EP 62: 2022 Year-End Questions

2022 Year-End Questions

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Which, of course, translates as “welcome to the funny house” where new and old and now, and then, and with Jan whenever are well obsolete and the mysterious Mary go of life. As we know, it just keeps on going round and round and up and down in the quantum. Universe. Hmm.

That. Given that the calendar is whispering that the year's end is now, we thought it might be a good time to respond to some of the questions that have come our way from our listeners during the course of the year.

So after pouring through all, we've come up with four subjects that well just seem to jump out. They have to do with creative partnerships. teaching the arts online, something called the Tyranny of Comfort and what Neuroscience can tell us about Arts and Change.

This is Change the Story, Change the World. My name is Bill Cleveland.

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[00:01:44] BC: Okay, well, this morning when I woke up pondering this, strangely enough, baseball popped into my mind's eye. So, in baseball and in life, I'm a firm believer in digging deep, good or bad.

When I keep experiencing the same thing over and over, I wanna know, “Okay, what's behind it?” When I'm up at the plate, it's easy for me to get it that I'm, you know, striking out all the time. What I really wanna know is why, if I can better understand what is going on at the plate, and there are going to be more opportunities for me to successfully hit that stupid ball. Is there a particular pitch that is fooling me? Am I constantly being duped by the change up that I think is gonna be a fastball?

Am I afraid of the fastball that comes inside and nearly hits me? Answering these questions is important for a number of reason. . If I know I'm vulnerable to certain pitches, I can better prepare and you know, possibly improve my chances.

If I can recognize what the pitcher is doing with particular pitches or at certain points in the game, then it's less likely that I will be fooled. In short, answering these questions could not only help me level the playing field. It could actually change the nature of the game for me.

When we first started bringing artists into the California prison system, we struck out a lot. Many of our projects just ended up failing because of what appeared to be an utter lack of cooperation. I assumed that the reason we couldn't hit the ball was because the game was rigged, translation.

“Nobody in the prison system wanted us there, and they're all against us.” Most of my associates who had little and no experience with the prison system agreed. They said, “Yeah. The prison system is the enforcing the arm of the inherently repressive American criminal justice system They just do not want, prisoners to have access to helpful, hopeful, healing activities. It stands to reason they will do everything in their power just to keep us from succeeding.”

Maybe we were crazy, but despite all the roadblocks we kept on pushing. An important aspect of our push was to question our own assumptions about why things were not working. Thankfully, we hung in there long enough to learn that what we first perceived as a well-constructed lockstep brick wall opposition was actually a complex and often contradictory community of human beings living and working in an extremely toxic and dangerous environment. Discovering this complexity dramatically transformed both the playing field and the game that we thought we were playing.

The most important thing we discovered was the layered and diverse ecosystem of people, motivations, and conditions we are trying to operate in. Here are a few of them:

– First, we actually knew very little about the community we were working in.

– Thus, we were so scared and intimidated by prisons that we saw everybody we encountered through the same fearful lens.

– And as a result, our assumptions about prisons and the people who lived and worked there distorted our vision and colored our behavior, which at times came across as defensive and disrespectful.

– And because of this, we were unclear and incomplete in our communication about what we were trying to do and what we needed.

– And because we were new, and inexperienced, both the prisoners and staff regarded us as untrustworthy.

– And because we were new and inexperienced, we really did need some intense supervision.

– And this intense supervision increased stress on staff who were extremely overworked and very grumpy.

– Despite this, some correctional officers were extremely supportive of the program for prisoners and some administrators loved us.

– Despite this, some prisoners were enthusiastic participants,

– and some prisoners wanted to use the program to make weapons and deal drugs.

– And some administrators hated the program.

– Some correctional officers made it very clear that they were categorically opposed to programs for prisoners,

– and some staff pretended to love the program, but undermined us.

– Some staff pretended to hate the program, but helped us

– some correctional officers.plainly incompetent.

– Some correctional officers actually wanted to participate in the program

– and some were burned out

– and some were willing to go the extra mile for us.

– And, most importantly, almost all of the people who lived and worked at the institutions, hated being there.

Once we began to understand the prison as a complex system of diverse impulses and intentions and motivations, we were able to navigate them more successfully --- actually extremely successfully. Were there roadblocks and opposition? Oh, most definitely. So, what's new? But our growing competency, increased trust among artists and staff and our incarcerated students and in turn. Increased trust and cooperation.

We also learned that in many ways, the prison system was actually way worse than we had originally and naively imagined. But characterizing these places and the people who ran the, and the people who lived in them as either saints or sinners, or bad or uncooperative, across the board was a gross oversimplification and a disservice to the incarcerated students and the correctional staff alike.

Bottom line: Inside, you can't see the joint for the fear. So, if you're a stranger in a foreign land, just be humble. Check your assumptions at the door, listen and learn.

