Population and Mental Health Progress Item No. 3

Population and Mental Health Progress Item No. 3

• 1. J Population and Mental Health Progress Item No. 3 "Appreciative Systems• John B. Calhoun 2N-3o6 Bldg. 10 National Institute o! Mental Health Bethesda, Marylam 2001.h January 17, 1966

• 2. (2) In Progress Item No. 2 (January 14, 1966) there was assembled a set of statements defining broad issues which bear upon the relationship between population and mental health. Running through these one may detect a major theme of education for change, of developing the capacity to modify ones value system toward those appropriate for altered conditions. One can also detect through many recent publications the felt need for some new mechanism in society which will facilitate the transition from one set of values to another. The direct implication that such transitions have for personality structure places this developing concern for a new social mechanism within the realm of interest to the field of mental health. This suggested new social mechanism has been termed an "Appreciative System" by Sir Geoffrey Vickers. My purpose here will simply be' to present a few passages from published sources . .that help to define the scope of the issue. Vickers (The Psychology of Policy Making and Social Change, British Journal of Psychiatry, July, 1964-) has become troubled over a peculiar imbalance in human affairs. He looks at the proliferation and refinement of the science of cybernetics which has spawned regulatory systems of great precision. Yet he views with alarm the near absence of systems of comparable precision which can help to generate or alter opinion about the goals of such exquisite regulatory systems. He says: "Men, institutions and societies learn what to want as well as how to get, what to be as well as what to do; and the two forms of adaptations .are closely connected. Since our ideas of regulation were formed in relation to norms which are deemed to be given, they need to be reconsidered in relation to norms which change with the effort made to pursue them. "so I shall concentrate on the processes involved in the first segment and I need a word to describe them. Since I cannot find one in the literature, I will call them collectively "appreciation," and I will keep the word "regulation" for the second segment. I will credit the appreciating agent with a set of readinesses to distinguish some aspects of its situation rather than others and to classify and value these in this way rather than that, and constantly to revise these readinesses; and I will describe these readinesses as an appreciative system." Professor r.s.c. Northrop (1948, Science, 107: 411-417) in the closing statements of his paper on The Neurological and Behavioristic Basis of the Ordering of Society by Means of Ideas, defines the value

• 3. (3) of such appreciative systems for society: "Human societies --- (can) radically reconstruct their social organization with the rejection of an old normative social theory and the acceptance of a new one. This is possible quickly only when a society or its leaders have reached a · majority agreement upon a systematic normative social theory and possess an excellent system of camrunications to acquaint and habituate the leaders of that society and, if possible, a majority of the people with that normative social theory. --- In short, in any culture embodied ideas defining purposes or ideas really matter." Van Rensselaer Potter, in his article, Council on the Future, (Nation, February 8, 1965) concludes with: "It is clear that world opinion is reaching a shared body of assumptions, for better or worse, which place the destiny of man .in the hands of science and technology. If we are to preserve the dignity of the individual, and if the human species is to survive and prosper, we need to cultivate the world of ideas and perfect the techniques for arriving at value judgments in areas where facts alone are not enough." Gardner :t,rurphy in his Human Potentialities (Basic Books, New York, 1958) on pages 23 and 25: "--- decisions based upon thought and discussion among all who are interested in thinking and discussion --- which is at least a large part of the democratic process --- is the only control device within a scientific-technological society that bas any serious chance of working. For freedom is largely a function of the availability of relevant information in the decision-making process, and reflection on our part will increase rather than decrease the freedom of those who in later years will have to make the decisions for which we are as yet unready." ---11 Part of this conception is that man can and will understand himself and his own society. A still more concrete exemplification of the idea is that all men in the science-dominated modern era can learn to understand one another despite colossal gulfs established by political, economic, and military clevage; and that it is only through a common discovery of all men striving to understand that a 'one world' fit to live in can be discovered." From Gardner Murphy' s "Human Potentialities," Basic Books, 1958: "If the intellectual leaders, upon whom scientific findings and their applications in the physical, biological, and social sciences depend, cannot make themselves heard and cannot bring society along with them, the game is up. - - .- For, unless humanity destroys itself utterly, there will have to be plans conceived in terms of the whole human family already pressing ever more closely upon itself, so to speak, and capable of existing on this planet only if sane ways and means are discovered for an orchestrated planning of humanity's future. Clearly, there must be both short-range and long-range thinking, with emphasis

• 4. (4) upon the dominant role of science and its implications. - - - Humanity cannot afford to belittle its only weapon in such a crisis: the weapon of sustained dispassionate thought as to its place in the cosmos and the devices by which the perils which surround it may be overcome . " - - - "What are the guidelines to the form of the interrelated biological and social changes which we believe are coming? This question involves our readiness to consider the possibility not only of gradual change but of abrupt transition to new levels. " (From Chap. 12) From Walter Russel Brain, Science and Antiscience, Science, April 9, 1965: "In my presidential address (to the British Association for the Advancement of Science) I drew attention to our collective failure to foresee the consequences of much recent and current scientific work, and I stressed the need for more education in science. And society is responsible for what it does or fails to do with the scientist's discoveries, though he has a special responsibility as a member of society, - - - The evolution of the human race is now threatened by a failure of integration. (And from Gardner Murphy, ibid: "The principle of emergence means that n~w conceptual tools are required for each level of integration."} Is man too intelligent, or perhaps not intelligent enough? The world population crisis, as I suggested, may illustrate a lack of.social integration of the intelligence of individuals. - - - Scientists, therefore, must seize every opportunity to bring home to those who make the practical decisions about social organization the urgency of the problems with which they are faced and their true nature ; and they can themselves contribute to their solution. - - - as science is international, it can bring together scientists of many nations who are prepared to try not to take for granted the emotional attitudes of their own societies, but to look beyond them in search of the common interests of all nations. - - - But it must often be extremely hard, and sometimes impossible, to foresee far ahead the social and technological consequences of particular scientific discoveries. Nevertheless, I believe we have to try to do it. If scientists ar e to be enabled to attempt it, society as a whole must recognize the need and provide the facilities." From a March 6, 1965 letter from Ralph Wendell Burhoe, Professor and Chairman, Theology and the Sciences, Meadvi lle Theol ogical School, University of Chicago (formerly executive officer of the American Academy .of Arts and Sciences): "My theory ·of human society says that not only is science as a discipline for acquiring knowl edge much more important to society than the subsequent technological applications of it, but there is a matter of prior importance still, and that is the value attitudes and orientation of a population and their integration with the scientific world view. If the crisis of a split culture (cf. the two cultures of c. P, Snow) of the Western and more developed nations in the last half of the twentieth century is threatening to disintegrate them, how much more so will it disrupt the

