Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning (37 page)

The
use of music by the pygmies
is described in Turnbull (1961).
The
importance of music
in the lives of Americans is mentioned in
The Meaning of Things
(Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton 1981), where it was found that for teenagers the most important object in the home tended to be the stereo set. The
policeman’s
interview is also from the same source. How music helps teenagers recover their good moods and its role in providing a matrix of peer solidarity are discussed in Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1984) and Larson & Kubey (1983).

Recorded music makes life richer.
I heard this argument propounded most forcefully (but, I think, quite erroneously) by the aesthetic philosopher Eliseo Vivas at a public lecture in Lake Forest College, Illinois, sometime in the late 1960s.

Durkheim
developed his concept of “collective effervescence” as a precursor of religiosity in his
Elementary Forms of Religious Life
(1912 [1967]). Victor Turner’s “communitas” provides a contemporary perspective on the importance of spontaneous social interaction (1969, 1974).

The writings of
Carlos Castaneda
(e.g., 1971, 1974), so influential even a decade ago, now barely produce a ripple on the collective consciousness. Much has been said to discredit the authenticity of his accounts. The last few volumes of the enduring saga of his sorcerer’s apprenticeship seem indeed confused and pointless. But the first four volumes contained many important ideas, intriguingly presented; for these the old Italian saying applies:
Se non è vero, è ben trovato
—or, “It may not be true, but it is well conceived.”

The stages of musical listening
were described in an unpublished empirical study by Michael Heifetz at the University of Chicago. A similar developmental trajectory was postulated earlier by the musicologist Leonard Meyer (1956).

Plato
expresses his views on music in the
Republic
, book 3, in the dialogue between Glaucon and Socrates about the aims of education. The idea is that children should not be exposed to either “plaintive” or “relaxed” music, because both will undermine their character—thus Ionian and Lydian harmonies should be eliminated from the curriculum. The only acceptable harmonies are the Dorian and the Phrygian, because these are the “strains of necessity and the strains of freedom,” inculcating courage and temperance in the young. Whatever one may think of Plato’s taste, it is clear that he took music very seriously. Here is what Socrates says (book 3, p. 401): “And therefore I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward place of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful….”
Alan Bloom (1987, esp. pp. 68–81) provides a spirited defense of Plato and an indictment of modern music, presumably because it has an affinity for Ionian and Lydian harmonies.

Lorin Hollander’
s story is based on conversations we had in 1985.

Eating.
For instance, ESM studies show that of the main things adult Americans do during an average day, eating is the most intrinsically motivated (Graef, Csikszentmihalyi, & Giannino 1983). Teenagers report the second highest levels of positive affect when eating (after socializing with peers, which is the most positive), and very high levels of intrinsic motivation—lower only than listening to music, being involved in sports and games, and resting (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson 1984, p. 300).

Cyrus the Great.
The information comes from Xenophon’s (431
B.C.
–350
B.C.
)
Cyropaedia
, a fictional account of Cyrus’s life. But Xenophon is the only contemporary who had actually served in Cyrus’s army, and who has left a written record of the man and his exploits (see also his
Anabasis
, translated as
The Persian Expedition
, Warner 1965).

Puritans and enjoyment.
On this topic see the extensive history by Foster Rhea Dulles (1965), Jane Carson’s account of recreation in colonial Virginia (1965), and chapter 5 in Kelly (1982).

CHAPTER 6

Reading.
In the interviews conducted by Professor Massimini around the world, reading books was the most often mentioned flow activity, especially in traditional groups undergoing modernization (Massimini, Csikszentmihalyi, & Delle Fave 1988, pp. 74–75). See also the study by Nell of how reading provides enjoyment (1988).

Mental puzzles.
The Dutch historian Johann Huizinga (1939 [1970]) argued that science and scholarship in general originated in riddling games.

“Works of art…”
is from Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson (in press).

