(This post was first written in the ambivalent aftermath of the, what should have been galvanising and uniting, for the ‘Yes Movement’, ‘March and Rally for an Independent Scotland in the EU’, organised by Believe In Scotland and Yes for EU, on 2nd September, more than a month past.
Whilst I catch up with typing, sooo much typing, I understand it may not feel like finger on the pulse political reflection, to post with such a ‘significant’ delay, at least in terms of how fast news - and related politics blog - cycles move. But this a reflective space which, sure, ruminates on, to paraphrase less gender specifically, ‘events, dear reader, events’.
It does so, though, because it tries to elbow out some room, to look at the feedback loop of how they impact on wider understanding. How the foundations, the sociological or cultural anthropological lens through which viewing them, may need adjusting to account for them, if at all they do.
While a month may be aeons in politics, in slow time, so often required to think in the wide lens perspective of anthropological terms, it is but a blip, a blink. It may be a blink worth considering, but a blink it remains, nonetheless.
If your political cognition requires a news cycle driven reference point, is rankled if reference to it doesn’t fit your lived hyperreality, cognitive sets adjusted to control the horizontal and the vertical, driven focus in the moment to moment of it, what this post also focuses on equally applies to the aftermath of the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election. But psephology it is not.
It also now applies to post-conference reflection on the chicken and egg, overwhelmingly British nationalist media created, conjured phantasm of a mortally wounded lead party for the Scottish independence movement. It almost, for a beat there, seemed like because they wished it, so it would become.
But creative thinking and understanding, projecting, a ‘new’ leader’s humanity and compassion appear to be winning through. At least with the faithful.
With a few, almost inevitable, curmudgeonly holdouts, singing their same auld sang. In many ways it was their reactionary reflex masquerading itself as new thinking which led to these ruminations, on what positivity, negativity and genuine creative thinking, in the face of compound existential crisis, actually looks like. They know who they are and if they ever rock up here, thanks for that. Pull up a chair, this might take a while).
Soooo…about staying positive, for the sake of the movement, for unity, for interpersonal harmony, for trajectory, or ‘singing kumbaya’, as some would have it.
A study published late last year replicated prior findings, that a positive affect and good humour can improve creative performance and is conducive to divergent thinking. Participants were randomly assigned to either a positive, humour or neutral control affect induction condition, or stimuli. They were subsequently asked to complete two randomised divergent thinking creativity tasks.
Compared to participants in the neutral condition, those in the positive affect generated significantly more creative ideas. The number of ideas generated by those in the humour affect condition did not differ from those in the positive. Implications and future directions for study were discussed.
What the study did not do was look at negative affect or the qualitative nature of ideas generated, an altogether more difficult to establish, subjective baseline. Let’s circle back to those, and what any of it means in relation to the Yes movement, after a slightly deeper dive into the positive, into humour and into creativity.
Exploring and understanding predictors of creativity, psychologically and neurologically, has received, over time, a great deal of research attention, arguably in significant disproportion to other, just as important areas of human brain and mind function. And it's been that way since there have been fields of study in either or both.
Not quite as abundant but certainly disproportionate to other areas of influence over creativity have been studies regarding the impact of positivity on it, relatively often conflated with related aspects of humour or comedy. Last year’s study attempted to disentangle the effects of humour from those of positive affect, whilst acknowledge in the impacts of both.
To give due credit to the researchers, some questions over qualitative assessment of the affect were addressed right at the outset, by using Runco and Jaeger’s standard psychological (also with roots in neurological study) definition of creativity as ‘that which is novel and accepted as useful or task appropriate’. ‘Originality’ or ‘novelty’ is essential to creativity but a novel idea or product is only ‘creative’, as Simonton (2012) and the study’s proponents would have it, if it also ‘task relevant’.
Ward and Kolomyts (2019) were also cited by them, wherein creativity was/is also defined as ‘the mental capacity to generate new ideas and products that have some purpose, utility or worth’.
The study also took into account divergent and convergent creativity.
Divergent thinking involves producing as many ideas as possible in response to a posited problem or prompt. Results are often them sorted for fluency (ie, the num bear of unique, non-repetitive, relevant ideas generated) and originality (ie, how rare or novel each generated idea is), at least in lab or research studies but often, functionally, as part of ‘brainstorming’, in a wider sense.
