An introduction to the DP part (on societal personality and creativity) of
Therivel's GAM/DP Theory of Personality and Creativity.

Introduction To DP (Division of Power)

The Long Term Effect of Power on Creativity - Introduction

The above is the title of chapter 11 of volume 1 of William A. Therivel's The GAM/DP Theory of Personality and Creativity (G stands for genetic endowment, A for assistances of youth, M for misfortunes of youth, DP for division of power, UP for unity of power). This chapter is the introduction to the DP part of the theory. For an introduction to the GAM part of the theory click "Introduction to GAM".

In this website, the reader is also offered a shortcut: The GAM/DP Synopsis and an expanded version, The GAM/DP Summary of volumes 1 through 6.

Hereafter are the contents and some pages of this long chapter:

The Long Term Effect of Power on Creativity

This chapter is divided into the following sections:

I. Ethnopsychology
     1. Introduction
     2. Insular
     3. Visitor
     4. Other Causes of Insularity
     5. Transmission by Cultural Continuity
     6. Insular Less Creative, Visitor More Creative

II. Times and Places of Creativity
     1. The Origins of the Division of Power in the West
     2. The New Power of the Law and the New Visitor Ethnopsychology
     3. Political Fragmentation
     4. Mozart, Child of the Division of Power of the Enlightenment
     5. Origins and Decline of Creativity: Three Brief Case Studies

I. Ethnopsychology

1. Introduction
     The type of power, whether united or divided, exercised over a society for a long period of time has a profound influence on individual personality development, on the buildup of overall culture and mentalities, and on creativity at the personal and social levels. The difference in psychological and social results and pertaining types of civilization deriving from either a single source of power or a divided one is so fundamental as to demand the creation of two new psychological terms. The two terms that are proposed, for theoretical and practical applications, are insular and visitor. The first refers to the personality type or type of civilization that evolved gradually under the oppression of one single, unified source of power. The second refers to the result of the impact of a multiplicity of sources of powers conflicting with one another.
     The psychological characteristics of the insular and visitor personalities are given in Table 5. These can be used to broadly divide people or civilizations. For instance, these new terms can be used for an additional understanding of the development of the personal and social philosophy of life of most later-period Chinese and many Latin Americans seen as insulars and of most Western Europeans and North Americans seen as visitors.

Table 5

     The insular personality is the result of a life, youth in particular, in a society ruled by one domineering power or one dominating hierarchy, (e.g., the emperor, king, local lord, or, in modern times, the government, political party, industry, or professional boss) and where this power is not restricted by any major division of power--in other words, when there is no possibility of maneuver, for the individual or the group, by switching allegiance. Insular people know that they have no recourse, no escape, and that they must stay in the good graces of the power holder or that their only alternative is to fight and seize power: something not open to many. Under these conditions insulars must learn to show a good face and never exhibit unhappiness or, worse, hatred or a desire to revolt, because the power above will crush them, sooner or later, and nobody will come to their rescue. Patience and dissimulation, silence and accommodation must be their virtues, which are strongly engraved in their mental scripts.
     Visitors, instead, know that they can always resort to Power Holder A, who will surely welcome new supporters in the fight against Power Holder B. In modern times this will mean having recourse to the legislative power if things go wrong with the executive or appeal for help to the judiciary, one of the political parties, the clergy, or the unions. Visitors know that they can never be harmed too badly, never be crushed because somebody else will come to their aid. The press, for instance, will always welcome a good fight. Consequently, visitors have faith in themselves as persons in control of important aspects in their lives, and in turn this will give them faith in their autonomy. They may therefore take risks, even against the power closest to them, including that of father and mother.

2. Insular
     Without recourse against the power above, insular persons must protect themselves through the strongest ties at their own level and at the hierarchical levels under them. This means maximum emphasis on family ties. Only the closest relatives (parents, spouse, children) will help them in case of trouble. The family must be united; the family must be the secure haven where each can take off the hated mask of smiling obedience. The children must know that they can count on their parents, regardless of whatever happens to them. The father in particular--more exposed to the boss--must count on total fidelity and obedience from wife and children. This is imperative for survival. Then, if at all possible, the father and mother will search for the alliance of an extended family or of the clan. In a country under unity of power no one is ever sure of his position, because every power holder will have a tyrant above him in a chain that leads to the ultimate power holder, say the emperor, who in turn can never feel safe because too many vie for his power. To protect himself, every power holder, from the supreme ruler down to the father, will preach the virtues of fidelity, of "knowing one's place," of complete obedience and love. The emperor or pope or clan head will present himself as "father," and the father will demand to be the emperor of his family.
     Once this is taken into account, one can understand the existence of contrasting reports of basic insular behavior (e.g., "impassivity/inscrutability" versus "emotivity/friendship," or even "fear of freedom.") The explanation lies in "with whom and where," as shown in the following comments on the tripartite division of all social relations among Chinese by professor Yang Kuo-shu, as reported by Kleinman and Kleinman (1991):

