This is in contrast to the cultural assumptions that dog losers in the economic race: they are lazy, they fail to plan ahead and conserve, they deserve punishment for spending beyond their means, their misfortune is self-created. Rather than meriting the benefit of the doubt, they deserve to suffer. Nearly a week ago, Paul Krugman’s “Punishing The Jobless” column on the shameful Congressional failure to extend unemployment benefits quoted Sharron Angle, the Republican senatorial candidate from Nevada:

…who has repeatedly insisted that the unemployed are deliberately choosing to stay jobless, so that they can keep collecting benefits. A sample remark: “You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job but it doesn’t pay as much. We’ve put in so much entitlement into our government that we really have spoiled our citizenry.”

Cognitive scientists call this the “just-world fallacy.” Some people have such a profound desire to believe that the world is just (perhaps as a holdover from childhood hopes), that they collect or invent reasons why certain people prosper and others suffer, rationalizing and justifying the existing order of winners and losers. Believing that people earn and deserve their fates lessens the believer’s anxiety about the possible impact of random events or forces on his or her own life. It confers the presumption of merit on the rich and the presumption of fault on the poor.

But ultimately, no presumption is immune from reality. This week’s buzz has has included some harbingers of possible change.

Friday’s New York Times carried a fascinating piece about wealthy homeowners defaulting on mortgages.

More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.

By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.

Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.

“The rich are different: they are more ruthless,” said Sam Khater, CoreLogic’s senior economist.

Brent T. White, a law professor at the University of Arizona, says they are also “[L]less susceptible to the shame and fear-mongering used by the government and the mortgage banking industry to keep underwater homeowners from acting in their financial best interest.” And, although the article doesn’t say so, more entitled to please themselves without much attention to what anyone else thinks.

A day earlier, Krugman pointed out that despite a huge boost in corporate profits and stock trades, “All the buzz lately is that the Obama administration is ‘antibusiness.’ And there are widespread claims that fears about taxes, regulation and budget deficits are holding down business spending and blocking economic recovery.”

Krugman correctly blames lobbying groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, profiled in the Washington Monthly. It’s the nation’s most profligate lobby, spending vast sums to scare people witless (including $800,000 a day to defeat healthcare reform):

“What we always said was the Chamber does best when there’s a Democrat in the White House, because you want businesses to be scared,” a former Chamber lobbyist said. “There’s no better time to raise money than when businesses are scared.”

Tom Donohue, the Chamber’s president, is himself portrayed as an improvident spender and talker, running up organizational deficits at least proportional to the federal deficits he denounces. His extreme stance against scientific evidence of climate change caused Apple and other major corporate members to withdraw; and some local chambers regularly distance themselves from the national organization. But while the current leadership’s tactics may be cruder than usual, it is all part of a decades-long effort to dismantle the financial regulations of the New Deal. (I wrote about it back in May, linking to some of the original strategy documents.)

In some ways, the most encouraging signs of a shift come from a corporate study of CEOs (who, like philanthropies, like to examine themselves: whether the reason is narcissism or the evergreen hope that they will thus discover the secret of success, who can say?). IBM’s just-released biennial study, entitled Capitalizing on Complexity, provides a really interesting snapshot of the way these leaders see themselves and the world. This summary is offered by IBM’s Chair:

1. The world’s private and public sector leaders believe that a rapid escalation of “complexity” is the biggest challenge confronting them. They expect it to continue — indeed, to accelerate — in the coming years.
2. They are equally clear that their enterprises today are not equipped to cope effectively with this complexity in the global environment.
3. Finally, they identify “creativity” as the single most important leadership competency for enterprises seeking a path through this complexity.

On the one hand, the report is affirming of the cultural values I’ve been espousing:

Creativity is often defined as the ability to bring into existence something new or different, but CEOs elaborated. Creativity is the basis for “disruptive innovation and continuous re-invention,” a Professional Services CEO in the United States told us. And this requires bold, breakthrough thinking. Leaders, they said, must be ready to upset the status quo even if it is successful. They must be comfortable with and committed to ongoing
experimentation.