The normal state of the mind is chaos.
This conclusion is based on various lines of evidence collected with the ESM. For example, of all the things teenagers do, “thinking” is the least intrinsically motivating activity, and one of the highest on negative affect and on passivity (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson 1984, p. 300). This is because people say they are thinking only when they are not doing anything else—when there are no external demands on their mind. The same pattern holds for adults, who are least happy and motivated when their mind is not engaged by an externally structured activity (Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi in press).
The various sensory deprivation experiments also show that without patterned input of information, the organization of consciousness tends to break down. For instance, George Miller writes: “The mind survives by ingesting information” (Miller 1983, p. 111). A more general claim is that organisms survive by ingesting negentropy (Schrödinger 1947).

The negative quality of the
television viewing
experience has been documented by several ESM studies, e.g., Csikszentmihalyi & Kubey (1981), Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1984), Csikszentmihalyi, Larson, & Prescott (1977), Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi (in press), and Larson & Kubey (1983).

Mental imagery.
For some of Singer’s work on daydreaming, see Singer (1966, 1973, 1981) and Singer & Switzer (1980). In the last decade, a widespread “mental imagery” movement has developed in the U.S.

The
Buñuel
reference is from Sacks (1970 [1987], p. 23).

Reciting names of ancestors.
Generally, the task of remembering belongs to the elder members of the tribe, and sometimes it is assigned to the chief. For example: “The Melanesian chief…has no administrative work, he has no function, properly speaking…. But in him…are enclosed the clan’s myth, tradition, alliances, and strengths…. When he delivers from his own lips the clan names and the marvelous phrases which have moved generations, he enlarges time for each one…. The chief’s authority rests on a simple quality which is his alone: he himself is the Word of the clan” (Leenhardt 1947 [1979], pp. 117–18). One example of how complex kinship reckoning can be is illustrated by Evans-Pritchard’s work on the Nuer of the Sudan, who divide their ancestors in maximal, major, minor, and minimal lineages, all connecting to each other for five or six ascending generations (Evans-Pritchard 1940 [1978]).

Riddles.
The rhyme translated by Charlotte Guest, as well as the material on the following page, come from the famous account Robert Graves (1960) gives of the origins of poetry and literacy in
The White Goddess
. Graves belonged to that wonderful period of British academic life when serious scholarship coexisted with unfettered flights of the imagination—the period when C. S. Lewis and R. R. Tolkien taught classics and wrote science fiction at Oxford. Graves’s mythopoetic reconstructions are controversial, but they provide the layperson with a feeling for what the quality of thought and experience might have been in the distant past, to an extent that one cannot get from works of more cautious scholarship.

Rote learning.
H. E. Garrett (1941) has reviewed the experimental evidence that contributed to the demise of rote learning in schools; see also Suppies (1978). This evidence showed that learning nonsense syllables did not improve a generalized aptitude for remembering. It is difficult to understand why educators would have thought such results relevant to making students stop memorizing meaningful texts.

The control of memory.
Remembering, like dreaming, seems not to be a process under volitional control of the self—we cannot bring into consciousness information that refuses to be called up. But just as with dreaming—except even more so—if one is willing to invest energy in it, memory can be greatly improved. With a little method and discipline, it is possible to build a whole set of mnemonic devices to help remember material that otherwise would be forgotten. For a recent review of how some of these methods were used in antiquity and the Renaissance, see Spence (1984).

The reference to
Archytas
and his thought experiments is from de Santillana (1961 [1970], p. 63).

The evolution of arithmetic and geometry.
Wittfogel (1957) gives a brilliant materialist account of the development of the sciences (as well as political forms) on the basis of the prior development of irrigational techniques.