Question Number Two:

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[00:08:06] BC: Well, as we all know, particularly lately, there've been many attempts to teach and transmit creative learning online and through distance networks. now, I think in circumstances where you have no choice, such as we experienced during the pandemic in schools all across the country and more personally, uh, with the William James Association Prison Arts Program, correspondence courses and online classes are much better than nothing. But there's a reason why teaching artists overwhelmingly agree that face-to-face, person to person, learning, feedback, and practice is to effective arts.

Now why? Why is that the case? Well, in my opinion, this is because much of the power of creative learning is relationship driven. Successful creative exploration involves risk taking and risky learning demands a safe and trusting environment. Safety and trust in the cynical world that we live in requires a significant amount of sustained and regular contact in formal and informal modes. Learning in the arts is, well, for some people, maybe a lot of people is inherently risky. It's kind of scary. Those who teach the arts know this. This is why a lot of arts learning. Kind of physical.

This is as true in the nonphysical genres like writing or design as it is in theater, dance, or music. This is not just about technique. This is how you learn to trust your senses. And all the arts are multi-sensory, and this is very difficult to do from a distance. Uh, the analogy I draw is with basketball, you cannot learn to play basketball on your own or in front of a computer screen. I think this is as true with the arts as it is with basketball.

Now, there are many people out there making lots of money, peddling creativity as a quick fix, freeze-dried commodity. But I believe the power of the creative process can be available and can't be useful to anyone or any learning environment that makes a significant commitment of time and resources to its exploration and cultivation, but to make the power of this resource understandable and useful, it needs to be respected for its standards of practice, one of which is that arts learning is whole person learning. It's embodied, and to be most effective, it takes real-time, longterm human to human sharing, and exchange, and support, and a lot of love.

Question Three:

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[00:10:57] BC: Certainly. Let's begin with some generic definitions.

Tyranny:

1. Cruel and oppressive rule.

2. Cruel, unreasonable, or arbitrary use of power or control.

Comfort:

1. A state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint.

2. Two, the easing or alleviation of a person's feelings of grief or distress.

So how can these two extremely different human states. Tyranny and comfort. Be used to characterize the other. Which gives rise to another question to ponder. When does perceived good become dangerous? Well, maybe when you've reached the point where the pursuit of the good destroys the things that made it possible.

My use of the term tyranny of comfort describes a situation that I believe we're actually in, a situation in which the obsessive pursuit of human comfort becomes a tyranny for the earth and its inhabitants. I believe this state is much more prevalent than most people recognize, and that it is incumbent upon us as a society to identify its symptoms as a first step towards addressing its causes.

So, Tyranny of comfort. I'll take a stab here but bear with me. This is a long list of symptoms.

We know the tyranny of comfort is happening when sustaining the comfort of one portion of the community. Oppresses.

Comfort Tyrannizes when ignorance becomes an accepted refuge from the discomfort of knowing the truth.

And when those who are comfortable wield more power than those who are not. And that power is used to protect that comfort by denying opportunities to others.

Comfort tyrannizes when what people desires become synonymous with what people think they need.

We know comfort is tyrannical when giving people what they want, what they desire becomes a value system and an accepted rationale for virtuous decision making.

We know comfort is a tyranny when community stamina, resilience, flexibility and imagination atrophy from lack of collective effort and struggle for common purpose.

We recognize the tyranny of comfort when pleasure is prescribed as a palliative for pain, when leaders advance by promising alone.

When accountability becomes a buzzword for pretending to care,

and when comfort itself becomes a definition of success.

We're tyrannized by comfort when virtues values, beliefs and comforts become indistinguishable.

When one group finds comfort in another's anguish and pain.

When the discomfort inherent to learning hard lessons is seen as harmful.

And when the rat pleasures itself to death.

So, you may be asking, what does this growing aversion to the discomfort of hard work and struggle that I'm describing have to do with arts-based change work. Well, I would say first that the tyranny of comfort is the antithesis of change work. This is because the all-consuming comfort state that I'm describing here is a kind of soothing stasis addiction.

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So that's number one. Number two is that artmaking, you know, starting from scratch with raw materials to make something new it's often exploratory and experimental. And given the inherently high failure rate, considered by some to be, Ooh, kind of risky. In fact, one could say that failure is the mother's milk of the creative process. And that the materialization of the creative process we call artmaking is an intentionally structured practice designed to precipitate learn from and build on those failures. Hmm, build on them in the hopes of making something new and interesting and maybe even groundbreaking.

How cool, and how different could that be from the desperate search for the easiest, most comfortable way to do just about everything that seems to be the default.

