A

Clash of Mentalities:
Uncertainty, Creativity, and Complexity in Times of Upheaval

Alfonso Montuori
California Institute of Integral Studies
San Francisco, California
amontuori@ciis.edu

Montuori, A. (2014). Un choc des mentalities: Incertitude, créativité et complexité en

temps de crise. (A clash of mentalities. Uncertainty, creativity and complexity in a time
of crisis. Communications. 95(2), 179-198.

Why Uncertainty?

Uncertainty: It’s been an intrinsic part of human existence for as long as human

beings have walked the earth. At the beginning of the 21st century, we find it takes

center stage in a dramatic way.

Social theorists Zia Sardar and Zygmunt Bauman argue that we are, respectively, in

“postnormal” and “liquid” times, while according to Anthony Giddens we are in a

“runaway world.” (Bauman, 2005, 2007; Giddens, 2002; Sardar, 2010). Nothing is

stable and fixed—nothing is ‘normal’-- anymore. Jobs, relationships, identities,

demographics, gender roles, global power dynamics, all seem to be changing rapidly,

fueled in large part, but not exclusively, by technological innovations. ‘Solid’

modernity, built on notions of order, stability, equilibrium, rationality, has given

way to a ‘liquid’ modernity, a Heraclitean world of constant change and

disequilibrium. We are in a transitional moment, where one world is dying but a

new one has not emerged. Uncertainty rules.

This transitional state requires us to live with the recognition that uncertainty is

now a central feature of our lives (Morin & Viveret, 2010). But surely uncertainty

has always been part of the human experience? Our ancestors coped with

uncertainty, with diseases, predators, famines, floods, wars, with loss and shock…

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are things really different today? I want to argue that things are indeed different,

that we are in a transitional moment that could become a transformative moment,

pointing to new directions and possibilities, an opportunity to shape the emerging

world.

A key factor in this postnormal state of affairs is that with the Enlightenment a quest

emerged for order and certainty, bringing the goal and very real hope of a world

that would be ordered and stable and where human beings would not be subjected

to the indignities of uncertainty (Toulmin, 1992). Today we are witnessing a

reassessment of this project, but we are also reeling because the way we understand

the world, our larger worldview, and the way we think about and organize our lives

and the world is based on a now crumbling illusion of control and certainty.

The Modern scientific worldview was based on a Newtonian/Cartesian machine or

clockwork metaphor in which the world was fundamentally objective, rational,

linear, deterministic, and orderly—like a machine (Capra, 1984, 1996; Matson,

1964; Morin, 1981; Peat, 2002; Russell, 1983; Toulmin, 1992). Human beings were

seen as machines: we think of La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine, of course, but this

kind of machine thinking about human beings continues in computer metaphors of

the mind and body (Dupuy, 2000). Machine thinking was borrowed from physics

and applied to all human activities. It is still very common to hear terms like

“programming” or “hard-wired” or “software” used in discussions about human

beings, particularly in reference to neuroscience and genetics. While there are

machine-like elements to life, all too often this language reflects a reductionist bias

whereby we are nothing but machines, programming, hard-wired, etc. Ways of

organizing education and industry reflected reductive and disjunctive “machine

thinking” with its stress on certainty, order, prediction, and control (Montuori,

2005a, 2012; Morgan, 2006; Morin, 1994, 2008a). Despite dramatic changes in the

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scientific understanding of the world and in the social world, at the beginning of the

21st century, the machine metaphor still underlies much of our thinking and

organizing at a very deep level (Capra, 1984, 1996; Montuori, 1989; Morgan, 2006;

Taylor, 2003; Toulmin, 1992).

At the beginning of the 21st century, the assumptions of the Newtonian/Cartesian

worldview have become deeply problematic (Capra, 1996; Elgin, 2009; Kincheloe,

1993; Morin, 2008a; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984). The goal and possibility of

certainty is being replaced by the experience of uncertainty. The history of ideas in

the 20th century has been framed as a movement from certainty to uncertainty

(Peat, 2002). Wallerstein has discussed the "uncertainties of knowledge" in the 21st

century, arguing that two key movements in academia can shed light on the

irruption of uncertainty and the dethroning of order and certainty (Wallerstein,

2004). In Wallerstein's view, complexity science and cultural studies are central to

understanding the changes. From complexity science we learn that the future is not

given, and that the Universe is uncertain and unpredictable. This shatters any

deterministic view of the world as ordered and predictable, and the "certainty of

certainty" that drove the Enlightenment Project.

