re Moreno's greatness

Mon Apr 13 16:50:11 CDT 2009

Dear Ivo and all,

Okay, as I said, I think he’s great and all that, so how you can think I’m implying something you call "pejorative" is interesting. 

Look, let’s see if we can agree on anything. What do you think of the following points? 

2. Moreno believed in creativity and not relying on the cultural conserve.

A. The cultural conserve is anything that has been created.

B. Moreno’s writings are a cultural conserve. 

C. Moreno never suggested that his writings should never be questioned, revised, or expanded on. 

D. One can respect a cultural conserve and still dare to critique some element? For example, is it okay to suggest that Moreno didn’t know about the internet, so he didn’t discuss its implications when it came to sociometry? 

How are we doing?

3. To agree with Moreno on 99.9% of what he wrote and think it is all wonderful is not a bad thing. 

A. What percentage of agreeing with Moreno is necessary before one is labeled as too critical? 98% 88% 54% what?

So, my response beyond that: 

I am caught up in multiple projects and cannot at this point describe misleading or mistaken points—one is late in WSS where he suggests that anyone over 30 or older kill themselves in order to make room for babies! – 

But I invite others to wonder if there are any points that seem to be misleading in Moreno’s stuff. Certainly there are lots of areas which are confusing and ambiguous. Anyway, the point is that his writings should not be treated as sacred scripture, but rather you and others should feel free to build on them, revise them, bring in stuff from other fields. Jung said he never wanted to have followers; he just made his observations and wanted others to build on these in whatever way the unfolding of any field goes. The spirit of creativity is incompatible with the spirit of orthodoxy. 

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Ivo Banaco 
  To: Adam Blatner 
  Cc: grouptalk Listserv 
  Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 9:49 AM
  Subject: Re: response to Ivo re Moreno's greatness

  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 
      To: grouptalk Listserv 
      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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