response to Ivo re Moreno's greatness

[Ivo Banaco]

Can you be more specific then. With all your experience can you make a list
of say 5 main misleading Moreno's ideas. I really want to know.
AB - "If that is seen as insufficiently reverent, sigh, well, too bad" - if
with this you are trying to say that my e-mail shows that you are wrong, as
I'm not the reverent type of person, with due respect.

Best,
Ivo


On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Adam Blatner <ablatner at verizon.net> wrote:

>  Ivo, I'm sorry my point seemed pejorative. The recognition of
> a statistical distribution of talents, skills, development of roles, etc. is
> meant to suggest a balanced perspective. For example, in my efforts to
> advocate for a balanced perspective, I may have some positive aspects, such
> as articulateness, and I may have some negative aspects, so that my tone
> seems to annoy some folks. I try to correct this, but it isn't easy.
>
>     Moreno was brilliant in many ways, and because his contributions are so
> generative of other potentialities, I consider him great. Yet the problem is
> also to be capable of reviewing his writing and career more objectively, and
> to realize in what way his style of interpersonal and organizational
> behavior not only interfered with the acceptance of his ideas, but also to
> consider the possibility that some of his thousands of ideas might be
> incomplete, misleading, or flat wrong. Idealization is the mental short-cut
> that overgeneralizes on virtues. Example: If my daddy is nice to me and buys
> me a birthday present, he must be the greatest, so I feel betrayed when,
> say, he loses his job. Is he not the greatest?
>
>         The problem is not that of avoiding throwing out the baby with the
> bathwater; it's avoiding making any discriminations and throwing out neither
> baby nor bathwater.    The spirit of creativity means that we do not rely
> (uncritically) on the cultural conserve. I believe in building on and
> occasionally revising Moreno's work, rather than making it a sacred text
> that must be followed blindly.
>      If that is seen as insufficiently reverent, sigh, well, too bad.    --
> warmly, adam
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Ivo Banaco <ibanaco at gmail.com>
> *To:* grouptalk Listserv <list at grouptalkweb.org>
> *Sent:* Monday, April 13, 2009 6:34 AM
> *Subject:* On Blatner's account of feet of clay
>
> In one of the thoughts that Adam Blatner share with us, here in Grouptalk
> he said (hope not taking this out of the context, I think I'm not):
>
> "what if our leaders have this same (really quite normal) distribution of
> role skills. What do we do when we find our leader, our pioneer, our elder,
> our ideal, has faults? Do we see Moreno, for example, as having feet of
> clay? That metaphor implies the entire edifice of his good ideas is based on
> his weaknesses, and as they are exposed, so falls the edifice. Or what if we
> grant (using a different metaphor) that many if not most heroes were heroic
> or genius or really pretty good in some ways and in other ways may exhibit
> character flaws, inconsistencies, what we see now as hypocrisy (How could
> Thomas Jefferson have kept slaves?!), etc.?"
>
> I felt this point uncomfortable to me so I waited a while to see what was
> this feeling all about. This is what I found and wanted to share with you
> all.
>
> I do think that JL Moreno and all genius for that matter have "feet of
> clay" in some particular sense. What I’ m not sure is that my sense is the
> same than Blatner’s used here, which I found particularly pejorative. I'll
> explain:
>
> It seems to me clear that Moreno built all his career as an antithesis (in
> Hegel and Fitche sense) of the establishment of the epoch. And why?
> Difficulty to adaptation? Certainly. But is that all? That is why I felt
> uncomfortable about words like feet of clay, flaws, inconsistencies,
> weaknesses. It brings pejorative sense of the struggle of the human being to
> grow. And Growth is a main issue for human beings and, by far, the less well
> understand issue for all of us. Despite all the brilliant theories,
> particularly since Darwin, we simply don't know exactly how and why do we
> develop as human beings, as culture and as society. Our own vulnerabilities
> could be a major strength if we used them to grow, enhancing the creative
> forces and reducing possible destructive forces in to play.
>
> In some accounts of evolutionary theories it is said that Evolution itself
> only occurs if necessary. For instance, the reptiles are so well adapted to
> their environment that there is no significant push to evolve further. When
> we think in this continuum between species, having human beings as the most
> evolved specie in some consciousness taxonomy (it’s important to be aware of
> the scale that we are measuring evolution), we can make speculations about
> how far away we and our environment are far from some kind of adaptation
> like the one showed by other animals.
>
> OK, I am missing my point here. What I’m saying is that, in my opinion,
> it’s beside the point to realize that genius have weaknesses. We don’t want
> to throw our baby with the bathwater. What we must know and be conscious of
> is the fact that there are no such thing as perfection and the brighter the
> light the greater the shadow.
>
> All the best,
>
> Ivo
>
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