The Cultural Commons Lies Hidden in Plain Sight

[marmar]

from OnTheCommons.org:


The Cultural Commons Lies Hidden in Plain Sight
How we can be midwives to a huge shift in creativity, connection and citizenship

By Arlene Goldbard


Let’s call it the cultural commons: public space for meaning and beauty that enables us to learn who we are, envision a livable future, and work together to shape it. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift that is bringing our cultural commons to the center of our awareness: art and culture are being given their true value as the crucible wherein civil society is forged. The capacities that can be best learned through art—social imagination, empathy, improvisation, awareness of cultural citizenship, connectivity, and creativity—are being used to transform our collective story to one of possibility. Consider a single example: since the advent of YouTube, we have become a nation of filmmakers, weaving music, image, and narrative to express our concerns, poke fun at false idols, foreshadow an emergent world more loving and just than the old paradigm. Have we taken in what this really means?

Thomas Kuhn coined the phrase “paradigm shift” to describe the change in scientific consensus that occurs when an accepted idea of the world can no longer account for our experience of it. The moment we looked at the heavens through a telescope, it began to be hard to pretend that the sun and the rest of the universe revolved around Earth. He compared the shift between paradigms to toggling between the two images that form an optical illusion: you probably know that one where a duck’s bill transforms into a rabbit’s ears if you just stare at the image from the right perspective. In a paradigm shift, it isn’t that the world changes in an instant. It’s that suddenly, our perception of the exact same information takes on a new shape. Suddenly, we can see the emergent reality that has been hiding in plain sight.

I’ve been traveling around the U.S. speaking and offering workshops based on my two new books, The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future and The Wave. Often, I encounter people who are still stuck in believing the old paradigm’s demoralizing orthodoxies. Undergraduates ask me how to keep from getting cynical and demoralized, and my first question is how much mainstream news media they consume each day. Many people have ceded real estate in their minds to the old order’s assertions of its rightness and permanence, leaving them afraid to imagine new possibilities—let alone get their hopes up. Some part of them still longs to change the world, but their idea of success has been reduced to losing a little less than anticipated. Sometimes this self-disempowering way of seeing has become so familiar and natural-seeming, people mistake being demoralized for being “realistic”: the propaganda that tells them to see the duck gets lodged in their minds, and they just can’t bring the rabbit into focus.

But now more than ever we need to see straight through the façade of so-called reality into a new universe of possibilities that we have the power to shape. This means looking at the world through a different kind of telescope, one equipped with what I call a cultural lens. It shows us that the paradigm shift is already well underway. As with an optical illusion, the challenge is just to bring the new picture into focus. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/magazine/cultural-commons-lies-hidden-plain-sight#sthash.559ZdGqC.dpuf

[ananda]

1. One cultural common myth that has turned into a common meme is ..

.. the belief that mental health diagnostics and medication are "scientific."
They're not.

[xchrom]

2. du rec.

[El_Johns]

3. We’ve all seen how our individual lives are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves.

Two individuals facing remarkably similar circumstances craft radically different narratives, and those narratives color their futures. If I lose my job, do I see it as a personal punishment that shames me, exposing my failure? Or do I see it as a common story, affected by larger forces—say, the export of hundreds of thousands of jobs a year—and therefore a personal spur to collective action? Either way, losing my job sucks, but one story sends me into despair, the other into possibility.