So different, that I would go so far as to say that art making has some of the antibodies we need to fight the tyranny of comfort. In all seriousness. I do think that if the creative process becomes a regular part of one's life, if the lessons available on the roller coaster of creative success and failure become an everyday asset for you and your community, I think we're way less likely to be infected by this imagination, draining affliction. So. Rock on.

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[00:16:35] You often reference neuroscience to advance the idea that art making can make a difference for people and communities. Could you elaborate why you think this is so?

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This will be my longest answer. And let me begin by saying that as an artist and a teller of stories about artists and their work in communities, I sometimes describe myself as being in the imagination business. I've come to believe that the imagination is the most powerful aspect of what it is to be human. Our ability to conjure new ideas, complex narratives, even entire worlds outside the constraints of time and. both distinguishes humans as a species and has been absolutely essential to our survival.

Now, there are many who say that the fate of the world depends on what we humans do next. Given our destructive capacity, I'm certainly inclined to agree, surely with regard to the future of the human. If not the globe, there's also a consensus that we are literally digging ourselves into a hole ecologically and socially, and I'm certainly not alone in thinking that the digging out part will require a revolution of thought and deed. In essen

To do this, I believe we'll need to harness the power of the imagination in new ways with new urgency and much greater focus now. Over the past 40 years as an artist, educator and researcher, I've been exploring how the power of imagination and story helps us make collective sense and meaning of our world.

I believe that imagination and story are our most dangerously neglected natural resources. So, if we're to change the meta narratives that provoke humans to destroy each other and the planet, we're gonna need to better understand how they came to be and how they work for both good and ill .

[: 00:18:57

And by mind-changing, I don't mean switching brand loyalty or voting patterns. I mean that through their work they are literally helping to rewire brains. I've come to believe this because another of the bright sparks I've encountered are new discoveries about what is going on in the human brain and how it influences what we think and believe and how we behave.

So. In answer to your question, here's some of what I've dug up, with the caveat of course, that this is not my area of expertise, so I'm only reporting on what I've found that are most reflected in what I've experienced in my work.

So, let's begin with the brain and stories.

We are literally wired to make stories. We are predisposed to impose story constructs or social narratives on the world as we perceive it, as it comes to us. This is basic to our ongoing need to quickly identify the potential threats or benefits of all of our interactions with other human beings. These assessments are continually being undertaken by our brains as a survival strategy.

This capacity to recognize and use social narratives to make decisions appears very early in human development. So, in one experiment, one year old babies watched a play with two bears and a duck. One bear is helpful. The other bear hinders the duck's efforts to open a box. Afterwards, the babies get to choose which bear to play with.

Now remember here they're just one year old, but they overwhelmingly choose the helpful bear. Well, that seems like a duh, but that's a pretty powerful thing for a one-year-old brain to do.

Now let's segue to stories and theater and empathy.

We all know that people show emotion through their facial expressions when this occurs a brain function called facial muscle mirroring allows us to recognize and empathize with the feelings of others.Interestingly enough, those with micro muscle paralysis caused by Botox injections are less able to identify emotions accurately.

With this in mind, we can think of theater as an empathy exercise. An important aspect of acting is the ability to physically project a character's emotional state. Watching others in pain in real or theatrical situations stimulates the parts of the brain that reflect the emotional impact of the pain or pleasure response associated with a given situation, this amazing capacity we know as empathy to empathize with another person is to literally feel their pain.

When this is happening, your brain is running a simulation of what it would be like if you were in that situation. Our capacity for this is why stories like plays and movies and novels are so absorbing, so persuasive across human culture.

Whether the story is about people you know, total strangers, or made-up characters, you experience their agony and their ecstasy. You fluidly become them, live their lives, and stand in their vantage points. When you see another person suffer, you can try and tell yourself that it's their issue, not yours, but neurons deep in your brain, can't tell the difference.

But that's just a small part of the empathy story. the capacity for empathy has not evolved simply to facilitate human connections. At its core, empathy has evolved as a necessary social survival strategy for humans.

The ability to tap into the feelings and motivations of other humans helps us predict what other humans might do next. It helps us discern in a given moment whether that person is a friend or a foe, most importantly, whether they pose a threat. This capacity has played an essential role in our ability to navigate the complex social landscape that is unique to our species.

Next, I want to talk about patterns, specifically patterns and stories and art making

Humans love patterns. Our brains are particularly good at recognizing patterns that are important to our survival. It makes sense --- threat patterns, food related patterns, patterns that communicate safety, nurturing opportunities for procreation, kinship, empathy, and social bonding

Now, paying attention to these patterns is so very important that our endocrine system has evolved, a strong set of rewards and reinforcements to focus our attention on them to the exclusion of other potential distractions. These reinforcements are a potent mix of neurochemicals with names like oxytocin, dopamine, adrenaline, norepinephrine, and serotonin.