Although the report doesn’t say so—in fact, it doesn’t offer any advice about how to learn creativity, just an imperative to do it—the skills and habits of mind that cultivate creativity are intrinsic to artistic practice, and can best be learned in that realm.

Perhaps inadvertently, the report also undermines the pervasive superstition that the future can be known and controlled:

Increasingly interconnected economies, enterprises, societies and governments have given rise to vast new opportunities. But a surprising number of CEOs told us they feel ill-prepared for today’s more complex environment. Increased connectivity has also created strong — and too often unknown — interdependencies. For this reason, the ultimate consequence of any decision has often been poorly understood.

Still, decisions must be made.

You can feel the desire to hold onto the fantasy of a knowable and controllable world in that phrase, “For this reason.” It alludes to the delusion that when things were simpler, the ultimate consequences of decisions could be fully understood. I find it fascinating that so many of us cling to this dream despite abundant evidence to the contrary: the law of unintended consequences is one of the toughest to evade, as any student of public or private hopes and realities can testify.

So contemporary superstitions still exert some force, but the overall message is that CEOs, like the rest of us poor humans, don’t know what to do, and that to face that truth, it’s best to be dextrous, flexible and improvisatory (developing skills, not blueprints, letting go of what doesn’t work); and to stay in touch, listening to and communicating with those involved in and affected by your actions.

There’s a chilling aspect to the report, too. Especially in the absence of reliable external guidance, the hope is that people will rely on an internal sense of what is right to guide their actions. After all, creativity is amoral: it takes tremendous creativity to invent new poisons, devise deceptive advertising, or defraud stockholders. What’s missing from the IBM study is what’s missing from the Chamber of Commerce’s lobbying efforts, and from the psyches of mortgage-defaulting millionaires as well as the right-wing politicians who are blocking the extension of unemployment benefits to punish the jobless: any serious consideration of the roles of compassion and social responsibility in commercial, governmental, or financial systems. Here are some of the words that don’t appear, either in IBM’s main text or its quotations from participants: ethics, ethical, moral, morality, democratic, democracy, participatory, participation, poverty, wealth, social justice, equality.

I’m familiar with the argument that claims a kind of neutrality for business: it’s a tool, like a screwdriver, with no intrinsic moral or ethical character. How you use it is up to you. Maybe so, but as they say, if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And if all you have is an understanding of your work in the world severed from any requirement to do the right thing, every economy looks like ours, a once-vibrant sector depleted by the self-dealing and self-serving choices of leaders, public and private.

To the extent that IBM’s report faced and admitted the dawning role of uncertainty in a realm that once claimed triumphal certainty, I applaud it. But I’m even happier about the way it supports (however inadvertently) questioning our collective wisdom in awarding economic winners a benefit of the doubt denied to those impoverished by the policies they promote.

I’d like to think that’s because my analysis of philanthropic power relations and their discontents wowed readers with its brilliance. But I’m pretty sure the essay’s biggest thrill was that I dared to write it at all. There aren’t many truth-tellers in the world of charitable giving, on account of pervasive fear that biting the hand that feeds could endanger one’s economic well-being.

No doubt. But if you care about accountability, reciprocity, and other social goods, then the harm done by silence will be evident. There are many individuals and some foundations doing much more than the minimum to introduce accountability and some democratic spirit into philanthropy. I know program officers who are up nights agonizing about the huge burden nonprofits now bear as a result of corporate financial crimes, lax public oversight, and their impact on endowments—who arise each morning in dread of that day’s news of lost jobs and lost opportunities.