• 5. (5) viability of individual personalities and social groups in peoples who have not even lived with sane value integration around an earlier level of scientific advancement. This means for me ~t the primary problem of the world society and peace is that of an integration of our values with the scientific world view, and this is as much a problem for the developed as for the less developed nations." From The End of Free Fall, a BBC lecture by Sir Geoffrey Vickers, published in The Listner, October 28, 1965, pp. 647-648, and p. 671: "So even to reshape the physical environment of a town to the minimal extent needed to sizing up completely, involves reshaping not only the town but also our institutions and the world of concepts and values which we share and which alone enables us to cooperate or even communicate. So the changes of the next thirty-five years, far more even than those of the last thirty-five years, will require of us a radical exercise in learning and re-learning--not merely learning new ways of doing, but also new ways of seeing, valuing, and organizing. And if we are to keep any control over the way that world develops, we must be moved to learn by our anticipation of things to come, moved not only to technical learning and ethical learning. This .is sanething which we are very ill-equipped to do, both biologically and-at present-socially. All kinds of critical variables, such as population, production, consumption, invention, transportation, caamunication, have been expanding in a world so underoccupied and underdeveloped that for a time each could stimulate the others without generating limitations to .them all. This period, unique in history and invisibly brief by comparison with man's total record, bas been enough to give to those who were so unlucky as to lead the race, the illusion of an inde!'initely expanding universe and a value system appropriate to that illusory period. This brief dream is already shattered, leaving a doubly cursed legacy - a world set to expand living spaces which no longer exist and a habit of seeing and valuing in ways grossly ill-suited to the world it has made." Appreciative System - Need for "For our far-away ancestor the world consisted of two parts: his little group and what was outside. Inside everything was friendly, nice, and warm, outside everything was hostile. One's own group could be enriched by killing and robbing another, or could be robbed or wiped out by others. Our ancestor's life depended on the survival of his group. Thus, accordingly, two codes of conduct bad to be established: one for the behavior inside the group, regulating relations to its other members, and a different one for the behavior toward outside hostile groups •••• The moral codes prescribing behavior in and

• 6. Appreciative System - Need for outside the group were not only different, but completely contradictory. The greatest sin for man was always killing a fellow man of his own group, _a sin usually entailing capital punishment. Contrary to this, killing of members of other groups was always virtue, the way to glory • ••• This duality of morals goes down throughout the whole l ist of sins. It still persists .••• All this leads to the question: What can be done about it? If mankind with its original intellectual structure, is unfit to live in its new surroundings and adaptation is a slow process, how can we survive?" {Szent-Gyorgyi, 1964) {8.4.4 ) The point .is that humanity needs generalists. Humanity needs generali sts who are willing to make the attempt to understand the totality of things; humanity needs gener alists who, by their outstanding ability t o amalgamate and synthesize the contradictions and opposi ng polarities of l i ving, symbolize the higher reaches of what it means to be; and finally, humanity needs generalists in positions of world leadership who will make decisions based on knowledge and wisdom. On this last point C.P. Snow takes the position that humanity's need for general - i sts is so great that nothing less than the survival of human kind i s at stake. {Royce, 1964) {18.17.11) The thi rd option, so to speak, that I want to mention, is that i f these developments that I 'm talking about do in fact occur, they will evolve gradually and unevenly, often unplanned , Men and i nst i tutions will view these developments at any stage as both threats and opportunities, i f t hey note the processes of change and t heir portents qt all. Ther e wi ll be str uggles, disasters, vi ctor i es -- unevenly distributed and unevenly appr ehended by t he winners and the l osers. Putt ing it another way, t he social system will continue to be sloppy i n many of its a r ticul ati ons, even though large parts of it will be becomi ng more rational ized and more powerful . The refore it seems t o me t here will conti nue to exist t he possibil ity of deliberately i ntroducing new i deas, new methods, and new goal s into the system wi thin a given period of time , or at a gi ven t ime . But the odds on a feli citous congruence of new event s and new i deas and new modes of operati on wil l be ver y low, just because the system will be simul taneousl y both sloppy and organized. Some parts will be too well organized to make significant change likely; some will be too mercur ial to change deliberately. But I think, hopefully and happily, the chances of introducing change at a significant time are not likely to disappear altogether. (Michael, 1964) (19.25.9) Yet these partial definitions and attempts at solution point in the same direction. We are becoming acutely aware that we need t o build a culture within which there is better communication--a culture within which interrelated ideas and assumptions are sufficiently

