Seeing beyond: Issues of creative awareness and social responsibility

Abstract

Abstract: How do we keep our eyes open to deal with the dangers threatening our world? This article looks at four types of potential blindness limiting us—as a species—from full awareness. These include difficulty seeing hazardous but slow changes, seeing heretofore unimagined dangers, seeing past our delimited reference groups to the needs of our species, and use of massive psychological defense to avoid the discomfort of awareness. Creative persons may have an edge in addressing these limitations because of their sustained cognitive‐affective awareness, creative courage and resilience, and capacity for universal perspective‐taking. Yet these capabilities do not guarantee the motivation for moral responsibility, nor its underlying reasoning and sustaining passion. A relational style of moral responsibility, growing out of everyday empathetic concerns, and expanding to embrace universal principles, provides the strongest framework for this, while helping to eliminate the distortions of a pseudo‐morality. In the interaction of three dimensions, therefore—accurate world perception, creative processing, and moral responsibility—lies a great deal of hope.