can Disney’s Davy Crockett save America?
The other day I wrote a piece about a new study that shows broad-mindedness leads to happiness, and happiness leads to broader, associative thinking that is more creative. The author, Harvard’s Moshe Bar, speculates that the happiness reward gives us a survival advantage. Certainty and dogmatism lead to unhappiness – and quite often to peril. Science is confirming Crockett’s advice. Move ahead, but do so with an open mind and an understanding that absolutist illusions of certainty are dangerous. There is a human tendency to avoid uncertainty, a tendency often exploited by the authoritarian right. They aren’t the only ones, of course. Ideologues of all stripes quit thinking creatively and insist that truth belongs exclusively to their ideology. Ronald Reagan was a master at using melodramatic American myths of the cock-sure frontier hero. In the end, though, Reagan was open-minded enough to trust Mikhail Gorbachev. It’s just another dumb ideological fiction that Reagan “won” the Cold Wa