• 7. (7) Appreciative System - Beed for widely shared so that specialists can talk with specialists in other fields, specialists can talk with laymen, laymen can ask questions of specialists, and the least educated can participate, at the level of political choice, in decisions made necessary by scientific or philosophical processes which are nev, complex, and abstruse.(Mead, 1965) (8.3.3) But such suggestions place too much reliance on the past and necessarily depend on a long time span within which to build a common, shared view of the world. In the present crisis, the need to establish a shared body of assumptions is a very pressing one--too pressing to wait for the slov process of educating a small elite group in a few places in the world •••• Speed in working out new solutions is essential if new and more disastrous fragmentations are not to occur--but we also need an appropriate framework. (Mead, 1965) (8.3.6) ·Today we have the resources to give children everywhere living experience of the whole contemporary world. And every child, everywhere in the world, can start with that knowledge and grow into its complexity. In this way, plans for population control, flood control, control of man's inroads on nature, plans for protecting human health and for developing a world food supply, and plans for sharing a world communication system can all become plans in which citizens participate in informed decisions •••• Knowledge arranged for comprehensibility by a young child is knowledge accessible to all, and the task of arranging it will necessarily fall upon the clearest minds in every field of the humanities, the sciences, the arts, engineering, and politics. (Mead, 1965) (8.3.14) Education at its best will develop the individual's inner resources to the point where he can learn (and will want to learn) on his own. It will equip him to cope with unforeseen challenges and to survive as a versatile individual in an unpredictable world. Individuals so educated will keep the society itself flexible, adaptive and innovative. (Gardner, 1963) (18.1.12) · Once we are convinced that the choice of a creative and selfdirecting society can be genuine, we shall have to face the most obvious of the immediate problems: Will this point of view be effective in relation to the imnediate threats that face us in this half-century? .•• The crisis of which we are a part need not be the frustration of the vision that bas been developed but can indeed be a catalyst to expedite the transition into the fulfillment, by a single humanity, of the three human natures already sketched out. These problems can be solved ••• only by searching out some concepts which may help to define the relations of man to his cosmos, •••

• 8. (8) Appreciative System - Need for of new creations of ossible systems and environment. Murphy, 195 between man And of all the threats to civilization perhaps none is greater than that which leads sociology to ask only what men do do and technology only what can be done, or, to use again the popular phrase, "what is there." By banishing "ought" from the vocabulary of our sociology, and by asking of our technologists only what they can do rather than what is worth doing, we are making ourselves passengers in a vehicle over which no critical intelligence pretends to exercise any control and which may, indeed, take us not only to the moon but to destinations even less desirable. (Krutch) (0.19.1) All the majesty of his mind can be dethroned by his stomach. Man can feast like Belshazzar· and ignore the writing on the wall. He can spend 40,000 million a year on the defence of peace and ignore the real content of the peace he is supposed to be defending. He can say, My group, at least, shall survive', and like the locustmen of Attila, Genghis Khan and Tamerlance and Hitler, try to wrest lebensraum at other people's expense. He can split the atom and release the power of matter and use this, his greatest discovery, to poison the goodness of his earth and destroy his species. He can outboast the Ancients, who in the arrogance of their material success built pyramids as the gravestones of their civilizations, for J.bdern M:l.n can throw his pyramids into Space and they may orbit eternally round a planet which died of his neglect. Or he may choose to use his science and his wisdom to co-operate with all his kind i n the peaceful enrichment of his Earth and of the people who live on it. {Calder, 1962) 0.16.5) What I am hoping for is that essentially a new set of values will become acceptable to society, for example, the same values which are acceptable to the artist, to the monk, to the creative man. The difficulty is that you have to create· these values for people who essentially are not in what we call now the creative level of intelligence. Thi~ is again the problem of leisure. (Salvadori, 1964) (1.23.2) This new sense of presence is paradoxical regarding the exteriorization and interiorization of man's life. The popular criticism of the media of communication - and there is a lot -- shows awareness, widespread if not very perceptive, of some of the exteriorizing effects of the new media. We are told over and over again that man's life has been depersonalized by the machine and by mass culture •••• The new media have extended man's senses. They have made his reach into time and space longer. But the result has been that the tips of

• 9. (9) Appreciati~e System - Need for his fingers are farther from his heart. What is truly human has been eliminated: a breathless superficiality governs too many relationships between individual and individual. This is the popular mythology, finding expression in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or Vance Packard's The Naked Society. (Ong, 1964) (8.6.14) But I am not so much interested in the fact that the population explosion is here, that the world population will double in the next 40 years, and some populations will triple. I am much more interested in another aspect of the population explosion. A South American sociologist has coined a word to indicate this new aspect of the population explosion: he states that what has increased is the psychological density of the population. By this he means that each one of us, by just being born, is given so many additional services in- such increased amounts -- medical, educational, entertainment services -- that each one of us counts more. More people know how to read and write ; more people listen to radio and look at television; more people travel,and more people participate in the pol itical process •••• We are confronted with a new political situation because of biological improvements and because of the impact of the hard sciences on the bringing up of the increased world population. We find ourselves surrounded by a larger number of people who count more, who demand more, and who have a tremendous impact on our political and sociological outlook. (Salvador!, 1964) (1.23.1) But the agency of human transformation cannot be the blind and automatic natural selection of the pre-human sector •••• Some form of psychosocial selection is needed, a selection as non-natural as are most human activities, such as wearing clothes, going to war, cooking food, or employing arbitrary systems of canmunication. To be effective, such "non-natural" selection must be conscious, purposeful and planned. And since the tempo of cultural evolution is many thousands of tillles faster than that of biological transformation, it must operate at a far higher speed than natural selection if it is to prevent disaster, let alone produce improvement. (Huxley, 1963) (13 . 5.18) At its present developnent level the "systems approach" is still a scheduling tool. It can give good answers to complex questions but a complex question remains: who frames and puts the questions •••• The prime need is for institutions or individuals who are capable of asking the right questions, of indicating, initiating, and sustaining innovative social and economic strategies. There are many such individuals, but we are low on institutions or agencies that can make really effective the use of such individuals and so encourage the long range thinking and planni ng that society now requires •• , ,The prospect before us, not only for the United States but for world society, is not only more change but ever more rapid rates of change . The attitude to change and the concomitant need for long range planning or large-scale social and economic innovations has become the touchstone of the viability for all our major·institutions.(McHale,1955) (17.17.1)