But that doesn’t change sectoral realities, which reinforce the antidemocratic spirit of these giver-receiver relationships, where potential receivers are expected to expose themselves to unbounded scrutiny and givers are entitled to ask without being required to answer. If truth in giving were mandated for foundation guidelines the way health warnings are required on cigarette packs, many of the more than 1.2 million foundations registered with the IRS as of last year would have to carry this notice (most of the rest are small family foundation that exist to give a few grants to pet projects):

Before You Apply

The IRS requires us to spend at least five percent of our endowment every year, some on expenses and most on grants. Like almost all foundations, we want to be here in perpetuity, so we don’t give more than the minimum requirement. We’ve lost money on our investments, so our total giving has dropped. That means it’s even harder than usual to get money from us. In fact, if we don’t already have a relationship with you, it’s twice as hard. There’s no way we are going to support even a quarter of the good and worthy projects that come to our attention, so we’ve put a lot of effort into finding ways to pre-reject applicants. If you decide to apply anyway, be sure you do everything we ask, but remember, most of you will be rejected anyway.

If you interact with the philanthropic world, this will come as no surprise. Without exactly specifying why, quite a few foundations have taken a pause from grant-making recently. The leaders of other foundations feel a responsibility toward long-term grantees that leads to rejecting almost all new applicants, without making that publicly known as policy. Most of the rest are just giving less—fewer grants, smaller grants, or both.

All of this must be considered just the breaks in a disintegrating economy. Foundations aren’t violating any laws by keeping their giving to the legally mandated minimum and keeping their workings private. Federal policies allow wealthy corporations and individuals to escape taxes by giving money to tax-exempt organizations; implicit in these policies are the property and power relationships that have shaped our entire economic system, valorizing donors’ right to do as they please, without comparable consideration for the taxpayers who enable their largesse.

Today, as when I wrote “Let Them Eat Pie,” the system’s least attractive features occupy the foreground, and I find myself wanting to speak up for those who feel constrained to speak for themselves. The big picture is much the same as in 1996. But foundations are a faddish bunch, and the new fads that have replaced some earlier enthusiasms bear mentioning.

I refer in particular to three bits of new orthodoxy stuck like shreds of spinach in the present-day foundation lexicon: best practices, logic models, and theories of change.

“Best Practices” entails collecting and sharing information about what is deemed to work in a particular field or sector, as a guide to future giving. As the Foundation Center’s Web site puts it, “Those engaged in philanthropy need to learn what is working, or not working, from others in their field.” The underlying idea is simple: figure out what works best, and save your money to replicate that. It acquires added force from donors’ aversion to risk, to looking foolish: if you bet on certified best practices, you are more likely to be a winner.

The problem is that the subject is human beings, not widgets. When you are working with measurable substances, it’s easy to define and locate best practices: which ways to heat a house cost less, spend less energy, produce the most heat with the least environmental damage, and so on? But this doesn’t apply to people. What seems to work in one location with one group isn’t necessarily transferable to a very different context. Believing so leads to a lack of openness and imagination, to dumbing everything down.

There are certain best practices one can safely call universal, but they are values and relationships, not methods or models: attend to ethical considerations, treat everyone with equal respect, tell the truth, avoid imposing strictures or ideologies on people who hold less social power than you, avoiding humiliating others, keep your promises, question your assumptions, stay awake, pay attention, stay curious, and so on. Every one of these entails remaining present to actual human individuals, organizations, and communities in all their particularity. None of them can be circumvented by deciding in advance what models or techniques work best and using “best practices” as a knife to pare away everything else.

The best philanthropic investment will always be in people, not models: find those who hold these universal best practices close, and give them what they need to do their work. Be brave enough to take that risk, even investing in unproven approaches.

“Logic Model” and “Theory of Change” are simply two different ways to package the same contents. Both describe devices for reducing the aims, assumptions, and activities embodied in a particular project or program element to a chart. Here’s the first page of visuals you get googling “logic model” and “theory of change.” They’re kind of pretty, aren’t they, resembling nothing so much as facing pages of placemats in a mail-order linen catalog? In fact, requiring one of these charts as part of a grant proposal bears about as much real relationship to community organizations’ work as would asking each to weave a placemat as their ante into the grant-getting game.