Cultural Studies has, at the same time, challenged the validity and universality of the

Western Canon, and therefore substantially destabilized views of what is good and

true and worthy of emulation. What was held to be certain and universal in the

sciences and humanities, their "hubris of omniscience" (Ceruti, 1994), has been

shaken, and different voices have been stirred (Rosenau, 1992).

Along with the irruption of uncertainty in the attacks on Newtonian Science and the

Humanities (Peat, 2002), there are also the disastrous realities of the 20th Century,

most notably two World Wars (culminating in the horror of the Holocaust), the

persistence of crushing global poverty and environmental destruction. The notion of

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"progress" was consequently lost in the postmodern melee (Journet, 2000;

Montuori, 1998; Morin, 2006; Sardar, 1999). What we can learn from our history of

mistakes, horrors, wrong turns, environmental devastation, and so on, is that our

dreams of order, control, and prediction may lead to islands of certainty but that the

order can soon be swallowed up in oceans of uncertainty and disorder (Morin,

1981). In fact, every human order also seems to bring with it resistance, rejection,

disorder, creativity, and constraints. Following Wallerstein, we can also say that the

sciences of complexity alert us to the inescapable uncertainty and unpredictability

of our world, just as cultural studies has pointed us to its incredible cultural

pluralism, complexity, and richness. The West may have thought it could predict,

control, and lead the way, but most if not all of the postnormal crises we are facing

are the result of precisely this hubris, this obsession with certainty, control, and the

one right way to progress (Sardar, 1999). It is also becoming increasingly clear that

the very quest for order, control, and prediction is not a value-free scientific

endeavor, but a value-laden project that has psychological, sociological, cultural, and

political roots (Devereux, 1968; Merchant, 1983; Morin, 1992; Wilden, 1980, 1987a,

1987b).

The Brain and Cartesian Anxiety

Certainty: Neuroscientists argue that the brain doesn’t just prefer certainty over

ambiguity and uncertainty, it actually craves certainty. We have a “certainty bias”

which means that even if we are not necessarily actually right, we want to feel right

(Burton, 2008).

When there is a challenge to a well-established mental schema, the brain reacts as if

it were threatened. The part of the brain associated with responses to threats, the

Amygdala, jumps into action. Our the reward system, the Ventral Striatum, stops

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rewarding us (DiSalvo, 2011). If a deviation to our way of seeing the world is

perceived as a threat, it should not come as a surprise that in a time of rapid and

significant change such as ours, there are high levels of anxiety, coupled with

attempts to impose specific ways of seeing the world that bring a return to certainty,

often more rigid and fundamentalist (Montuori, 2005b).

In a world that is perceived as chaotic it should also not surprise us that there is a

quest for new (as well as a return to old) ways of making sense of our lives. The

fascination with Eastern religions and more broadly the world’s wisdom traditions

is part of this quest for meaning as old narratives break down. So is the resurgence

of fundamentalism of all stripes (Armstrong, 2000). One of the recurring topics in

this quest is for ways of understanding life and existence that account for

uncertainty. Titles such as philosopher Alan Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity and

Comfortable with Uncertainty by Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön represent an

ongoing and intensifying trend to find ways to live with uncertainty (Chodron, 2008;

Watts, 1951). But the need for meaning and order is not just found in spiritual texts

and contexts, it is also found in the practical world of management. Business texts

have been drawing on Chaos and Complexity theories for several decades, with titles

such as Brafman and Pollack’s The Chaos Imperative, VISA founder and former CEO

Dee Hock’s Birth of the Chaordic Age, management guru Tom Peters’s Thriving on

Chaos among many others (Brafman & Pollack, 2013; Hock, 1999; Peters, 1988).

Unfortunately, much of this work seems to run aground on the traditional ways of

thinking that still inform us.