• 10. Appreciative System - Processes within In Julian Huxley 's classical phrase, man is taking evolution in his own hands; and the critical procedure is the rehearsal of the entire range of imaginable options. The self-discipline involved in exposing the focus of attention to these options is an act of rational choice, since no terminal selection can be justified unless all maj or categories of value have been considered in relation to each alternative. By building various value orientations into computersocieties it will be possible to explore the consequences of renovating the value systems to which we are accustomed. (Iaswell, 1965) (17 .16.4) Man's psychosocial environment includes his beliefs and purposes, his ideals and his aims: these are concerned with what we may call the habitat of the future , and help to determine the direction of his further evol ution. All evolution is directional and therefore relative. But whereas the direction of biological evolution is relateQ to the continuing improvement of organisms in relation to their conditions of life, human evolution is related to the improvement of the entire psychosocial process, including the human organism, in relation t o man's purposes and beliefs, long-term as well as short-term. Only in so far as those purposes and beliefs are grounded on scientific and tested knowledge, will they serve to steer human evolution in a desirable direction. (Huxley, 1963) (13.5.20) I would like to close with a quotation from Thomas Huxley: Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of nature, through which name I include not merely things and their f orces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of affections and of the will into an earnest and lovi ng desire to move in harmony with those laws.- (Dorosin, 1965) (5.23.5) Ther e is implicit in this titl e some idea of a form of social behavior oriented to a changing world .••• Let us define "pol iteness." Essential ly we use it in the sense of a pattern of social interaction, beginning at the individual level and then extending t o group structuri ng. I think of thoughtfulness and considerati on first here; i .e., we are pol ite in terms of what our behavior means to the other; we "consider" his good, inherently, in terms of our responsive attitude; we sort of put ourselves "in the other fellow's place" ••• I think then of courtesy which is really a corollary of basic thoughtfulness, yet is pe:haps a bit more structured •••• I think of respect, even of deference, which are attributes of politeness that are usually stratified, i.e., they are differentially related to sex, or to age, or to various status symbols •••• I think we are ready to accept politeness as a desirable social force at every level of human interactive behavior. It is

• 11. (U) Appreciative System - Processes within essentially d'nd intrinsically an awareness of others and it involves adjustive values, in the sense of a give-and-take situation. I think both the giver (the politer) and the receiver (the politee) are mutual gainers •••• When mutual politeness is present both parties are in a situation wherein a predictable pattern of reactive adjustment is established. (Krogman, 1965) (8.7.1) Up to now I have skirted the fringe of the world situation, apart :from reference to a bulging population. There is far more to it than "the numbers racket." There are broader and deeper implications of the values held by whole blocs of peoples •••• I now move into considerations of politeness at the natiopolitical level. In the last analysis we but substitute people-to-people values and behaviors for person-to-person •••• In recent years "nationalism" ••• bas been in the ascendancy •••• Who is to detail discrete ingredients or analyze the cultural chemistry that boils and bubbles in the world today? · I leave that to the chancelleries of· the world. But I can give them one priceless ingredient, one catal1 t, that may allay the explosive chemical instability of the international vat--politeness in terms of understanding, of appreciation, of tolerance, and of sympathetic and empbathetic guidance. {Kro@1118n, 1965) (8.7.5) "Politeness in a Crowded World?" How, tl}en? As a conviction that inherent in politeness--at every level--is the dignity, the beauty, the grandeur, and, I venture to observe, the divinity, of the human spirit. As a belief that politeness is a way of life and living that encompasses universal laws and values--tbat all life bas equal value in the eyes of God and that in His sight we are all children, one to the other. As an expression of the fact that we, alone of all creatures, have the capacity to compassion, to understanding, to appreciation, and to sharing with all in all. (Krogman, 1965) (8.7.6) In a society of free men, which is the only situation vhere there is any need for will, the will to agree begins as the will to communicate. "Truth," says Jaspers, "must be comnunicable •••• We are what we are only through the community of mutually conscious understandings." The sheer act of listening to other minds in a receptive mood, of speaking one's own mind clearly and honestly, not with the intent to dazzle, but with the intent to communicate, can make all the difference between "agreement" and dissent." ••• Under the sobering exigencies of the world crisis, it is not too much to hope that communication will replace controv~sy as the central aim of thinking people. The rule of thumb to follow is astonishingly simple: speak so as to be understood and to further understanding; listen to understand, by putting one's own mind in the mind of the other, and trying to reason<lf).s he reasons, from his perspective.