     These are the personal weltanschauungen and life strategies of most Chinese of the recent past and the present, in a country where the emperor once, and now the Communist Party, had undisputed power, in a country famous for its strong family ties and its almost worshipful respect and devotion to parents and ancestors.
     Mexico's leading poet, Nobel laureate, essayist, and cultural critic, Octavio Paz (1950/1985), noticed common characteristics between Mexicans and Chinese:

     For Arabic city-dwellers since several generations, the family is the state, a be-all-and-end-all in itself, where every child grows up feeling that his prime responsibility is not toward society but toward his family or, in the words of Vatikiotis (1987): "The bastion of traditional Islamic values remains the family; it is the principal intermediary between the individual and his social-cultural milieu. Such values as authoritarianism, respect for seniority, male dominance, overdependence on social milieu and status, helplessness vis-à-vis state power and lack of personal initiative are still widely, overwhelmingly prevalent" (p.70).

     Barzini (1965) made similar comments on the insulars of southern Italy:

3. Visitor
     Visitors may actually not be freer in their actions than insular individuals, but they are visitors in the knowledge that they live in a world where a major division of power exists, and where in case of need they can exert control over their lives by changing sides from Power A to Power B. Under each of these powers they may have the same practical lack of freedom--like a soldier in an army--but they have some power in the knowledge that both powers A and B know that they can change sides. This, in turn, will force each of these powers to sharpen their discourses and institutional practices (Foucault, 1980) in order to win adherents to their side by the sheer--or contributory--power of the reasonableness of their claim and corresponding right to differentiate. Through listening to these opposing discourses the visitor will be born and will progressively be realigned and transformed (Wartenberg, 1990).
     North Americans are visitors par excellence (at times visitors with a vengeance against themselves) living, as they are, in the country with the greatest division of power since more than two centuries. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, no nation in the world was governed by officially defined separated and divided powers providing checks and balances on the exercise of authority by those who governed. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was a first step toward this division and was followed by the Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights of 1791. Each had antecedents back to the English Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, and the Investiture Controversy of 1075-1122.

Insular Less Creative, Visitor More Creative
     The insular personality is less creative at each of the three systems of Csikszentmihalyi's (1988a) "triangular locus of creativity": person, domain (symbol system), field (social organization of domain). In terms of the person, insulars have less of the insight/inspiration that comes from "seeing the world in a new and different light" (Weiten, 1989, p. 292) because the strength of their scripts tells them how to interpret new information, instead of how to understand it. In consequence, insulars are pleased with the old-for them fundamental-elements of their world; and if there are major problems, it must be due to a lack of fidelity to the tradition that must be brought back through a number of fundamentalist accommodations, but it also eliminates creativity.
     In an insular world, the field blesses only those works which fit the approved truth/traditions/scripts. In consequence, anything new is refused and excommunicated: with no hiding place and little opportunity to move to an independent field free to appreciate and protect it. In the end, the person has no incentive to put 99 percent of perspiration behind his or her unorthodox 1 percent of inspiration. Similar considerations apply to the insular domain, which consists of rigid themes and exacting performing rules.
     An example of this is the insular personality of the ancient Egyptians of the later dynasties, who had lived for long centuries under the pharaoh's supreme unity of civilian, economic, and religious power as manifested in the constancy of their domain: "In techniques, art, and writing, the methods developed in the earliest times remained, in general terms, satisfactory for the needs of the Egyptian people and over the centuries required only the modifications resulting from natural development within a fairly closed culture. This self-sufficiency…. amounted almost to a sort of cultural stagnation" (T. James, 1978, p. 460).
     In essence, insular people are less creative because they are subject to a single truth linked intrinsically to one single power.

