Conclusion

Strategic Challenge of Polysensorial Knowledge: bringing the "elephant" into "focus" (Part #14)

---

[Parts: First | Prev | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx | Refs ]

---

Given the extent of the western cultural deployment of binary logic over past decades, and the current socio-economic condition of global society, can humanity afford to depend on a mono-sensorial approach to the strategic development of its future -- when even marketing strategy now recognizes the value of a polysensorial approach?

Such neuromarketing would seem to be taking account of factors that conventional strategy neglects. As a methodology that studies consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli, the question might be asked to what strategic "stimuli" do voters respond and how is this determined? The future may find it curious that democratic choices -- and election of leaders -- are supposedly made in response to articulations of "vision", through use of "speech", when market strategists have already recognized the limitations of this mode.

Is there a case for recognizing a kind of analogy to Dwight Eisenhower's famous warning about the dangers of the insidious strategic approach of the military-industrial complex -- namely the as yet unrecognized dangers associated with a "vision-speech complex" in the conventional articulation of strategy? Or would that be the "vision-dialogue complex" that has been associated with so much hope-mongering (Credibility Crunch engendered by Hope-mongering: "credit crunch" focus as symptom of a dangerous mindset, 2008)?

Are the strategies currently on offer by the "vision-speech complex" simply "tasteless" -- as those who value the aesthetics of taste might claim? Do such strategies "smell right" -- as those with other sensibilities might question? Do they "sound right" -- as those who derive their sense of harmony and meaning from music might assert -- or are they as meaninglessly hollow as "sounding brass"? Or is it simply that they do not "feel right" or do not "touch the heart"? Expressed otherwise, how far is humanity from recognizing the vital role of aesthetics in governance, as explored speculatively elsewhere (Aesthetics of Governance in the Year 2490, 1990)?

Although it is obviously through the complete set of senses that individuals engage cognitively with the environment, this is less obvious in the case of communities -- as manifest in their strategic deliberations in exercises of collective intelligence. And yet it is through the latter that will be developed the response to the challenge of climate change -- a dramatic manifestation of the environment as a whole. The argument here points to the vital significance of a polysensorial strategic approach in order to engage effectively with the environment -- benefitting however from the correspondences between the cognitive modes and the characteristics of nature they best apprehend. Curiously such dynamic engagement -- learning to "dance with dragons" -- is being prefigured virtually, as argued elsewhere (Playfully Changing the Prevailing Climate of Opinion: climate change as focal metaphor of effective global governance, 2005).

---

[Parts: First | Prev | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx | Refs ]