• 12. (12) Appreciative SystCiJl - Processes within The mental habits of the college debating team must be shelved, at least for the duration of the present world crisis ..•. To quote Leibniz, that greatest diplomat among philosophers, "I find that most systems are right in a good share of that which they advance, but not so much in what they deny." And in this event, hov1 can we be satisfied, in seeking a nev1 and more comprehensive v1orl d-view f or the corning v1orld civil ization, if we do not win now f rcm every grai n i ts kernel of truth? In times of reconstr uction every school of thought, every discipline must be laid under contribution. (Wager, 1953 ) (4.3.31) Decisions based upon thought and discussion among all who are interested in thinking and discussi on--which is at least a large part of the democratic pr ocess--is the onl y control device within a scientific-technological society that has any serious chance of working. For freedom is l argely a function of the ava i lability of relevant information in the decision-making process, and reflection on our part will increase rather than decrease the freedom of those who in later years wil l have to make the decisions for which we are as yet unready. (Murphy, 1958) (5.16.4) \ In the coming age of man's spiritual maturity, beyond dogma and beyond skepticism, he will somehow ~earn to live with perpetual uncertainty, and at the same time work in concert with his fellows to determine, in the light of all current knowledge and belief, what is the closest approximation to Truth possible at each successive stage in his development. If man cannot ever know the infinite Truth, still he can always strive to reach a common definition of what finite truths, subj ect to unlimited revision, seem cogent to him in the vital present . ... And as we approach the epoch of One World, and a unified world science, and a world perspective in philosophy and religion, something remotely akin to what Teilhard de ~hardin calls "Unanimity" may be possible for free minds working with passion and sincerity to reach tentative agreement. on values, goals, and knowledge .••• To create an . integrated world c1Vilizat1on and to integrate the integrators who will lead the way thither, requires not Truth but Will: a new approach to thought based on the will to agree. And further: to assert that agreement on fundamentals does not matter, is to assert that fundamentals do not matter. It is to argue that a civilization without goals or values can spin aimlessly through the endless oceans of existence without making its passengers mortally sick. (Wager, 1963) (4.3.28) I therefore have no hesitation in recommending the attitude toward the great transition which I have described as critical acceptance. There may be times when we wish nostalgically that it had never started, for then at least the danger that the evolutionary experiment in this part of the universe would be terminated would be more remote. Now that the transition is under way, however, there

• 13. (13) Appreciative System - Processes within is no going back on it. We must learn to ·use its enormous potential for good rather than for evil, and we must learn to diminish and eventually eliminate the dangers which are inherent in it. If I had to sum up the situation in a sentence I would say that the situation has arisen because of the development of certain methods of reality testing applied to our images of nature. If we are to ride out the transition successfully we must apply these or s:illlilar methods for real ity testing to our images of man and his society. (Boulding,1964) (0.6.67) Still another prophet of world integration who, like Jaspers, shows profound concern for the integrity of the human personality, is Lewis Mumford •.•• in the Transformations of M:ln, he has been in the debt of Jaspers. Throughout, he speaks with the concern of a man firmly attached to life and firmly persuaded that the ultimate source of all life is the "whole man," the person in all his dimensions and powers, not multiplied into masses by ruthless collectivization, or chopped into fragments by assembly-line specialization. With Jaspers, he argues that the twentieth-century world crisis is insoluble and the city of man unattainable without an interior change in men. "The very possibility of achieving a world order by other means than totalitarian enslavement and automatism rests on the plentiful creation of unified personalities," whole men of unusual creative vision precipitated by the world crisis but themselves capable of precipitating a further transformation in the rank and file of mankind. A handful of individuals or even "a single human personality may overcome the apparently irresistible inertia of institutions," ••• That such a "miracle" will rescue man today is by no means sure. "On purely rational terms," Mumford is inclined to side with "the dying jud@llent of H.G. Wells" that man is at the end of his tether; but in any event there is no use looking for salvation outside the self. All the important decisions are made there, and man's fate even now is locked in the hearts of living men. (Wager, 1963) (4.3.18) In the interior of the sensitive person, the past and present and future of the human race around the globe thus dwell with an immediacy which is a new and arduous experience, unknown to our ancestors, and still resisted strenuously in certain sectors of society •.•• The crisis which developments in communication have imposed on man today is thus not one of the mere depersonalization of l ife. It is at least equally that of the intense interiorization of consciousness. Or, better, it is the tension between a growing exteriorization and a growing interiorization. The problem, insofar as it is a human problem, must of course find its more radical solution from the interior, fran within. We must have more and more machines in our communications processes, but we must at the same time master them more and more by growth in our interior resources. The way to this mastery of necessity involves fuller understanding of the history and structure of communications in relation to the human psyche. (Ong, 1964) (8.6.16)

• 14. (14) Appreciative System - Processes within We have assumed that it is desirable to move in the direction of unencapsulation as opposed to encapsulation, ••• What might this unencapsulated man look like? ••• Presumably he would be able to live out the idea of unity within diversity •.•• The unencapsulated man would be particularly interested in what F.s.c. Northrop has called epistemic correlations. An epistemic correlation is simply an agreement reached through two or more valid approaches to reality • ••• The implication is that if a finding is reached via two or more criteria of "truth" that its probability of "really" being true is enhanced •••• If we now broaden this way of looking at epistemic correlations to include the interpenetrations of reality images, we see that the broadest possible image of reality is the· one most likely to provide us with true vision. In fact, if there could be such a thing as a convergence of all legitimate reality images, ••• we would have transcended the epistemological barrier and come to know ultimate reality ..•• While this is impossible for finite man, it is possible for him to break the bonds of psycho-epistemological encapsulation and emerge with the broadest possible reality image, ••• Because of his great efforts at synthesis we would expect such a man to be highly self-actualized, that is, integrated in the Jungian sense of a lifetime struggle toward wholeness or in the Eastern sense of reaching for satori •••• He would, in short, be reaching for ultimate consciousness. (Royce, 1964) (18.17.13)