The American philosopher Richard J. Bernstein (Bernstein, 1983) has looked at the

relationships between certainty and uncertainty and order and disorder and coined

the term “Cartesian Anxiety” to refer to

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the quest for some fixed point, some stable rock upon which we can secure our lives
against the vicissitudes that constantly threaten us. The specter that hovers in the
background of this journey is not just radical epistemological skepticism but the
dread of madness and chaos where nothing is fixed, where we can neither touch
bottom nor support ourselves on the surface. With a chilling clarity Descartes leads
us with an apparent and ineluctable necessity to a grand and seductive Either/Or.
Either there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for our knowledge, or
we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelop us with madness, with
intellectual and moral chaos. (p. 18)

For Bernstein, Cartesian Anxiety manifests as a psychological and existential issue,

and is also part and parcel of a larger philosophical perspective. One could say that

Cartesian Anxiety is built into a certain interpretation of the world. Bernstein’s

Cartesian Anxiety describes a view that, as he points out, is marked by the “grand

and seductive Either/Or,” what Morin calls disjunctive thinking (Morin, 2008a).

Here we find the need for certainty, the rejection of uncertainty as wrong,

dangerous, and weak, and the absence of certainty as a bottomless pit. In Richard

Dawkins’s highly polemical neo-atheist documentary about religion, The Root of All

Evil, he interviews two fundamentalists, one Jewish and one Islamic. Both

fundamentalists express their concern that without a God who is a law-giver, there

can be no foundation for morality. Without laws that are fixed and forever, and

come from an absolute source, in their view ethical behavior is an impossibility. For

fundamentalists, anybody who is not one of them either is a fundamentalist who

believes in the wrong fundaments, or a secular (moral) relativist who does not

believe in anything and is therefore by definition a nihilist.

Bernstein (Bernstein, 2005) offers a more nuanced perspective suggesting that

The battle I see taking place is not between religious believers with firm moral
commitments and secular relativists who lack conviction. It is a battle that cuts
between the so-called religious/secular divide. It is a battle between those who find
rigid moral absolutes appealing, those who think that nuance and subtlety mask
indecisiveness, those who embellish their ideological prejudices with the language
of religious piety, and those who approach the world with a more open, fallibilistic
mentality—one that eschews the quest for absolute certainty. Such a mentality is
not only compatible with a religious orientation; it is essential to keeping a religious
tradition alive to new situations and contingencies. What we are confronting today

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is not a clash of civilizations, but a clash of mentalities. And the outcome of this clash
has significant practical consequences for how we live our everyday lives—for our
morality, politics, and religion. (pp. 16-17)

This is a key point. Bernstein does not demonize religion, as the new atheists do,

but rather outlines two radically different mentalities. One open, fallibilistic, and, as

I shall argue, complex, creative, and collaborative, and the other closed, dogmatic,

and polarizing.

Responding to the critique that without absolutes no decisive, let alone moral,

action can be taken, Bernstein articulates his pragmatist view that

There is no incompatibility between being decisive and recognizing the fallibility and
limitations of our choices and decisions. On the contrary, this is what is required for
responsible action (Bernstein, 2005, p. 58).

For Bernstein, it is essential to go beyond the grand and seductive Either/Or, and

find another way, which recognizes the inevitability of uncertainty and limitation of

human knowledge precisely in order to act responsibly rather than in a closed-

minded way. Morin has likewise argued for an ethics that acknowledges and

integrates uncertainty and complexity (Morin, 2004b). This includes an awareness

of what Morin refers to as “the ecology of action,” meaning that no matter what our

intention, any action exists in a context, and ecology, and once we can never be sure

how even the most well-intentioned action will turn out.

Are we then abject victims of this need to feel certain, trapped by the workings of

our brain illustrated by neuroscientists, yet living in a world of uncertainty? Are we

trapped on the horns of the grand either/or? It appears that this is not the case. As

Edgar Morin (Morin, 1986) has written,

Does knowing that knowledge cannot be guaranteed by a foundation not mean that
we have already acquired a first fundamental knowledge? And should this not lead
us to abandon the architectural metaphor, in which the term “foundation” assumes
an indispensable meaning, in favor of a musical metaphor of construction in

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movement that transforms in its very movement the constitutive elements that form
it? And might we not also consider the knowledge of knowledge as a construction in
movement? (p.21-22)

Can we favor a musical metaphor of construction, a knowledge of knowledge in

movement? Can we envision a different relationship between knowing and being

altogether?

The perspective from developmental psychology

An example from research on the cognitive development of college students the

American psychologist William Perry begins to provide us with some insights about

human responses to pluralism and uncertainty (Perry, 1998). Perry found students

had a number of epistemological positions (a term he preferred to stages, despite

the popularity of stage models in the United States) that are relevant to our

discussion. For the sake of convenience, Perry’s research can be summarized as

presenting three distinct positions (Salner, 1986).

