Mediating imaginative game-playing

Marrying Strategic White Holes with Problematic Black Holes (Part #9)

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Missing from the argument so presented is the sense of fun associated with imaginative game-playing. Whilst marital relationships (and prior courtship) may involve game-playing in its strategic sense, it is the interplay of imagination and fun which is vital to fruitful engagement. Again this interplay is essentially beyond the scope of the officiant. With respect to this argument a key question is then how "fun" emerges as significant in the relationship between problematique and resolutique. The question can be framed in a more particular manner in terms of the fun many derive from engaging creatively with a problem -- in many domains, but notably in technology and mathematics. Situations in which "the fun is taken out of" engagement with a problem do not favour creativity.

A schematic relationship between problematique, resolutique, imaginative and irresolutique was presented in a previous exercise (Imagining the Real Challenge and Realizing the Imaginal Pathway of Sustainable Transformation, 2007). As a development of it, the various threads of this argument could be tentatively interwoven in the following schematic. This is helpful in suggesting distinctions between:

• creativity and imagination, best recognized in considering creativity inspired by only limited imagination, and imagination characterized by limited creativity and originality
• fun and play, best recognized in considering fun without play (and the patterns of variations the latter may offer), and play without fun (as in some more mechanical forms of game-playing)

As a form of Venn diagram, the schematic isolates a central zone in which the four threads interweave as a context for fruitful intercourse between problematique and resolutique.

Interweaving modalities framing fruitful intercourse between problematique and resolutique

Such a schematic can clearly be developed in a variety of ways to evoke a variety of connotations -- of which the vesica piscis is but one. Of particular relevance to global governance is the sense in which its dimensions recall the functional and symbolic role of circuses and their amphitheatres -- and their extreme importance to governance in engaging the support of the population throughout the Roman empire. The media now perform an equivalent function -- hence the phrase "media circus". The "sustainability" of the Roman empire over centuries is worth recalling. Numerous comparisons of present civilization with that empire have been made (J. Rainsnow, Entertainment, Politics, and the Soul: lessons of the Roman games; Jack Curtis, Bread and Circuses: the last days of the American Empire, American Thinker, 29 March 2013).

The question is whether the dimensions of the schematic were more readily evident and focused in practice in the Roman circuses than is currently the case through the media. Of relevance is the question of Amy Scanlon cited by William Astore (Bread and Circuses in Rome and America, The Huffington Post, 6 October 2013): Could our society be sliding towards those Roman attitudes in a bizarre sort of way? Scanlon's argument is that:

Basically ancient Rome was a society that completely revolved around war, and where compassion was considered a vice rather than a virtue... To a Roman compassion was a detestable vice, which was considered both decadent and feminine. Watching people and animals slaughtered brutally [in the arena] was seen as a way to keep the civilian population from this 'weakness'...

It is difficult to deny that global civilization is currently oriented around war to a high degree -- whether actual or virtual -- celebrated in forms of entertainment which are difficult to distinguish from reporting of ongoing conflicts and slaughter. For Ben Moreell (Of Bread And Circuses, The Freeman, 1 January 1956):

A twentieth-century repetition of the mistakes of ancient Rome would be inexcusable. Rome was eight and a half centuries old when the poet, Juvenal, penned his famous tirade against his degenerate countrymen. About 100 A.D. he wrote: Now that no one buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things, bread and circuses....[panem et circenses].

Here was a once-proud people, whose government had been their servant, who had finally succumbed to the blandishments of clever political adventurers. They had gradually relinquished their sovereignty to government administrators to whom they had granted absolute powers, in return for food and entertainment. And the surprising thing about this insidious progression is that, at the time, few realized that they were witnessing the slow destruction of a people by a corruption that would eventually transmute a nation of self-reliant, courageous, sovereign individuals into a mob, dependent upon their government for the means of sustaining life.

Of remarkable significance in this context is the strange attractor associated with elegance -- curiously fundamental even to the operation of the Roman circuses. This is variously evident in the four dynamics of creativity, imagination, fun (especially humour), and play (especially music). In the schematic, these appropriately frame the subtlety of the central attractor of fruitful intercourse, however this is understood (Enacting Transformative Integral Thinking through Playful Elegance, 2010; "Human Intercourse" "Intercourse with Nature" and "Intercourse with the Other", 2007).

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