane people are those who live in the
world of reality, except for rare, fleeting, and unimportant moments
of escapism.
Well, it's not quite that simple. Though you and I may never
entertain such a fantasy as riding a photon, we do have a rich
imaginative life, whether we notice it or not. We could hardly get
through the day without it. Daydreams may constitute about half of
the thousands of thoughts and images we produce in a day.
In Defence of Fantasies
Here I intend to defend the imagination. Oddly, people normally
feel ashamed of their daydreams. The imagination is an indispensable
aspect of realistic, practical thinking, not its antithesis. Realism
and fantasy depend on each other. I want to explore the influence of
fantasies (both our own and those that writers and actors create for
us) on the quality of our human relationships - the ethical
dimension of our experience. This exploration is preliminary to a
larger discussion of the social use of fictional cultural products.
Dreams and daydreams can yield practical solutions to empirical
problems. Einstein said that "the gift of fantasy has meant more to
me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge." He was not the
only scientist who used fantasy in that way. I'll illustrate by
mentioning three other geniuses whose imagination gave them their
greatest research insight.
The chemist
Friedrich August Kekulé had been working in 1858 on the
structure of organic compounds when he dozed off in front of his
fireplace. He imagined atoms in
"long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and
twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the
snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled
mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and
this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the
consequences of the hypothesis."
This image of a snake biting its own tail revealed to him the
structure of the benzene ring - the basis of all organic chemistry.
Or consider Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest inventors of all time,
who is best known for discovering alternating current. Tesla's
fantasy life was remarkable. In his autobiography, he described
visions that seemed so real that he could not always tell which ones
were tangible and which ones not. Yet he was far from being mad, and
indeed he put his visualizing capacities to work in the realm of
physics.
"When I get an idea, I start at once building it up in my
imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and
operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me
whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even
note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever; the
results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and
perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so
far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can
think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this
final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived
that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned
it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception."
And finally, my third example is
Elias Howe, who invented the sewing
machine in 1845. He had been attempting to invent such an instrument
for years. One night he fell asleep at his workbench and dreamed of
being captured by cannibals in Africa. They carried him home on a
pole and dumped him into a pot, preparing to boil him. Although he
managed to loosen the ropes from his hands and tried to climb out of
the pot, the cannibals kept poking him down again with their spears,
which had holes in the points.
Howe awoke with a shock. "Holes in the points!" he exclaimed.
"That's it!" Of course, the solution to his problem was to put the
hole in the point of the needle, instead of at the back, as in
needles for hand sewing.
The brilliance of Howe, Einstein, Tesla, and Kekulé can be
attributed to their ability to play with fantasies and dreams in the
back of their minds, yet notice the images and bring them up into
consciousness, work through the practical implications, and then put
the ideas into a form that others could see.
The Power of Imagining
Relatively few people have such rich fantasy lives as these
scientists and I don't want to exaggerate the sheer power of
thoughts. You have to do more than "wish upon a star" to make your
dreams come true. Nevertheless, the imagination is often
consequential for ordinary people. Let me illustrate with three
factors that show the power of images: the "self-fulfilling
prophecy;" the placebo effect; and the relationship between health
and emotional relationships.
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
A "self-fulfilling prophecy" occurs when an expectation about
what others will do increases the probability that they will do
exactly as predicted. Here, an image of the future influences the
reality that actually takes place. The most famous example is the
"Pygmalion effect" established by psychologist
Robert Rosenthal. He
found that teachers, by expecting high or low levels of achievement
from their various students, actually make it more likely that the
students will perform accordingly well or poorly. This happens even
if the teacher does not tell anyone what he or she expects. Indeed,
Rosenthal and his colleagues experimented by telling teachers that
they had invented a new test that would predict which of their
students would "bloom" that year. They told the teachers which
students were likely to develop. Actually, they had randomly
selected those students; they had no such test. Nevertheless, by the
end of the year, the students who had been predicted to bloom
actually performed better on standardized tests than the other
students. Apparently the teachers had unconsciously encouraged them
more.