The first of these positions is dualism. The student makes a clear distinction

between the self and the external world. Knowledge resides in the external world.

Knowledge is absolute truth, objectivity, and learning involves searching for the

appropriate authority and the right answer. Any differences in perspectives are

framed by a logic of either/or, and reduced to right and wrong, good and bad. The

student rejects ambiguity because it suggests that the proper authority has not been

found, and ambiguity and uncertainty are the result of incorrect knowledge.

The second position is multiplicity. Perry’s research shows that exposure to a

pluralistic world can break down absolute categories of right and wrong, as

students begin to see there are many different perspectives. In any given discipline,

and from many authorities and experts, students find conflicting positions and

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perspectives, and a lot of debates among experts, all of whom claim to be right. Any

number of theoretical perspectives from different disciplines frame topics in often

conflicting ways: Religion is the opium of the masses (Marx), a way to create social

cohesion (Durkheim), a psychological coping mechanism (Freud) the engine of

economics (Weber), a function of the human unconscious (Jung), a way to make

sense of the world (Berger). What does this mean? What is the “right” answer?

Experiences of different cultures and sub-cultures, with their often radically

different assumptions about the world, also break down the assumption that our

view of the world is the “objective” one and things cannot—or should not—be

otherwise (Montuori & Fahim, 2004). Rather than believing in a single, absolute

truth, the student in the position of multiplicity begins to believe that there are as

many truths as there are people. It seems the experts can’t agree, so what’s the point

of listening to their theories? They’re just ‘theories,’ and it’s clear anybody can

present a theory. The self now becomes the source and arbiter of knowledge, and in

fact there is a privileging of subjectivity. “You see it your way, I see it my way.” An

anti-authoritarian position often develops, as a reaction to the conformism of

dualism, with an explicit rejection of experts, authorities, and teachers (Baxter

Magolda, 1999).

Perry’s third position, the least articulated in his original study, is contextual

relativism. This position usually emerges from a gradual dissatisfaction with

multiplicity, from the need to participate more actively with values and direction

rather than the arguably narcissistic and opportunistic wanderings of the relativistic

position of multiplicity. If everybody is right—or nobody is wrong—what basis is

there to make any choices or commitments? What basis do I have for any view, even

my own? Multiplicity can easily become selfish, acquisitive individualism, where the

isolated self is the lowest common denominator. Whereas dualism saw the source of

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knowledge as external and objective, and multiplicity as internal and subjective,

contextual relativism reconciles the two in an ongoing process and appreciates the

importance of context in making choices. It looks for knowledge in the interaction

between self and world. In this sense, it is more like Morin’s musical metaphor of

construction, a ‘knowledge of knowledge’ in movement.

To follow up on the musical metaphor proposed by Morin, the dualist looks for the

correct musical score to play. There is only one correct score, and any deviation

from that score is an error. People performing a different score are simply wrong.

The score comes from the great composer, the law giver, whether a terrestrial or

celestial authority, viewed as the ultimate arbiter, and passed down through his

(because it rarely if ever is her) orchestral hierarchy, starting with the conductor.

We might say that multiplicity on the other hand involves the realization that there

are many composers, and that we ourselves can “compose,” so why play anybody

else’s score? The problem with multiplicity is that it tends to be isolating and

fragmenting. Multiplicity is mostly a rejection of a central authority, but still

operates within the Cartesian Anxiety of Either/Or. What should also be noted is

that, ironically, the fragmentation of multiplicity easily lends itself to a policy of

divide and rule from larger authorities which, while allowing for an illusion of

individual freedom (through consumption, or the prospect of future consumption)

in fact exercise increasing levels of control on social systems.

Contextual relativists are like skilled improvising musicians: they are aware of a

multiplicity of perspectives, and construct their own meaning and performance out

of their encounter with the history and contexts of their traditions, as well as with

the musicians and audiences they engage in the present (Montuori, 2003). Rather

than seek the certainty of a fixed score, or reject the possibility of anything but

entirely subjective performance, playing only for themselves, their ability to play in

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the moment emerges out of a network of interactions and knowledge across space

and time, and out of self-reflection and an understanding of their own participation

in the word.