• 15. (15) Appreciative System - Organization of Two things happened just about 1950. First, we invented the organization of invention; the most interesting newly invented things has been our institution. Where we don't have a body of ex_isting knowledge, we now know how to invent this •••• In the kind of world in which we live you decide what you're going to invent, and then you mobilize the competencies which are required to invent this: then you simply move forward to invent it •••• You don't get results by accretion or by addition, for the way in which a systemtype project develops is something like the development which takes· place at conception from zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, child, adult and so on. Here, the total reality is being designed at the very beginning, and the mode of progress is from the immature to the mature ..•• We invented the organization of invention, and then we deliberately plugged this into a business complex in the form of a research and development department, or of some department for the management of innovation ..•• Now there can be only one reason for this organized kind of research, and that is to take a business which has a system we have conceived of as a closed system (one which was in balance, and in which output was equal to input) and to punch a hole in it, to inject imbalance, to create disturbance. (Muller-Thym, 1964) (19.28.1) The second thing that has happened has been a radical. change in organization and the nature of work •••• Our organizational shapes are no longer pyramidal in character; we are living with kinds of work structures which, if you diagram them, would look like diagrams of a nervous system, or a circuit model for a computer. A total business system will be made up of a complex of centers that have very high concentration of skills; these centers are united by communication networks in which ideally one could go from any action-taking, decision-making, information-handling center to any other. What is coming into existence is a kind of complex in which there are many centers ••.• Now we have not gone as far as this, organizationally, until now, because the technical problem of managing the total information of the system with manual technologies on a sampling basis made it emotionally too difficult to do. We can now manage such networks with computers, more accurately, more sensitively, and in totality. (Mull er-Thym, 1964) (19.28.3) The second point at which we affect the noosphere is through the information outflow which we make toward others. In conversation, writing, and in the ordinary activity of daily life we are constantly communicating with others, and as a result of these communications their images of the world change .••• The third process is perhaps only an extension of the first. This is the process by which we come to have new knowledge which nobody had before. This process is often

• 16. (16) Appreciative System - Organization of regarded as the privilege of a few who are engaged in professional research. The process, however, is not sharply blocked off from the general process of the increase of knowledge in any mind, and a great many discoveries and inventions are still made by people who are amateurs. The more people there are engaged in a search of some kind, ••• the faster will be the general rate of development. The unfinished tasks of the great transition are so enormous that there is hardly anyone who cannot find a role to play in the process. (Boulding, 1964) (0.6.72) Out of these different but persistent tendencies Teilhard deduced the next stage in hmnan evolution, if man is to succeed in realizing his cosmic destiny. Through an ultimate complexification, he would achieve "an organic super-aggregation of souls" uniting all minds everywhere; and through an ultimate personalization, this superbeing would become itself a person, a "hyper-person," an organic synthesis of persons not deprived in any sense of their personality, but fulfilled through union. For Teilhard, this was the "Qnega Point," the goal of evolution since the beginning, and clearly deducible as such from trends already well established. (Wager, 1963) (4.3.9) The lost significance of Alfred Russel Wallace lies in this: precisely one hundred years ago, and five years after the publication of the Origin of Species, Wallace, pElssing one step beyond Darwin, perceived that with the emergence of the human brain, man had to a previously inconceivable degree, passed out of the domain of the particulate evolution of biological organs and had entered upon what we may call history. We, as human beings in whom the power of communication bad arisen, were leaving the realm of phylogeny for the realm of history, which was to contain, henceforth, our essential destiny. After two billion years of biological effort, man alone had seemingly evaded the oblique trap of biological specialization. He had done so by the developnent of a specialized organ--the brain--whose essential purpose was to evade specia11zat1on. (E1sely, 1965) (9.1.1) Our greatest need today, then, is to acquire the power of looking ahead, forecasting, and preparing for the consequences of the accelerating developments in science and technology. Many years ago, H. G. Wells pointed out the need for what he called a 'world brain' to correlete information and extrapolate it on the world scale, and I hope that one day we shall achieve something like that. But I can see only one main preliminary step towards all this essential foresight--education, and by education I mean education at all levels of society. (Brain, 1964) (19.17.8)

• 17. (17) Appreciative System - Organization of As individuals, we are all receptors, capable of supplying the higher centres with information. What information they get, therefore, depends on us. We are also the motor nerves, and what society does is done by us. But we are again, collectively, ourselves the higher centres, the forebrain, which mediates for the social mind the difficult task of receiving the information, learning from past experience, reacting to it emotionally, yet controlling its emotions; and, above all, looking to the future. (Brain, 1964) (19 .17.11) Today a new analogy has excited attention on the part of the public and many scholars. It lies in a rough comparison with the evolutionary growth and increasing complexity of that spheroid known as the brain, with the increase in human numbers and the extension of a nerve net of communications over a similar sphere of limited dimensions; it is, namely, the world. Human society, like the convolutions of the individually evolving neopallium, is becoming infolded upon itself. This, in turn, it has been argued, should lead to a heightened, reflective conciousness on the part of the masses. "Mln," in the words of Teilhard de Chardin, -"is building his composite brain before our eyes." (Eisley, 1965) (9.1.7) We are now neari ng the end of the era of change. We have been isolated human beings, selfish, combative, ignorant, helpless. But now for several hundred years the great evolutionary hormones of knowledge and technol ogy have been pressing us, almost without our understanding it, into power and prosperity and communication and· i nteraction, and into increasing tolerance and vision and choice and planning--pressing us, whether we like it or not, into a single coordinated humankind. The scattered and competing parts are being bound together. Everywhere now we begin to see men and nations beginning the deliberate design of development with a growing confidence in the choice and creation of their own future • .•• It is a tremendous prospect. Hardly anyone has seen the enormous sweep and restructuring and unity and future of it except perhaps dreamers like H. G. Wells or Teilhard de Chardin. It is a quantum jump. It is a new state of matter. The act of saving ourselves, if it succeeds, will make us participants in the most incredible event in evolution. It is the step to M':t.n, (Platt, 1965) (10 .3.17) Perhaps it is time for organized medicine to come to grips with these realities. It would seem necessary that it first address itself to the difficulties which the ·free, voluntary democratic political system has in finding acceptable solutions to the complex social and environmental problems which are the direct result of the impact of scientific progress. Perhaps competent in the field of human biology, it can borrow for itself a leaf from the book of biological evolution and apply some of its principles to the evolutionary process of which it is a part .••• A major key to this improved performance among specialized and inter dependent cells has been the development of the