This phenomenon of self-fulfilling prediction has been shown to be
involved with other expectations, such as an employer's anticipation
that some workers will be better at their jobs than others.
The placebo effect.
Self-fulfilling prophecies are well understood. In contrast, no
one is quite sure how the placebo effect works. Here too, a belief
evidently changes physical reality. A patient is given a sugar pill
or some other inert substance (placebo), but is told that it is a
potent medication that will cure his disease. Whenever placebos are
administered, the proportion of people who feel better is
considerably higher than the proportion who spontaneously recuperate
without any treatment. Positive placebo reactions have been reported
as ranging from 21 percent to 58 percent. Placebos can be genuinely
helpful to patients. However, for the placebo to work, the doctor
has to deceive the patient. Ordinarily physicians do not resort to
this kind of lying.
Health and Emotions.
For at least a generation, physicians have recognized the
benefits of meditative calm for the health and emotional well being
of their patients - especially those with stress-related disorders
such as high blood pressure. Now they know that other states of mind
besides meditation also are beneficial - not just calm, but a
various intense positive feelings, such as love, joy, sexual
pleasure, enthusiastic excitement, religious awe, tender affection,
and laughter.
One might not be surprised to find small correlations between
emotional well being and physical health, but the magnitude of the
association is extraordinary - larger than the statistics
pharmaceutical companies seek when testing the effectiveness of new
drugs. People who feel close to no one and whose lives are lacking
in love are at least three to five times more likely than other
people to die prematurely. I review this research in Chapter 3.
So far as Two Aspirins and a Comedy is concerned, we are interested
in the relationship between the imagination and the creation of
cultural products, especially fiction - which are created, not
instrumentally to address a practical problem, but rather
expressively, for entertainment purposes. This distinction is worth
elaborating.
Instrumental and Consummatory Fantasies
The social philosopher
George Herbert Mead distinguished between
two kinds of acts: instrumental and expressive (or consummatory).
The former type of act is a component of some other, larger-scale
project. The consummatory act, on the other hand, is performed for
its own sake as the direct fulfillment or expression of an impulse.
For example, when I switch on my computer, that is an
instrumental act - one phase of a larger act, checking my e-mail.
But if my e-mail contains unexpectedly good news, I may dance around
the room in joy - not as a phase of any other larger plan of action,
but simply as an expression of elation.
Mead would call the dance a consummatory or expressive act. Any
act done for the sake of doing it, and not for some practical end,
is consummatory. Religious ritual is consummatory, for instance,
while magic is instrumental - done for the sake of gaining control
over the forces that determine good or bad luck.
We can also distinguish between instrumental and consummatory
fantasies. During some fantasies we are working out anticipated
problems or attempting to interpret a situation by holding an
internal debate between contrasting perspectives. These are
"instrumental" imaginings that may, if they work out well, give us a
new sense of clarity about, say, a moral, political, or scientific
problem and enable us to act decisively. Dialogues with imaginary or
internalized others about real problems or controversies are usually
instrumental fantasies, whether or not they seem entirely rational
or lucid.
However, many other fantasies, such as your daydream about driving a
snazzy sports car, are consummatory; you think about them for the
sheer pleasure of experiencing them and not because they are a phase
of addressing any other realistic end. Fiction - a novel, poem,
movie, or other entertainment product - is predominantly meant as a
consummatory experience, enjoyable simply as a moment of diversion
or wish-fulfillment. However, even a frothy little romantic comedy
may occasionally strike a deep chord in a viewer, bringing to mind a
troubling unresolved issue and unexpectedly serving instrumentally
to bring new insights. Stories may have greater influence than the
readers realize.