In the years since Perry’s work was published, a line of research has emerged

exploring these epistemological positions, sometimes interpreting them as stages

(Love & Guthrie, 1999). The work of Baxter-Magolda, Commons, Kegan, and Gidley

in particular has moved towards a more complex an nuanced articulation of this

third position, framing contextual relativism as “post-formal” thought (Baxter

Magolda, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2008; Commons & Ross, 2008a, 2008b; Gidley, 2007,

2009, 2010; Kegan, 1982, 1998; King & Baxter Magolda, 2005).

For Kegan (2003), the subject/object relationship is central in the development of

human thought. His framework includes what he class five “orders of

consciousness.” Most relevant to us are order three, four, and five, since the first two

are childhood stages. 3rd order consciousness, or the “socialized mind,” involves

absorbing the values of our society and our community, and is similar to Perry’s

“dualism,” with a focus on external, “objective” knowledge. 4th order consciousness,

the “self-authoring mind,” involves forging one’s own identity and ideology, shifting

to an internal, subjective source for knowledge. In this respect, it is similar to Perry’s

multiplicity. 5th order consciousness, or the “self-transforming mind,” goes beyond

the subject/object split, and sees beyond one’s own fixed position to engage in a

constant evolutionary dialogue between inner and outer.

As Kegan (2003, p. 151) states:

When you get to the edge of the fourth order, you start to see that all the ways that
you had of making meaning or making sense out of experience are, each in their own
way, partial. They’re leaving certain things out. When people who have long had
self-authoring consciousness come to the limits of self-authoring, they recognize the
partiality of even their own internal system, even though like any good system, it
does have the capacity to handle the “data,” or make systematic, rational sense of

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our experience. In the Western world, we often call that “objectivity.” But just
because you can handle everything, put it all together in some coherent system,
obviously doesn’t make it a truthful apprehension—or truly objective. And this
realization is what promotes the transformation from the fourth to the fifth order of
consciousness, from the self-authoring self to what we call the self-transforming self.
So, you start to build a way of constructing the world that is much more friendly to
contradiction, to oppositeness, to being able to hold on to multiple systems of
thinking. You begin to see that the life project is not about continuing to defend one
formation of the self but about the ability to have the self literally be transformative.
This means that the self is more about movement through different forms of
consciousness than about defending and identifying with any one form.

One of the most important points Kegan makes is that 5th order consciousness

involves the awareness that any view, including our own view, is only partial, and

that there is inherent in our knowledge a great deal of ambiguity and uncertainty.

What makes 5th order consciousness so interesting is that it seems to thrive on not-

knowing. Rather than attempt to hide her or his own ignorance, or dismiss other

perspectives as wrong by definition, the person at this level is continuously self-

transforming because s/he is open to the unknown, and finds in it an opportunity to

learn and grow.

The self-transformative capacity characteristic of 5th order consciousness, is a

capacity to be what Morin would call a self-eco-re-organizing system (Morin, 1994).

It involves mobilizing one’s creativity in a very fundamental sense. Gilligan and

Murphy (Gilligan & Murphy, 1979) find that it involves an evolution from a closed-

system self-sufficiency to a “more open and dialectical process involving

contextualization and an openness to re-evaluation” (p.7). These three

characteristics, namely dialectical thinking, contextualization, and re-evaluation,

play a key role in 5th order consciousness, and are strikingly close to the key

dimensions of Morin’s complex thought (Morin, 1994, 2008a, 2008b), where

knowing and thinking are not about reaching an absolutely certain truth, but about

a dialogue with uncertainty.

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An expanded view of creativity

(T)he most important ingredients for coping with postnormal times, (…) I would
argue, are imagination and creativity. Why? Because we have no other way of
dealing with complexity, contradictions and chaos. Imagination is the main tool,
indeed I would suggest the only tool, which takes us from simple reasoned analysis
to higher synthesis. While imagination is intangible, it creates and shapes our
reality; while a mental tool, it affects our behaviour and expectations. We will have
to imagine our way out of the postnormal times. The kind of futures we imagine
beyond postnormal times would depend on the quality of our imagination. Given
that our imagination is embedded and limited to our own culture, we will have to
unleash a broad spectrum of imaginations from the rich diversity of human cultures
and multiple ways of imagining alternatives to conventional, orthodox ways of being
and doing. (Sardar, p.443)

We have seen neuroscientists make a strong case for the human need for certainty.