• 18. (18) Appreciative System - Organization of specialized functions of cOI11Dunications within the organism and with its environment •••• This important mechanism is a brain or an intelligence. The parallel to the problems of modern medicine in modern society is close. Medicine too has its free and independent cells which are yet specialized and interdependent. Perhaps organized medicine too needs some sort of better intelligence system to deal with its internal and external problems in a changing environment, to recognize them when they occur, and hopefully to anticipate them before they arise. At the moment organized medicine sanewhat resembles an amoeba, moving every which way and almost without direction, except when strongly attracted or strongly repelled. (Watts, 1965) (19.24. 3) De Jouvenel bas made the point that a modern government must be endowed with a service of studies of the future. One form such a service might assume is that of a "look-out" institution, whose function it would be to develop concepts of possibl e futures, to assess the implications of foreseeable developments, and in general to provide the informational and conceptual wherewithal for those with policy and action responsibilities in government to choose wisely and well, It is the purpose of this paper to direct attention to some attractive possibilities for governments to augment their ability to anticipate the future in meaningful ways, that is, in ways that bear upon their role in actually creating it. (Adelson, 1965) (19.9.1) Enough is known to warrant some initial steps, such as starting up an organization--a Futuribles Institute--as a kind of social experiment. Such an institute would have as its mission to enable the direct exploration if possible futures by both men of knowledge and men of action. This resource must be brought about through the concerted efforts of qualified and interested professionals, provided with adequate facilities, including computers and their endorgans, laboratory space, access to relevant infonnation, freedom to travel and discuss, and a host of other tools for practicing the kinds of planning-related techniques we may anticipate being developed .••• Once the resource is operative, current communications techniques can be used to provide remote access for use of the system by many potential "subscribers," who need not all be exclusively government users. (Adelson, 1965) (19.9.20) There is in the world today an "invisible college" of people in many different countries and many different cultures, who have this vision of the nature of the transition through which we are passing and who are determined to devote their lives to contributing toward its successful fulfillment. Membership in this college is consistent with IilBny different philosophical, religious, and political positions. ·rt is a college without a founder and without a president,

• 19. (19) Appreciative System - Organization of without buildings and without organization. Its founding members might have included a Jesuit like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a humanist like Aldous Huxley, a writer of science fiction like H. G. Wells, and it might even have given honorary degrees to Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Pope John XXIII, and even Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy , Its living representatives are still a pretty small group of people. I think, however, that it is they who hold the future of the world in their hands or at least in their minds, (Boulding, 1964) o.6.68) Specialized consciousness --- represents the major target of this book . ..• Because the man of specialized consciousness is a man of consi derable insight and importance, he is a man of special i nformation, a man of learning, a man who changes the culture. He is, in short, one of Toynbee's"creative minority," and thereby a maj or agent of histor y . ••• While .it is important that all men become relatively unencapsulated, i t is particularly important that the " creative minority" become unencapsulated. Toynbee's point regarding the importance of the creative minority is that these men represent the source of maximal creativity in our society and that such creativity must be nurtured with great care. Why? Because creativity is the source of values, and values must continually flow from a civilization if it is to continue to grow. (Royce, 1964) (18.17 .18) The psychosocial phase, t he latest of which we have any knowledge, is based on a self-reproducing and self-varying s ystem of cumulative transmission of experience and culture, opera ting by mechanisms of psychological and s ocial select ion whi ch we have not as yet adequatel y defined or analysed . .•. On our planet i t i s at t he very beginning of its course, havi ng begun less t han one million years ago. However, its tempo is not onl y much faster than that of biological evolut ion, but manifest s a new phenomenon: in the shape of a marked acceleration. Its overall trend is highly antient ropic, a nd is characte rized by a sharp increase in the operat i ve significance of exceptional individual s and i n t he importance or t rue purpose and conscious evaluation ba sed on r eason and imagination, as against the automatic differential el iminat ion of r andom va riants. (Huxley, 1963) 13. 5.7)