As an aspect of the creative ideation process, convergent thinking seeks to provide a single (or optimal) solution to a pointed problem or prompt, often as part of a later or subsequent ‘sorting’ process. Divergent creative ideation emphasises variety in directions of thought. Convergent ideation seeks an optimal, single (or very few) idea(s) or solution(s).
Both trait and state-level positive affect augment creativity in problem-solving abilities through widened cognitive processing and association. At the neurological level, positive affect results in ‘better’, more effective, more insightful, creative problem-solving, via increased, induced, neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain associated with cognitive control.
Creativity, or a creative act/creative ideation, is bisociative. It operates on more than one plane because it signifies a transitory, double-minded state, where the balances of emotion and thought are inherently disturbed. Thinking conventionally is the result of mentally operating on a single plane, thinking creatively that of doing so on more than one.
In this sense, there are parallels between the creative process and humour. The invention and/or comprehension of humourous context or ideas also, most often, require bisociative thinking, thus sharing a degree of overlap with creative thinking.
Humour and creativity both involve shifting frames of reference, connecting seemingly unrelated elements and managing effective and appropriate surprise or response. Both involve shifting mental schemas from those which are generally more dominant to those which are more original, sometimes even conflicting.
Cognitive processing used in both creativity and humour, or ideation associated with them, employs the ability to conflate seemingly unrelated things. The process of discovering similarities between previous and novel situations uses analogically reasoning. Practising abstract or divergent thinking increases flexibility of ‘category membership’, which then increases cognitive flexibility, a hallmark of creative cognition.
Last year’s study built on these pre-established, well researched concepts. It found a positive mood condition generates significantly more ideas, for both unusual uses and product improvement. It also found humour did not impact the overall ideation but did change the positive affect generating it.
The study attempted to consolidate previous research into an updated context. Whilst its methods and considerations largely did this, they also acknowledged difficulties associated with contemporary, social and technological profile association. Both emphasise an exponential rise in the presence, generally and individually, socially and politically, and basis for ideation and action in the existence of negativity bias (ooh, callback, see pt.2!)
Creativity, as a product of divergent thinking, as the study observed, is arguably one of the most important constructs in the field of psychology. Creative thinking allows us to solve problems, adopt effectively to new circumstance, navigate complexities of the social world and, most importantly, to survive.
Of course, then, in an academic field dedicated to thinking about thinking, creativity has been a source of much research and study. There is an implicit irony in that, to meet academic, peer review and clinical standards or expectations, much of it has not been particularly creative. The edges of this particular Overton window, in new and divergent thinking about new and divergen thinking, have thankfully been increasingly pushed at in recent years.
In this regard, relevant to a Scots mind, to Scots minds, as intentionally colonised minds, by way of reference to the Torres Strait expedition, it is first worth digressing briefly to establish understanding of some concepts which have emerged from previous, less creative thinking about creative thinking, old thinking about new thinking.
As far back as 1950, still a pioneering time in the relatively new and burgeoning fields of psychology and neurology, Guildford (best remembered for an early psychometric study of intellect, sometimes referred to as the structure of intellect model) described the processes through which ideas are produced in what have since been referred to as divergent and convergent thinking. Whereas these were, for Guildford, an elected member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1937, foundational, psychological concerns, they have become as much of interest and concern to the now growing sand diversifying fields of neuroscience, as they have to those of psychology.
As Guildford expressed it, how ideas are conceived of in convergent thinking looks for one ‘correct’ solution and was then seen in opposition to searching for multiple possibilities, which distinguishes divergent thinking from it.
In many ways, the tension of this oppositional dichotomy has developed across the co-dependent fields of neurology and psychology, almost as an expressive, expressed meta-concept. Not only has convergent thinking about itself defined itself, but it has also restricted divergent thinking, or just how divergent thinking could be, about itself.
How psychology and the evidence unearthed to support it through neuroscience, in much the same type of co-dependency developed between anthropology and archeology, have unfolded these concepts into collective understanding has become much less constrained, more nuanced, as well as being much more reflective of how mind actually works as an emergent property of brain, over time. Divergent thinking is no longer as in opposition to convergent thinking.
Divergent thinking generates new ideas, imagines, is authentically original, asks questions, spots issues, looks for patterns, makes unexpected connections, sees things from a variety of perspectives. It is ideational and visionary. It spurs thinking beyond what exists so it can consider and conceive of genuinely new possibilities.
