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"It's Not a Generation Gap" - A discussion of open and closed


[The following excerpt is from the opening and concluding paragraphs of a paper by Dr. Clare Graves titled "It's Not a Generation Gap." In it he provides a very good summary of the notion of closed and open systems, an important and often-overlooked factor in many current discussions of his theory.

Dr. Graves then uses the lyrics of a number of songs popular in the 1960's to illustrate his major points. Once permission is obtained to reproduce these, a copy of the complete paper will be available. It reflects a hopeful view for the future and a deep respect for the creative, artistic minds who paint what's next before theoreticians can begin to research and analyze it.]



"In the sixties it became fashionable to euphemistically refer to one of man's problems as the 'generation gap.' This euphemism, like all euphemisms, seems to exist more to protect man from the cold facts of reality than to communicate what really is. For nothing could be further from the truth than to infer that the problem between dissent and establishment is just a generation gap. This problem is a far more pervasive one. It is the problem of the separation in thinking between those, at any level, of any age, whose being has closed down and those at other levels who are open and growing no matter where their position be on man's existential staircase.

The person who is closed desperately believes that he has truly found the way for man to be and in his honest desperation he defends it 'til its death. He who is open genuinely sees change as the law of life. The closed lives in a completely assured and timeless world of never a question and nary a doubt. The open reaches, albeit sometimes recklessly, for a new sun to rise tomorrow. As the open man, in his unending quest for new and different meaning, moves from one level of existence to each that is to follow, more of the world and its foibles are open to his view. At each new level he has increased degrees of behavioral freedom, and from the increased freedom which is his, he looks upon the closed both above and below not hesitating to tell it, how it is.

. . . I cannot say, beyond the confines of my theory, where man will go from here. But of this you can rest assured. If man survives to meet the I-J state of being, the few who are the artists will be describing its mentality far beyond my capacity to do it from the theory I have drawn. And among these artists is aborning the few, for it is always the few "dissenters" who will see ahead, who will be utilizing the medium of music to present their youthful plea for change from that which has been and was good in its day, to that which is the better in man."

                                                                                                    -- Dr. Clare W. Graves