• 20. (20) Appreciative System - Organization of (See Note at Bottom of Page) "Turning to the human situation we may no-re that institutional organizations through cultural detenninism have tended toward producing efficient mechanisms of responding to static conditions. They have become culturally innate regulatory systems. What Vickers is saying is that in this era of ever-increasing rate of social change cultural evolution has for some reason not yet been able to provide for . 1 U effective appreciative systems, much less their gaining ascendency to regulatory systems. That such ascendency is fundamental for the survival of the human species may well .account for the broad appeal of Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the n6osphere to many contemporary thinkers as they view the developing course of human destiny." So my concern will now focus on the structure and function of an appreciative system. If I 1 ···I,.., represents the totality of images requisite for a society to function under the given conditions at a particular time, then the function of an appreciative system becomes one of developing new images which can replace or enlarge upon the prior repertoire as surrounding conditions change. Images I ···In for a society are assumed to be isomorphic to behavioral states ~1 -··Bn for an individual. This implies that there must be elements in society comparable to neurones, and that these elements can function together to produce signals which can initiate or terminate the temporal influence of an image on the function of socfety. Now to return to the problem of the elements in society which are comparable to neurones. Individual humans represent these units. Judging from the course of human evolution, and from the characteristics of the culturally most primitive groups of humans now existing, such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert, the basic assembly of elements becomes twelve adults on the average, which from theory (Calhoun, 1964) may be taken to encompass the range of 7-19 individuals. In the scientific realm we find a long historical precedence for such assemblies of indi vidua·1s whose function is t o guide the elaboration of new images of scientific insight. These are the invisible colleges whose history is traced by De Solla Price (Nature 2o6: 233-238, 1965). He points out that they have a critical size of about a hundred individuals. This estimate represents an order of magnitude. For theor.etical reasons I would like to take this as 144, i.e. 122. If an invisible college does in fact represent the optimum assembly required to generate a new image, it follows that it must be comprised of twelve groups of twelve individuals on the average with a considerable range of 49 (i.e. 72 ) to 361 (i.e. 1#). De Solla Price emphasizes the critical role of effective communication among members of an invisible college. (Note: The terminal selections on pp. 20-23 of this Progress •Item No. 3 are from a paper, Behavioral States and Developed Images, presented br John B. Calhoun, December 29, 1965 at the AAAS meeting at Berkel~y, California:

• 21. (21) Appreciative System - Organization of Considering rates of change affecting society an effective appreciative system must be future oriented. We are then faced with the problem of how a future oriented appreciative system can find a niche providing an interface of communication with society. Gardner Murphy (1958, p. 273) provides a beginning clue. He says: "Some years ago, Nathan Israeli developed the magnificent. conception of a "museum of the future": a systematic and orderly display of the various potentialities which the future may indeed bring, Just as we may use a museum to see what Egypt once produced or a museum of science and industry to show the interrelations among the sciences and engineering and invention today, so a study by all the methods of analysis and extrapolation might reveal to us the possible future directions of cosmic and human development. In such a museum, we should have to go far beyond the classification of scientific enterprises already attempted in terms of observation, analysis, abstraction, generalization, the principle of levels, and the discovery of new forms of emergence. The task here would be to find ways (like those of the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century) of defining systematically what is known, so that one can fill in the gaps and at the same time extrapolate in directions suggested by existing trends-- for upon this possibility intelligent planning depends." Kenneth Boulding (Technology and Culture 7(11), 1966) in a discussion of "The Role of the Museum in the Propagation of Developed Images" has continued this theme with emphasis upon the potential r ole of museums as an extension of their present capacity to serve as an interface with society. In closing he says: "Another strategic element in the situation is that the museum is the one culture form at which Professor Snow's "two cultures" meet. The art museum is as much a museum as the science museum. So is the historical museum. A museum, therefore, is not only an interface between the developed sub-culture and the folk culture, it is also part of the interface within the developed culture between the humanistic side and the scientific side, It may, therefore, have an important role in establishing communication across this gulf as well as the other one. The critical question is whether the people who run museums around the world have a sufficient sense of vocational unity to respond to this image of their potential significance. If they do, they may be a very key element in the formation of the world community.

• 22. (22) Appreciative System - Organization of If this opportunity is to be seized, however, it requires a breakdown of the present isolation of the museum subculture, and it involves getting a large part of the scientific collDIIUility itself interested in the problem of the rapid spread of developed images. We have seen the enormous impact when an important segment of the scientific community gets interested in schools, as in the recent revolution in the teaching of mathematics and the natural sciences. A similar revolution in the museum is by no means impossible." It will be noted· that the closing phrase in the passage quoted earlier from Gardner Murphy includes the concept of planning as a function museums of the future. Bertrand de Jouvenal in describing his FUI'URIBLES "venture" to RAND's Interdepartmental Seminar on November 30, 1964, put the issue this way: "We at FUrURIBLES are interested in surmises about the future which are achieved at the cost of some intellectual exertion, - - - I wish to stress that it is expensive, in terms of intellectual effort, to picture a future 'condition of human affairs.' - - - We like to call them reasoned 'conjectures,' meaning thereby, that when an author gives it as his opinion--and it is no more than an opinion--that things will shape up in a certain way, more or less by a certain time, he must adduce reasons for this opinion, describe the steps whereby that shape will be achieved, that situation will be reached. - - - Now, coming to the great design of our venture, it is to generate, gradually, a 'Surmising Forum,' a market place to which various speculations about the future are brought, where these speculations are confronted, discussed, criticized, combined or aggregated, so that images of attainable futures are made available." I shall then define a museum of the future as an institution which encompasses three functions: 1. An invisible college of an appreciative system, or one of its 12 sub-assemblies. 2. A surmising forum -- the planning function. 3. The interface communication function. Interface is here used to denote a two-way communication. None of these functions encompasses policy or regulatory responsibilities. They are solely concerned with generation and transmittal of images. The museum of the future serves as an oasis for the members of an invisible college to assemble together for discussion with low public visibility, and maintains such supportive activities as will make

• 23. (23) Appreciative System - Organization of colIIIIUnication between these elements more effective while each member is in normal residence at his home institution. These supportive activities also include all necessary means for providing vertical and horizontal communication through the appreciative system. The surmising forums, unlike the invisible colleges, consist of permanent members of the museums of the future . They form the research branch. The human "neurones" that are required to develop the far-flung network of the appreciative system, the surmising forum, and the interface with society are here now. We merely have to provide the means for them to begin functioning.-