Great art, compelling art. Art that moves us succeeds because it concentrates and plays with the world's profusion of intersecting patterns. Art that is intriguing, entertaining, and captivating, art that teaches and transforms is art that reveals multiple layers of interrelated patterns in meaningful ways.

The best theater, the most successful plays involve intricate yet indelible patterns of character, plot, intention, and outcome that touches us in every way that are both familiar, and of course, surprising. As this is happening, some aspect of an ever-present set of existential human questions inevitably gets nudged.

Who am I? Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? And when this happens, when the work touches us in this way. Our endocrine drugstore also kicks into high gear, reinforcing our sense of fear or exhilaration or connection. When these kinds of experiences become more common, more focused, or intentional, when they start to inhabit us, when the stories you tell become infectious, stories like Rosa Park and David and Goliath, they have the potential to modify our neuro circuitry over time. Like I said, artists are in the mind-changing business.

Next up, empathy and imitation, which are both essential central to art making.

Now, earlier on we talked about empathy. Like I said, neuroscientists, think mirror neurons may be the mechanism that triggers a parallel pain response when we see pain in another. Beyond mere imitation. This means that we are hardwired to know and learn from the action and experiences of other humans. In essence, our bodies help us comprehend other bodies.

Now, performing artists rely heavily on the mind body loops we're talking about. If we are in a musical improvisation together or a collective building project or a hunt, my simulation system reads your body automatically and unconsciously helps me see here and feel where you're going, what you're up to. In real time, my behavior adapts to your behavior and vice versa. And this helps us corner to the animal or sync up our drumming or build a crescendo of a chorus or whatever.

Thinking with the body is intuitive, associational, collective problem solving. And it's why artists have been found to be so helpful in provoking new, useful ideas and strategies and cohesiveness for groups of people trying to make meaningful change together.

Now, all of these elements have to come together in the aspect of human behavior that is probably most responsible for our survival. That's the power of cooperation.

Humans certainly are not stealthy. We're not keen-eyed, we don't blend in very well. We most definitely are not very fast, but we do know how to plan and work together. Some think that our big brain and opposable thumbs gave us our evolutionary leg up, but we would've been a footnote in biological history if we have not evolved the power of cooperation. Actually, there would be no footnotes or even what we call history if our brain had not evolved to support and reward our ability to collaborate.

The field of social neuroscience studies the brain's relationship to human cooperation and connection as an evolved human survival trait. This is important because most of what we know and can do comes from others? Among social neuroscientists, there's a growing appreciation that artmaking and the development of language emerged in humans as a principle means of provoking this essential cooperation.

They are speculating that what artists do in the world on stages, in studios, in the streets, or around the proverbial ritual fire has, in essence, provided the heartbeat for the evolution and growth of the human community.

I'd like to finish with a bit about the power of creativity.

Evolution is essentially a creative process. It's a recurring cycle that provides for the accumulation of successful novelty, which after many, many iterations of random trial and error produces a more efficient wing, a longer neck, or a bigger brain. But these kinds of generate-test-regenerate cycles aren't just evolutionary. We see these same repeated patterns as people grow physically and learn and mature over their lifetimes, layer upon layer upon layer. If we look hard, we see it again, deeply embodied in our own human development.

From the third trimester on our brain's synaptic network begins a lifelong adaptive wiring and rewiring project in response to the demands of a continually changing world. Every day our immune systems are encountering unique and evolving combinations of pathogens to which they respond by generating, testing, applying, and retesting new antibody variations.

These things are going on twenty-four seven. Evolutionary biologists call sub-processes like these Darwin Machines. Now, these kinds of repeating patterns should be very familiar to artists. Generate, test, modify, adapt, adopt, regenerate, repeat. --- that's pretty much what artists do over and over, spurred on by curiosity and imagination.

In fact, in his great book, On the Origin of Stories. Brian Boyd identifies the generate-test-regenerate sequence represented in human art making as what else: A Darwin Machine! He goes further to assert that this art making Darwin Machine that we all have, is designed in part to support the evolution of human creativity.

But wait, wait, didn't our innate human creativity give birth to art? Well, maybe not. Boyd and many others find evidence that starting as far back as 60,000 years ago, that the creativity we use every day to solve problems, make art, and share stories emerged as a primary driver of the neural development that drove the growth of our big brain.

Yay! Maybe this thing that happens when we dance or sing or tell a story that some people describe as trivial or entertaining is actually how and why we became what we are for good, and for ill and for what comes next. Who knew? Anyway, stay tuned.

do hope. You do stay tuned in: 2023

Change the Story / Change the World is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscape are delivered by the stupendously creative Judy Munsen, our text editing is by Andre Nnebbe and our inspiration bubbles up in a constant stream from the ever-present mysterious specter of UKE. 235. So, until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word.