To be sure, the warp and woof are commonsense questions about applicants’ work: what do you want to accomplish, what is required, what short- and long-term outcomes are anticipated? But the task of boiling the answers down to colored bars often wastes days, compressing most of the useful meaning out of the inquiry. People invest the effort because a funder (or a consultant working for a funder) requires it. Most never look back at the charts until it’s time to tweak them to meet the next funder’s requirements. And after the charts have served their purpose of separating compliant applicants from the rest, few foundation officers make meaningful use of them either.

If you came up (as I did) in our culture of private property as the highest value, you may now be saying, “What’s the big deal? They have to spend some time on paperwork to get money for free? Without foundations, they’d have nothing.”

Note that I’m speaking out for greater respect and accountability—for caring that recognizes the realities of power—not against foundations. But in this charged climate, for some people, they amount to the same thing.

But what principle makes donors sacrosanct? There really isn’t any moral high ground in escaping your fair share of taxes (which after all, underwrite all public expenditures, those we adore and those we abhor) in exchange for the right to direct your money where you think it will do the most good. As progressives constantly point out, that same system has fueled the right’s powerful network of think tanks and organizing and communications systems. The massive right-wing philanthropies—the Scaifes and Olins of this world—benefit greatly from our policy of devolving social investment to those whose single qualification is having (or having forbears who) amassed a fortune, and they are a lot less fastidious than liberal foundations about using it for their own political ends.

The tax exemption is a simple quid pro quo—something for something—predicated on an underdeveloped public sector. We spend plenty of tax money on war, incarceration, bank bailouts and industry supports, and far less on promoting health, making communities livable, creating beauty and meaning, and other social goods. Instead, we let foundations and other donors underwrite such work, carried out by mostly underpaid and overworked folks like community organizers and community artists. In our system, without question, it is far better to incentivize charitable giving than not.

But there’s plenty of room for improvement. Right now, after decades of financial foxes guarding our economic henhouse, the independent sector—already under remarkable stress—is hurting badly. A constant complaint is the vast amount of time foundation fundraising takes in proportion to the results, more so as many foundations cut back on giving to invest in their own futures. And for too many funders, the less they give, the more hurdles they erect to discourage applications.

In practice—regardless of how lofty or pragmatic the stated reasons—the primary function of every philanthropic fad is the same: to winnow down the pool of grant applicants. If it was your job or mine to say “No” to half or two-thirds or three-quarters of the perfectly good proposals that came across our desks, perhaps we’d be doing the same. But I’d like to think not.

I’d like to think that I’d be one of the funders who responds to the current situation by distributing more than the minimum required by law, who cares more about helping now than preserving my fortune for posterity. I’d like to think I’d be one of the funders who requires a simple letter of intent before putting applicants through the ordeal of a full proposal (preferably without placemats). I’d even like to think I’d be one of those visionary types who, facing these circumstances, substitutes a lottery system for pre-qualified applicants for the extensive rituals of supplication that so distort the giver-receiver relationship.

But we don’t always live up to the self-image we’d like. Along with accountability, transparency is one of the virtues foundations often prescribe for their grantees. (For themselves, not quite so often.) Who knows if you or I, sitting in the big chair, would voluntarily make the choices that embody the most respect and consideration for applicants?

As insurance, then, in a philanthropic universe as comfortable dictating requirements as the U.S. charitable sector, I’d like to recommend a healthy start of practicing what is preached. Let’s require truth in giving. What do you think?

My favorite philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, is famous for spinning a lengthy essay out of the ancient poet Archilochus’ animal maxim, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin’s game was distinguishing those whose views are shaped by a single, defining idea from those who draw on many sources for a result both more textured and less reductive.