We have even seen that a challenge to pre-existing schemas, to things we believed to

be certain, can be perceived as a threat to our very existence. Uncertainty in that

light seems extremely problematic—something to be avoided at all costs.

Particularly disturbing—although not surprising--is Burton’s argument that human

beings want to believe they’re right, even when they’re not right.

While these findings might leave us disheartened, it is important to note that there

are decades of research on a phenomenon that involves people who seem to thrive

on uncertainty, ambiguity, and disorder. These are the people who are socially

identified as “creative.” They seem to buck the trend in a rather remarkable way

(Barron, 1968, 1969, 1995).

Uncertainty is not, in other words, always viewed as a threat: for certain kinds of

individuals, uncertainty, ambiguity, and disorder are opportunities for creation

(Barron, 1958, 1963). Creative individuals have been shown to have characteristics

such as Openness to Experience (Kaufman, 2013; McCrae & Sutin, 2009),

Independence of Judgment rather than Conformity (Dacey & Lennon, 1998), as well

as three more characteristics particularly relevant to our exploration of uncertainty.

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They are Tolerance of Ambiguity, Complexity of Outlook, and Androgyny (Barron,

1990, 1995; Dacey & Lennon, 1998; Norlander, Erixon, & Archer, 2000; Piirto,

2004). The first two indicate an openness to, and even preference for, ambiguous,

complex phenomena over dichotomous, black and white thinking and simplicity,

understood as over-simplification ad premature closure. The third is related

because it involves an expansion of possible behaviors and feelings, beyond

traditional gender stereotypes, rather than a rigid role-based disjunction between

masculine and feminine characteristics.

Barron (1968) and others have shown that

Those personality correlates generally ascribed to one sex or the other are much
less pronounced in creative people. Creative women have fewer "feminine" traits
and more "masculine" interests than noncreative control groups. Sex-specific
interests and traits that are descriptive of men and women in general seem to break
down when we examine creative people (1972, 33).

Barron’s concept of Ego-strength in many ways summarizes further characteristics

of creative persons to the extent that they are self-confident, tolerant, and non-

authoritarian, possessed of a more resilient, fluid ego, rather than one that is hard

and brittle. Of particular relevance to us is that the psychology of the creative

person is a mirror image of the psychology of the authoritarian person (Montuori,

2005b). The authoritarian person is submissive, very sensitive to situational

pressures, hierarchical, preferring simple, black/white, either/or thinker, prone to

scapegoating, stereotyping, and aggression. Recent research has confirmed the role

of fear as a fundamental factor in authoritarian persons, as well as their focus on

obedience and norm-maintaining: Authoritarians believe the world to be

fundamentally dangerous, and that human beings are not to be trusted

(Hetherington & Weiler, 2009; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003; Mooney,

2012; Sanford, 1973; Stenner, 2005; Stone, Lederer, & Christie, 1993).

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Authoritarianism, in both its psychological and sociological manifestations, is

associated with rigid and stereotyped gender roles. It is not surprising to note that

in all fundamentalist, authoritarian regimes, there is a strong separation of gender

roles, and un-ambiguous, rigid differentiation of male and female roles and

characteristics (Eisler, 1987, 1995, 2007; Eisler & Miller, 2004; Eisler & Montuori,

2001, 2007). A different manifestation of a grand either/or.

Authoritarianism is positively correlated with dogmatism and intolerance of

ambiguity, need for order and closure, fear of threat and loss, and death anxiety,

while negatively correlated with uncertainty tolerance, integrative complexity, and

openness to experience (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1982;

Hetherington & Weiler, 2009; Jost et al., 2003; Sanford, 1973; Stenner, 2005; Stone

et al., 1993). The authoritarian mentality is an extreme example of simplification

through reduction and disjunction, in search of a kind of certainty that is deeply

problematic precisely because by its very nature it cannot be questioned. This

certainty is not merely conceptual, it is profoundly tied to the need to feel one is

right. And this anxiety-driven feeling of being right is inextricably tied to the need to

control the world and those in it, and to be part of clear order.

This rich vein of research, dating back to Adorno et al.’s classic Authoritarian

Personality from 1950 is controversially being revived in political psychology as the

study of political conservatism (Hetherington & Weiler, 2009; Jost et al., 2003;

Mooney, 2012; Stenner, 2005; Stone et al., 1993). It has historically not been

explicitly connected to creativity research, and yet there is much to be learned from

the comparison of the authoritarian person and the creative person, as I have

suggested elsewhere (Montuori, 2005b). Before I discuss these implications, a brief

digression to address not what we can learn but how to interpret these findings

from psychological research.

