The presentation came as a keynote speech at the two-day eighth Social Media Symposium, which reviews and analyzes the impact of digital social media channels on society and newsgathering.
Demonstrating with practical examples that a viewer’s culture defined his perception of beauty, he told the audience that when art became another branch of religion it took away an individual’s ability to think and form an independent opinion.
Al-Mutawa, a practicing medical psychologist, referred to the rapid expansion of access to art and ideas in the early European renaissance and the invention of the printing press, saying that as a result they were no longer the province of the extant church from whom opinions of beauty wand worth stemmed.
“It was the end of the age of recitation over reason. Henry VIII spent a lot of his life trying to reverse that, but he failed,” he opined. “Our culture tells us that if you think too much you will go to hell. We need to make up a new word for think.”
He added that quality of output from intellectual processes was governed by the attitude of the person toward the information as well as the quality of the information he worked with. “Really it’s a case of ‘garbage in, garbage out’.”
He quipped that if God had wanted people to be parrots, then he would have given feathers and beaks. “He did not; He gave us minds to think.”
Commenting on the recitation as a symptom of the idolizing of words per se as opposed to looking for meaning, giving the deific hieroglyphics of Pharonic Egypt as an example, he said that monitoring of people’s behavior rather than appreciating what went on in their hearts characterized many societies.
It was this thought that human values were universal as opposed to belief systems that were ethnocentric that triggered the idea of the 99.
This thought led him to review the underlying commonalities of the Hollywood superhero culture, all of which echoed biblical and religious structure and characters. Many involved the arrival of a hero from “above,” be it a planet or another galaxy, perhaps in a Moses-like capsule (Superman) and each one imbued with extreme power which could be put to good or evil use.
Those similarities initiated the idea that cultures all seemed to have common human based — almost genetic based — standards and values, though expressed in different forms. The 99, he was at pains to demonstrate, was not a religious-oriented conceit but a values-based one.
“There is no religion at all promoted anywhere in the stories, just positive values” he said.
In a post presentation question and answer session with Arab News Editor in Chief Khaled Almaeena, Al-Mutawa expanded on his free-thinking discussion. Almaeena posed the question of how to break down the fear of speaking out with new ideas.
“We (the Arab world) are a punishment culture and we don’t value failure,” he responded. “It should be valued as it is a learning experience.” He expanded the thought by saying that it was an error to mistake luck for skill.
He quoted John Lennon’s advice to his son: “Life is what happens while you’re busy making plans,” he said.
Almaeena pressed Al-Mutawa on the adoption of role models that young people might value in Middle Eastern society. Al-Mutawa responded that they could be created consciously and thought that the American television series “24” and “The Cosby Show” that promoted black people in a positive light for the years before President Obama came to power were critical in his acceptance and election.
He thought that above all, society needed diversity to be healthy. He felt that by removing all cultural diversity from a society in an attempt to make it pure was deeply unhealthy. “Eventually you will turn on yourselves; the only way to prevent this is with diversity,” he said.
Al-Mutawa’s original idea, “formed in the back of a cab telling my sister to be quiet,” has expanded into a $400 million print, film and digital media empire. He seems to have proved in a spectacular way the psychological reality of shared values across diverse cultures and faiths.