Popper's Three Worlds
Ideas can exist in two states - either subjectively in the
privacy of one's mind or in an objective form that others may
witness. Ideas - indeed, all the components of culture - can go back
and forth between the two states; they originate in someone's
imagination, then may be manifested in some physical state, which
others in turn may perceive and mull over privately in their own
minds.
Two Aspirins and a Comedy explores the movement of ideas and
feelings back and forth - from subjective experience into objective,
empirical reality, which in turn stimulates new subjective
experiences, and so on, ad infinitum. The interaction between
objectivity and subjectivity interests me.
Not all ideas ever become manifested in objective reality; most
notions perish without having been shared. Those that do get
expressed in an objective state may be ephemeral and obscure (a
single sentence uttered in a public place, for example) or may last
as long as the Sphinx.
Culture contains only those ideas that have been manifested
objectively, at least in a fleeting way. Culture originates in the
imagination, but its existence must also be physical, objective, so
as to move from one mind to another. A writer puts words onto a
page; years later, a reader harvests them. A television crew puts a
tender relationship onto tape; years later, a viewer's tears and
hormones flow while watching it.
Sometimes culture contains ideas that no longer exist in any living
person's mind, but which remain physically present, ready to be
apprehended again by another mind. Take the ancient
Etruscan
language, for example. Today many of the written words have been
decoded and about 100 texts have been translated for the first time
in millennia. The ideas encoded in Etruscan writing existed
objectively, but not subjectively, since no one could read them.
When we distinguish between reality and the imagination, we are
emphasizing the difference between the subjective realm of
consciousness and the objective realm of physically observable
phenomena, such as Etruscan inscriptions on stone monuments. But
that latter realm, the physical realm, must be divided in two:
natural phenomena and artifacts of human minds. An ordinary stone
belongs to the former category, whereas an engraved tombstone or a
diamond solitaire in a ring belongs to the latter category -
physical artifacts that manifest intentions of the human mind.
We owe this distinction between two states of culture - as objective
and subjective ideas - to the philosopher
Karl Popper, who proposed
three categories, which he called "three worlds." World One is the
physical, natural world. World Two is the world of consciousness -
of fantasies, emotions, and all other mental processes. World Three
consists of the products of the human mind. Popper meant to include
in World Three everything observable that the human mind has
fashioned, such as tools, institutions, musical performances, books,
heart operations, and journals. These productions are different from
the minds that create them; they exist objectively and often (but
not always) rather permanently, enabling us to compare them,
criticize them, argue about them, and develop them further. They may
survive the minds - the World Two entities - that created them and
they are therefore "objective ideas." Popper explained that
"the third world, the world of objective knowledge... is man-made.
But it is to be stressed that this world exists to a large extent
autonomously; that it generates its own problems, especially those
connected with methods of growth; and that its impact on any one of
us, even on the most original of creative thinkers, vastly exceeds
the impact which any of us can make upon it."
Subjectivity - human consciousness, World Two - mediates between
Worlds One and Three. Popper wrote:
"The three worlds are so related that the first two can interact,
and that the last two can interact. Thus the second world, the world
of subjective or personal experiences, interacts with each of the
other two worlds. The first world and the third world cannot
interact, save through the intervention of the second world, the
world of subjective or personal experiences."
An immense accumulation of culture exists as objective knowledge -
concretized artifacts in such places as the Internet, museums, and
magazines. This is humanity's cultural storehouse of objective
knowledge.
There is a constant interplay between Worlds Two and Three - between
the subjective world of the imagination and the objective world of
expressed ideas. Popper's classification system is itself an
example. He thought it up and wrote it down. I read his book and
thought about it further. Then I drew upon it in writing a book on a
topic that probably would never have interested him. And so it goes.
In receiving, using, and passing objective knowledge on, we serve as
curators of our World Three heritage. Ideas that have been recorded
but are no longer part of any World Two process are dormant. Live
culture consists of this ongoing motion of ideas from one mind to
another - always as communicated across time and space through the
manifestations of World Three.
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- Metta Spencer, 2006