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The original research cited here, both on authoritarianism and creativity, was

framed as being “trait-based, ” describing the characteristics of “authoritarians” and

“creatives.” The problem was that these traits were viewed as fixed, and this led to a

rather over-simplified, fixed view. The view I present here is that authoritarianism

or creativity may be more dominant in some persons (there is some suggestion that

there may be a considerable genetic component to them (Mooney, 2012), as well as

a cultural one with certain cultures having high “uncertainty avoidance” (Hofstede,

2001)) but that all persons can approach the world in with an “authoritarian” as

well as a “creative” mentality. Even the most creative person may under certain

circumstances interpret a situation and react in an authoritarian way, with black

and white solutions, rigid categories, and so on, and vice versa. The authoritarian

and the creative mentalities are, therefore, part of a continuum of human

possibilities, which, most importantly, can be influenced by immediate context,

education and socialization. Shocks and climates of fear can lead to authoritarian

mentalities, and climates that are open to creativity can lead to the flourishing of

creative mentalities (Montuori, 2011b).

Creativity has historically been associated with unusual individuals of genius in the

arts and sciences. At the beginning of the 21st century this view is beginning to

change. I have called the emerging view, “everyday, everyone, everywhere”

creativity (Montuori, 2011a; Montuori & Donnelly, 2013). In a postnormal,

pluralistic, changing, liquid, uncertain society, the ability to create alternatives and

live with complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty demands such a distributed,

networked, grass-roots, everyday creativity to respond to the demands of

articulating, developing, and embodying new ways of being, relating, knowing, and

doing (Montuori, 2010).

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The emerging view might be called, drawing on Morin, “complex creativity.” If the

old view was reductive, focusing on the creative individual as a closed system at the

expense of context and history and relations, and with a fixed nature—either

creative or not—in the new view the creative process is contextual and occurs in a

network of relationships and interactions: it does not eliminate the individual but

rather takes an open system view which acknowledges the complexity of the

creative process and sees creativity as a capacity that can be cultivated (Glaveanu,

2010; Glăveanu, 2011a, 2011b, 2013, 2014; Montuori, 2011b, 2011c; Montuori &

Purser, 1995, 1996).

Creativity, Complexity and Collaboration

We have seen how uncertainty has become a central feature of these postnormal

times, this transitional period where one world is ending but a new one is yet to

emerge. The response to this transitional time has led to what Bernstein has called a

“clash of mentalities.” I have attempted to flesh out these two mentalities by

drawing on psychological research, showing some of the mechanisms that lead us to

seek certainty above all, and all too often morph into a closed mentality of

authoritarianism and fundamentalism. I have also pointed to post-formal thought

and the role of creativity in a more open and complex mentality.

Bernstein’s two mentalities can be framed as authoritarian and creative, the former

seeking to eliminate uncertainty, and the second acknowledging it as an opportunity

for creativity. The former stresses control, simplicity, black and white, either/or

thinking, and rigid categories, the latter allows for emergence, complexity,

paradoxical or dialogical thinking, and more fluid categories. In the authoritarian

mentality, we need the feeling of absolute (God-given) certainty in order to act. In

the creative mentality (in line with Perry’s contextual relativism, post-formal

thought, and most notably Morin’s complex thought) we see the ability to act while

17
recognizing what Bernstein calls the fallibility of our choices. But this does not mean

lack the courage of our convictions. Rather it means remaining open to ongoing self-

reflection, to what Morin (Morin, 2004a) called “auto-critique,” a process whereby

we do not become the convicts, the prisoners, of our own beliefs at all costs, rigidly

clinging to the feeling of certainty. In the creative mentality we are challenged to

both create, in the sense of acknowledging the creativity of our own process of

world-making and decision-making, and also taking responsibility for it, and being

able to reflect on it, all the while knowing that we act. Indeed, from the perspective

of a complex creative mentality we cannot not act, in the same way that Gregory

Bateson argued we cannot not communicate (Bateson, 2002). We are always already

in the world, we are not bystanders to it. Paradoxically, if we do not act, we are still

acting: if we do not take action to pay a bill, the non-action is our action. We are also

always already creating: the question is not if we are creating, but what are we

creating and are we taking responsibility for our creativity?