Convergent thinking complements it. It takes new ideas and connections, generated in divergence, and probes them, judges and weighs them against previously existing evidence. Multiple options are evaluated within a previously fixed or generally agreed upon set or sets of information.
It considers the particular situation from which they have emerged divergently, in response to, measures it against goals or objectives, analyses the available information and decides what to do, considering the circumstance. That is if the two are enabled to work together in a genuinely creative and constructive process.
Like most humans, particularly in post-Enlightenment, ‘post’-colonial societal arrangements, the colonised minds of Scots, are well practised in convergent thinking. Even the much vaunted ‘democratic intellect’, allegedly retained in a ‘distinct’ educational system, arrived at an almost inevitable destination, at a place of convergence by way of empirical thinking.
School, especially in eras promoting benchmarks of standardised testing, has trained us in almost exclusively convergent thinking, even in areas where creativity and divergence should be promoted. As the use of tests, over wider societal arcs and in trajectories of purported educational and academic progress, through collective and individual lives, increased, increases, becoming more pressurised, educators inevitably adjust, have adjusted, their teaching styles accordingly.
In many ways, not least due to budget and funding pressures throughout all tiers of education, convergent thinking dominates an overwhelming majority of classrooms and lecture halls. Recent studies, US and UK based, have also shown this to be increasingly the case in nurseries and pre-school care too.
Throw into the developmental mix the convergence of parental care and thinking around it, pre-pre and post-post – in the other hours, where there is none, and digital devices proliferate, nudging toward other convergences, echoed behaviourally in parental voices - school, and the idea of human progress, steeped in convergence from a very young age, perhaps even pre-conception, in the proverbial twinkle in potential parents’ eyes, becomes almost irresistible.
Even so, clutching at divergence in the face of overwhelming, seemingly all-pervasive, convergent thinking, the solution is not opposition to it. It is divergence from it, arising from it, not in spite of but because of it.
To have ‘true’ creativity, the most robust form of thinking, we must be better at being both. We must get better at using convergence not in and of itself but as divergent thinking, creativity’s partner, the co-parent of our ideation. It’s willing travelling companion, not the driver of our bus. Or the pre-determined, inevitable route it ‘must’ take.
Achieving that kind of self-regulation - of genuine, reflective, balance – is perhaps even more difficult collectively than it is individually. In both senses, we are not just living post-crisis (remember that pesky pandemic thingy?), we are living through an ongoing perma-crisis. We are not living in post-trauma, we are living through perma-trauma.
An aspect of this, for us, as Scots, is not only that we are a living in an abusive, co-dependent, political relationship but also that the coercive control it has over us is the very thing which made us, makes us, choose to stay.
This is not, cannot be agency. And without agency, there is no autonomy. Not even hope of gaining it.
The kind of trauma we experience, individually and collectively, as subjects of a changing nation in a changing world, hosted by a fast-changing planet, is not just rooted somewhere between negative bias and toxic positivity. It is neither, both and more besides.
It is cognitively dissonant, in a meta-sense. We hold both an awareness of our dissonance and a denial of it, in a superposition of of trauma response. And, of course, it becomes difficult not to rage at those among us who would tell us to ‘just breathe, in…and out’, while they submit, seemingly willingly, to its myriad coercions.
Trauma, no matter how it manifests, is a kind of ‘undoing of the self’, ‘a radical disruption of memory, a severing of past from present and, typically, an inability to envision a future’ (Brison, 2002). For many, most, it is experienced as helplessness in the face of an overpowering and overwhelming force, which strips away agency and any capacity to imagine an ‘otherwise’, an ‘elsewhere’, any other space or time.
It forces a schismatic ruption between ‘before’, ‘now’ and ‘after’. It destroys narratives of self with such dramatic force it becomes difficult, nigh on impossible, to see any connection between who and what was, is or can be.
Replacing these disrupted and annihilated, identity-constituted narratives, trauma offers up other stories. It self-talks, with frightening effectiveness and efficiency, taking up the empty spaces it has created with tales of defeat, of fear, of isolation, worthlessness and loss of control. They become self-replicating, entrenched and they are sometimes all encapsulated in the fact that it can also tell no story at all, echoing itself endlessly into the vacuum of absence.