That
new cultural products
are developed more for the sake of enjoyment than out of necessity is argued in Csikszentmihalyi (1988). This seems to be true even in the introduction of such basic techniques as the use of metals: “In several areas of the world it has been noted, in the case of metallurgical innovation in particular, that the development of bronze and other metals as useful commodities was a much later phenomenon than their first utilization as new and attractive materials, employed in contexts of display…. In most cases early metallurgy appears to have been practiced primarily because products have novel properties that made them attractive to use as symbols and as personal adornments and ornaments, in a manner that, by focusing attention, could attract or enhance prestige” (Renfrew 1986, pp. 144, 146).

Huizinga (1939 [1970]) argued that institutions such as religion, law, government, and the armed forces originally started as play-forms, or games, and only gradually did they become rigid and serious. Similarly Max Weber (1930 [1958]) pointed out that capitalism started as an adventurous game of entrepreneurs, and only later, when its practices became rigidified in laws and conventions, did it become an “iron cage.”

For the anecdotes concerning
Democritus,
see de Santillana (1961 [1970], pp. 142ff.)

For an introduction to the
sagas of Iceland,
see Skuli Johnson’s (1930) collection.

The argument about how
conversation
helps maintain the symbolic universe is in Berger & Luckmann (1967).

How
poetry
can be taught to ghetto children and to old people in retirement homes without formal education is beautifully told by Koch (1970, 1977).

Writing and depression.
At least since the Romantic era, artists of all types have been held to be “tortured” or “demonically impelled.” There is reasonably good evidence that many modern artists and writers in fact show a variety of depressive and obsessive symptoms (see, e.g., Alvarez 1973, Berman 1988, Csikszentmihalyi 1988, and Matson 1980). Recently much has been written also about the relationship of manic depression and literary creativity (Andreasen 1987, Richards et al. 1988). It is very likely, however, that this relationship between psychic entropy and artistic creativity is the result of specific cultural expectations, and of the awkward structure of the artistic role, rather than anything necessarily inherent in art or in creativity. In other words, if to survive as an artist in a given social environment a person has to put up with insecurity, neglect, ridicule, and a lack of commonly shared expressive symbols, he or she is likely to show the psychic effects of these adverse conditions. Vasari in 1550 was one of the first to express concern that the personality of the young Italian artists of the time, already influenced by Mannerism, a precursor of Baroque and Romantic styles, displayed a “certain element of savagery and madness” which made them appear “strange and eccentric” in a way that previous artists were not (Vasari 1550 [1959], p. 232). In earlier periods, such as the thousands of years of Egyptian civilization, or the Middle Ages, artists were apparently quite pleasant and well adjusted (Hauser 1951). And of course there are several more recent examples of great artists, like J. S. Bach, Goethe, Dickens, or Verdi, that disprove the existence of a necessary link between creativity and neurosis.

Remembering the personal past.
In part under the influence of Erikson’s psychobiographical accounts of the lives of Hitler, Gorki, Luther, and Gandhi (1950, 1958, 1969), a concern for “personal narrative” has become prominent in life-span developmental psychology (see Cohler 1982; Freeman 1989; Gergen & Gergen 1983, 1984; McAdams 1985; Robinson 1988; Sarbin 1986; and Schafer 1980). This perspective claims that knowing how a person sees his or her own past is one of the best ways to predict what he or she will do in the future.

Every home a museum.
Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton (1981) studied over 300 members of three-generational families around Chicago, who were asked in their homes to show interviewers their favorite objects, and to explain the reasons for cherishing them.

The four quotations from
Thomas Kuhn
’s
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1962) are from pages 24, 38, 38, and 36, respectively. One of the most exciting promises of flow theory is that it may help explain why certain ideas, practices, and products are adopted, while others are ignored or forgotten—since at this point the histories of ideas, institutions, and cultures work almost exclusively within a paradigm informed by economic determinism. In addition, it might be revealing to consider how history is directed by the enjoyment people derive or anticipate from different courses of action. A beginning in that direction is Isabella Csikszentmihalyi’s analysis of the reasons for the success of the Jesuit order in the 16th and 17th centuries (1988).