Precisely because of the often conflictual pluralism and uncertainty of today’s world,

we need complex thought, as Morin has argued, a thought that contextualizes and

connects and is thus, among other things, better able to account for the increasingly

networked and interconnected nature of our existence. We also need to go beyond

what linguist Deborah Tannen has called “argument culture,” with its inevitable

polarization. We need the ability to engage in complex, creative dialogue. In other

words, the ability to dialogue with others in ways that respect and reflect

complexity and are generative, leading to the creation of new and more

encompassing perspectives (Tannen, 1999). Indeed, Arthur Koestler held that

creativity involves bisociation, bringing together two or more apparently

incompatible frames of thought (Koestler, 1990).

18
The authoritarian mentality involves a contraction—both socially and

psychologically—to the defense of the ego and the group one identifies with, with

exclusion of, and in opposition to, another group or other groups. A complex,

creative mentality seeks to expand both our view of the self and of our context to a

larger planetary culture, a “community of destiny” (Morin & Kern, 1999), in an effort

to find creative alternatives to failing systems and processes.

In order to address these postnormal times, this transitional period between two

worlds, we have to first of all understand the characteristics of the world we are

leaving behind. We can also point to desired directions for the future, for the new

world: but there are multiple challenges here. All too often the way we think about

the future is grounded in the problematic thinking of the old world: it is reductive

and disjunctive. It is not easy to embody the future, as it were, with the

characteristics and ways of thinking of the future: in order to begin to do so, I

suggest we need to minimally develop creative, complex, and collaborative

competencies (Montuori, 1989). In an uncertain world, we can learn from Heinz Von

Foerster, who stated that the problem was not truth but trust, because we have to

make decisions on questions that are in principle undecidable (Von Foerster, 1990).

These types of problems must be confronted with a complex creative mentality, one

that is generative not only in the sense of increasing the number of choices, as Von

Foerster urged, but also by creating a larger context where human beings learn how

to dialogue and support each other in this process together.

Bernstein (Bernstein, 2005) writes that

Fallibilism, in its robust sense, is not a rarified epistemological doctrine. It consists of a

set of virtues – a set of practices – that need to be carefully nurtured in critical
communities. A fallibilistic orientation requires a genuine willingness to test one’s ideas
in public, and listen carefully to those who criticize them. It requires the imagination to
formulate new hypotheses and conjectures and to subject them to rigorous public testing
and critique by the community of inquirers. Fallibilism requires a high tolerance for

19
uncertainty, and the courage to revise, modify, and abandon our most cherished beliefs
when they have been refuted (p. 29).

Our present educational systems and socialization processes do not cultivate the

(fallibilistic) capacities of creative complexity. Educational reform is clearly

essential, as Morin and others have argued (Montuori, 2012; Morin, 2001; Naranjo,

2010). More broadly, I believe there is a need to develop personal and social

transformative practices1. These practices go beyond learning that is exclusively

cognitive, and focus on transformation of the knower. We have a substantial

treasure trove of global “wisdom” traditions with practices that address the

expansion of a full spectrum of human capacities to counteract the fearful

contraction of the authoritarian mentality with wisdom and compassion (Macy &

Johnstone, 2012; Walsh, 1999). Even in the world of management education such

concepts as the need to cultivate “emotional intelligence” are now becoming

accepted (Goleman, 2006). These practices involve ongoing, lifelong cultivation of a

new set of individual and collective capacities, new ways of knowing, relating, being,

and doing that embody and generate alternatives to our present, clearly obsolete

ways, and create the spaces of generative trust where their formulation and

enactment become possible (Montuori, 2010; Montuori & Conti, 1993).

Uncertainty is not merely a scientific or cognitive phenomenon. It strikes at the

heart of our being, and our existence on the planet. Uncertainty creates anxiety and

fear, as well as a sense of possibility and creation. As such it requires a radical

reframing of who we are, how we know, and how we can act in this world of

uncertainty. It requires a complex reframing of traditional dualism such as

order/disorder, certainty/uncertainty, reason/emotion, and an educational process

that takes into account our full humanity, including the relational and affective

dimensions.

1 I am indebted to my colleague Gabrielle Donnelly for her articulation of the concept of practice in
the context of the present planetary crisis.

20


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