When we seek amid this, from inside trauma, to restore a narrative, or to emphasise its continuum, as it is for Scots, for Scotland, for this place and time, our imagined nation, made real and without an independent state, our stateless nation, it is easy to forget how disconnected from it trauma can make us. For many, aware of traumas wrought by colonisation or not, we are both caught between the headlights of past and future, in a paralysis of perma-crisis – where somewhere an unconscious awareness tells us we must act but everything conscious tells us we cannot – and they have passed already, leaving us flailing in the self-recriminating devastation of their wake.
Restoration, continuum, even an acknowledgement of interregnum, requires reconnection. While yessers attempt to find means to it, we forget how much most people, even among ourselves, tend to have a rather weak grasp of human history, as well as of the archeologies and anthropologies of our collective and individual selves.
Some may know something about a particular era, usually our own, or at least of particularities of how we got to it. Or can even claim to some in-depth knowledge of particular subjects they have been drawn to. General understanding of human history is neither wide nor deep.
This matters because, particularly as we seek to reconnect narratives, not only does history catch up with us, so too, by way of the present it brought us to, does the future. Or certainly historical approaches, as well as approaches to history, including to self and identity, our inculcated sense of them, what they have been and could be, arrive and bang loudly at our door.
And all too often we respond in ignorance, with hubris. Because we have surprisingly short memories.
We respond politely, or for some, not so, and move on to seemingly more immediately relevant, pertinent, pressing, if not necessarily more interesting, then certainly apparently demanding more of our interest, things. This too is an understandable response, to trauma and to ongoing existential crises, personal and collective, for Scots and for humanity.
Perhaps the most psychologically damaging, trauma-implicating failure, for us all, collectively and individually, yes and no, is a failure of the imagination, of our creativity as its foundation. We never imagined this.
We never imagined that what would remian of all past impetus, its vibrancy and enervation, would be residual boredom and anxiety. Amid our trauma and grief, for something many were not, are not, even aware we lost, far less that we manufactured consent to losing it, we never imagined they would be the remaining dominant, recurring themes of our narrative.
We imagined heroic arcs and got anxiety inducing ennui. And still, we have to manage, to persist with, the subsequent ongoing minutiae of otherwise uninterrupted lives.
Pay the bills, feed ourselves, feed our families, do the dishes, do the washing, walk the dog. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.
In between we may fret, wonder what thinking about the future, even the past and present, save in the moment to moment, might mean anymore, if anything. Then, maybe we don’t.
Deep in our collective and individual trauma induced, colonised somnambulant reverie, how do we rouse ourselves and our chosen families, our fellow travellers, if neither positive nor negative inducements break the cycles, clear the fog of cognitive and existential crises. In fact, only reinforce and compound, thicken it.
Amid our ragged, torn, frayed connections to them, to past and future, even present, selves, is there even a way, a means, any means, to repair our narratives, our lives? Is it possible to do so in ways which recast the future as something meaningful and recognisable, into which we could project whatever hopes remain or are rekindled?
Of course, for self-indentified ‘yessers’, there remains a self-explicatory ‘yes’. It seems to sound different, to different ‘factions’ of the movement.
It sounds different to me too. And tangled among the roots and ubiquity of trauma and crises, I am moved to offer up, votive and supplicating, in hopes of planting a unifying flag (or something like one, something less perceived as, easily derided as, nationalistic), alongside it, another kind of, albeit tentative, yes.
Can we accept, how do we accept, while echoes of self-defeating, self-replicating, self-talk yet resound around us, a proposition to, as much as we can, genuinely consider our traumas, collective and individual, and to connect them to new, meaning-making narratives? To a shared testimony, part narrative of what it is and has been like to be here, then and now, and part creation of shared moral spaces, to serve as foundations of genuine solidarity and connection?
The idea of narratives, as means of self-understanding and repair, has not only been the focus of moral theorists, bioethicists or literature professors, but also of psychologists, of the social order too. All of them wrestled, wrestle, somewhere, with a familiar, similar notion. If existence is in crisis, if any concept of where we were, are, at least in a sense intelligible to ourselves, or to others, who share the same space and/or time, through connections, through community, through choices, through a sense of potential, of future, seems gone, what remains?