Times and Places of Creativity

The Origins of the Division of Power in the West

     The modern visitor personality was born when, at the end of the eleventh century, two fundamental powers, papacy and empire, preaching different ontological/epistemological truths began opposing each other, in what can be labeled as a major war of the scripts. The result was a creative revolution linked to new evolving truths, different from those fabricated by each of the two powers, closer to scientific truth, and more humane, because they arose in a broader dialectic world less subservient to the great powers.
     This war of the scripts was possible because, for the first time in history, a series of unarmed religious leaders (the popes) were able to oppose the lay rulers (emperors and kings). This fundamental role by the popes was possible because of the unique characteristics at the origin of the West.
     Indeed, Western civilization is different in kind from any other civilization, not only because of its Judaic, Greek, Roman, Germanic foundation but also because it was formed from the synergy of a monotheistic religion, that was not founded by a military commander, and the special geo/historical/cultural/political role played by the city of Rome as seat of the popes. The notion of a single God legitimatizes the idea of a single underlying universal truth and unitary paradigms and excludes, a priori, a "religious" division of power among leaders of the cult of different gods. Consequently, for centuries, the popes were the leaders of the only religion of the West, and this gave them an enormous power. In addition, their geopolitical position in Rome distanced them from the direct impact of the lay power which resided in the capital cities of Germany, Spain or France. This, instead, was not the case for the Patriarch of Constantinople and Moscow, who bore immediately the brunt of any displeasure by their secular masters.
     In the wake of the ecclesiastical and spiritual reforming spirit of the eleventh century, the popes, as soon as they felt reasonably secure from military repression and in good control of the Church, launched an attack against the German "Holy Roman" emperors in what was to become a centuries long War of Supremacy (1075-1313), of which the Investiture Controversy of 1075-1122 was the first and most important episode.
     “In their own day the Gregorians by no means had the forum of public debate to themselves. On the contrary, their discussions of the nature of a Christian world order called forth a variety of comments, critiques, and treatises reflecting almost every shade of opinion. It is indicative of both the intense feelings that the Gregorian reform aroused and the increased literacy in the eleventh century that the surviving treatises of the period on church-state relations fill more than two thousand pages when printed in modern folio. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that it seems that around the year 1100 almost every monk in western Europe was writing a pamphlet on church and kingship.” (Cantor, 1993, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, p. 264)      The War of Supremacy ended in a dynamic dialectical stalemate: the popes, while being able to reduce considerably the power of the emperors, could not win a decisive victory. A de-facto division of power evolved at every level of society, with corresponding checks and balances on the exercise of authority. For each secular level of power there was an equivalent religious level of power: emperor/pope, king/cardinal primate, prince/bishop, small lord/parish priest.

The New Power of the Law and the New Visitor Ethnopsychology

     From the time of Charlemagne onward, the Church promoted the promulgation of written laws, the study of the law, and maximum respect for the law, because only the law could protect the Church's properties from the never-ending financial needs of the secular lords. The only real protection for the Church was in having the law superior to the king. In the words of Paul Johnson (1976): "The law had first been put in writing to provide specifically for the protection of clerks and their property" (p. 204).
     In parallel, there was a visitor evolution in the people's minds that came from being informed of and participating in the confrontation of the two powers, lay and religious, and their ideologies and ways of life. People could reason about them, compare, and often play one power against the other. In this process, part of the power went to the burghers who began to look at emperors and popes, at lords and priests, with a detached and critical eye, and began to build for themselves a world free of both types of power, under the protection of a law superior to both.
     That the beginning of a full-fledged visitor ethnopsychology happened at the time of the Investiture Controversy had been remarked-following a different track-by Colin Morris in his The Discovery of the Individual 1050-1200 when he wrote that "there is a rapid rise in individualism and humanism from about 1080 to 1150" (1972, p. 7), an individualism truly unique to the West, as Morris had stressed a few pages before: "The Asiatic and Eastern tradition of thought has set much less store by the individual than the West has done. Belief in reincarnation virtually excludes individuality in the Western sense. For each person is but a manifestation of the life within him, which will be reborn, after his apparent death, in another form. Western individualism is therefore far from expressing the common experience of humanity. Taking a world view, one might almost regard it as an eccentricity among cultures" (p. 2).
     Clifford Geertz in his On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding, had felt the need to remind his readers that "the Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of world's cultures" (1975, p. 48).
     However, what more eccentric and peculiar among cultures than the key episode of the Investiture Controversy: the humiliation of Emperor Henry IV at Canossa in 1077 at the hand of Pope Gregory VII. The excommunicated emperor, in penitent garb-after a long journey from Germany to Italy-begged pardon for three days, in the snow, from a priest who was armed only with the religious prestige of being the successor of Saint Peter in Rome, the representative of who had said, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's" (Matthew 22:22). Such a humiliation of a mighty lay ruler by a religious ruler was unique in the history of civilizations.
     In England, the Investiture Controversy and later the protracted fight between King John and Pope Innocent II and between the King and Stephen Langton-the man whom the Pope chose as archbishop of Canterbury against the King's nominee-led to the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. It was indeed Stephen Langton who directed the baronial unrest into a demand for a solemn grant of liberties by the King. Appropriately, the very first article of the Magna Carta asserts that "the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished and its liberties unimpaired." Accordingly, it was used by the Church against the kings, for instance, when in 1279 archbishop Pecham "required that copies of Magna Carta, 'the charter of the lord king concerning the liberties of the church,' be displayed in cathedral and collegiate churches as a reminder to all who entered" (Haines, 1986, P. 218). In turn, the Magna Carta played a central role as the progenitor of most national and state constitutions.
     Thanks to the continuous fights between popes and emperors from 1075 to 1330, the cities could gradually free themselves from the domination of their masters, the German emperors. In the absence of kings and emperors these cities could develop their "modern" commercial and political institutions: