Abstract
Present day Americans–especially the middle class–have little concern for social obligation or tradition, and so are less constrained from mingling with unrelated people. Indeed, since they move so frequently to strange neighbourhoods; they need to be able to create new support networks quickly but not to become too attached emotionally to the people in them, since no one knows when anyone will be moving on. Social media and advances in technology have accelerated these processes. Americans we might say are approaching an historical stage with a desire to be self-defining that has produced a disintegrated or alienated consciousness. What defines this consciousness is its antagonism to the external power of society–the wish to be free of imposed social circumstances. The dangers of this position are that: 1) We may devolve into a society in which narcissistic preoccupations are pervasive; 2) Due to competition over more limited resources a social balkanization or fragmentation becomes rampant–divisions along multicultural factors become rallying forces; or 3) We do not grow into a new ethos, and remain condemned to the stagnation of the personality ethics. The above forms of human blindness stem from the same root–an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self when there are shared goals. We must be poised ready for technological, economic, social, and even political change–the one thing we can be sure of in the short-term but more so long-term fate of this country.
Highlights
British historian Arnold Toynbee [1], discussing cultural evolution, stated that civilizations grow through a dynamic interplay between stability and change
This article is written to introduce the reader to a cognitive process termed “meta-thinking” that taps into our potential as human beings to cope with the vicissitudes of contemporary life in an era that seems to be transitional and could be epochal in American history
If we said that the Identity crisis is least marked in that segment of youth which in a given era is able to invest its fidelity in a an ideological trend associated with a new technical and economic expansion such as mercantilism, colonialism, or industrialization, we recognize the catastrophic consequences of any systematic exclusion from such trends Youth which is eager for, yet unable to find access to the dominant techniques of society will feel estranged from society, and upset in sexuality, and most of all unable to apply aggression constructively” Identity links the past and the future, both in the individual and in society
Summary
British historian Arnold Toynbee [1], discussing cultural evolution, stated that civilizations grow through a dynamic interplay between stability and change. Radical constructivists claim that problems exist only in the way in which they are "language"–that is, only in the frames or stories we believe and tell ourselves and one another about those problems Another position, called constructivism by many, is that reality does exist, but we cannot come close to knowing it objectively because of our sensory and conceptual limitations, or because of the closed nature of our sensory system, and so one map of reality is as good as another. Dewey held that effective problem solving demands the active pursuit of a set of procedures or steps in a well-defined and orderly sequence These steps Dewey referred to as the "five phases of reflective thinking" and they include: recognizing the difficulty; defining the difficulty, raising suggestions for possible solutions and rationally exploring the suggestions, which includes data collection, selecting an optimal solution from among many proposals, and carrying out the solution.
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