Perhaps it is the ability, even with constrained, restricted, colonised agency, to choose our own kind of tragic optimism. Sustained by deliberate, dedicated and even seemingly absurd meaning making. In the postscript to one of the most important treatises on the search for meaning of the past century, Holocaust survivor and psychoanalyst, Viktor Frankl laid out ‘The Case for a Tragic Optimism’. (Frankl, 2006)
Frankl argues that we make trauma and suffering meaningful, view guilt (in survival, which we can as Scots, as coloniser and colonised, at the very least admit to) as an imperative to improve ourselves. To interpret the fragility, unpredictability, precarity and transitory nature of life, our lives, as motivation to find meaning.
This conception of tragic optimism can be placed in a particularly clear and relevant position to our ongoing trauma. Frankl considers what happens when will to meaning does not recover, beyond initial trauma, amid ongoing trauma, if it continues to dictate thought and deed.
Further, Frankl argues it can be repaired through work, through love and through suffering. How this is to be done is largely a matter of values, desires and commitment.
What is also clear is that this kind of repair, amid the ruins, cannot be accomplished by accepting or adhering to convergent ‘master-narratives’. Ready-made, oven ready or with self-assembly, step by simple step instructions on how, what and whether to value, as well as how to structure that valuation.
Narratives which claim to offer means of plotting, of emplotment, of our trauma, in deliberately readily recognisable tropes, follow the appeal of what Frankl calls ‘the super-meaning’. For humans, as wholly subjective beings, this is neither something to which we have any genuine access, nor something which can actually provide the necessary means of repair we require, disconnected from self through trauma.
Frankl’s arguments for tragic optimism in the face of despair are, in fact, instructional about ‘what to do’ amid ongoing, live trauma. What is, remains, possible, if we lend them credence, is to make the human will to meaning a motivating force.
To help us tell stories, about predicament, about crises, about trauma, about existence as a matter of willed choice. As a matter of how we view them, talk about, judge and evaluate them.
And to make their values clear to others. To the yet to be convinced.
It is not immersion in the anxieties of self-talk. It is a defiance, a necessary attitude which makes anxiety-ridden, trauma damaged, colonised lives matter, in a way that makes sense. To us.
And makes them both intelligible to and possible for others. Frankl argues that we find meaning not by asking unanswerable ‘big questions’, but instead realising life demands of us determination of our own meaning, right now. And right now, again, in every moment.
It demands meaning-making stories. Stories we must tell ourselves. Narratives and responses to them. Actions, repairing not only self, identity, but also making commitments to changing the injustices and horrors revealed by trauma.
It is not that we must endure an agonistic process, to become our own healers, shamans ministering to our existence, neither that we must continue to suffer nor avoid suffering. It is that meaning can be found both in spite of and because of inescapable suffering.
If we cannot change its cause or if it resists change, is implacable to our entreaties, we can still choose, indeed it may be the only vestige of agency left to us, our attitude, our attunement to it. We can acknowledge it, without acclimatising to it.
We can accept its reality, in an act of genuine realpolitik. And we can do so without surrendering agency completely. Or our desire, our need, to make things otherwise to it.
Our optimism, of the change we want to see is in becoming a story to convince those yet to be, must face our guilt, as colonisers and survivors of being colonised, by taking full and genuine responsibility for our words and deeds. For taking action, not for its own sake, but in dedicating our lives, our cause, to transforming ourselves and a society, in making of which we are complicit, which enables, facilitates, makes any oppression or exploitation, of people, of place, of planet possible.
Any optimism we have as we do, then, must be a tragic one. We realise and acknowledge the fullness of our predicaments and our limitations in the face of them. But still, we must be defiant.
We must refuse to be defined or consumed by the trauma of any potential ‘world-loss’, past, present or future. Even if it means letting go, of dispelling any notion, any illusion we may have conceived of, of thinking we can ‘get over it’ or can ever fully recover from the suffering of it.
In the midst of ongoing traumas, we abandon the for normative narratives of happiness, even of well-being. And replace them with narratives of meaning-making.
When we have turned inward, to find genuinely new words, new ideas, new valuations, then outward to share them, we must reckon not only with Frankl’s arguments, but also with our own Beckettian dilemna. We cannot go on, we must go on; we cannot go on like this, we must go on with something new.
What does it look like? Can we show it, present, explain it, tell the story of its conception, to those who know nothing of it, other than what is and has been, to those yet to be convinced?
Let’s keep getting, staying, creative about it. Let’s use our imaginations while staying tragically optimistic. We are many, divergent, vibrant.