But the hamster’s teaching doesn’t fit either category. It isn’t about knowing, but about asking one big question: “Am I there yet? Am I there yet? Am I there yet?”

This seems to be the question of the day. My long-time activist friends keep asking how they can know whether they are having an impact. They ask it in aid of summoning the energy to continue. In the pauses between activities, the question bangs around my own brain like an echo: is what I want—for the world and for myself—coming or not?

As much as I’d like it to be otherwise, the answer can only be, “Who knows?” The lesson history tells is this: Win some, lose some. The wheel never stops turning. So no matter how hard I try, I can only come up with one conclusion, that the greatest meaning is to be found in doing what one desires and embraces most strongly, for its own sake, and not for the promise of a result.

In this context, it was especially interesting when last week, a colleague pointed me to a kind of historical marker: a confidential memo to the leadership of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, authored in 1971 by soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, entitled “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.”

In measured prose—sort of a low-intensity jeremiad—Powell bemoaned the anti-capitalist tenor of sixties intellectual life and activism and its impact on the media and society. He noted that social criticism is “wholesome and constructive so long as the objective was to improve rather than to subvert or destroy,” which is a refreshingly moderate view in comparison with today’s pervasive desire to silence critics altogether. As exemplars of the problem, he singled out attorney William Kunstler, consumer activist Ralph Nader, philosopher Herbert Marcuse, and author Charles Reich.

Powell’s prescription brought together a set of realizations that had been dawning on the right since Barry Goldwater’s crushing defeat in the 1964 presidential election: that if they had any hope of winning future elections and policy battles, they would have to apply their best thinking, and considerable resources, to shifting public opinion their way.

Powell outlined a series of interlocking measures that in the intervening forty years have been lavishly financed and energetically promoted by ideologues, funders, and other operatives of the right. He advocated creating cadres of scholars and speakers, vetting textbooks for the proper indications of “belief in the American system,” promoting more airtime and faculty posts for pro-capitalist views on campus, applying the same monitoring and pressure tactics to the media—and because all of this is rather gradual, pressing now for direct political influence through Congress and the courts (he suggested the ACLU as a model):

The educational programs suggested above would be designed to enlighten public thinking — not so much about the businessman and his individual role as about the system which he administers, and which provides the goods, services and jobs on which our country depends.

But one should not postpone more direct political action, while awaiting the gradual change in public opinion to be effected through education and information. Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.

One way to look at this is as good news for hamsters everywhere, since almost every element of the right-wing campaign Powell lays out has been actualized since he wrote this memo summarizing his and his colleagues’ thinking. I’m pretty sure the moment long since arrived when they were able to gaze at each other in satisfaction, offering a resounding “Yes!” to the question, “Are we there yet?”

Another is to take a deep breath and acknowledge that at present, the remedy is for advocates of responsive government, economic democracy, environmental stewardship and the other positions Powell opposes is to create the same sort of synergies and collaborations that shifted public opinion rightward. Only, the wheel must turn the other way, toward an enhanced understanding of public interest, public responsibility, and common good and a strong commitment to reverse the damage the corporate ascendancy has done to community life and the body politic.

It seems likely that history is on our side, since the disastrous effects of our almost mystical coronation of unmediated capitalism are evident in rising rates of unemployment, home repossessions and runaway industry, even as our largest financial corporations rake in unprecedented profits. (Here’s a nice compilation of relevant numbers from Americans for Financial Reform.) Unless collective suicide is the goal, this has got to be pulling the wheel toward the other direction.

Remember, Powell’s confidential memo was written in a moment when it seemed to many of us that progressive critiques and ideas were clearly on the rise, that we had every reason to expect a period of strong democracy, including well-regulated business and finance sectors. But as it turned out, that was exactly when the wheel began turning the other way. Something similar could happen now: who knows? While progressives don’t have the willingness to walk in lock-step that marked the right’s ascendancy of the last four decades, so many overlapping, related, and potentially reinforcing expressions of economic democracy are emerging these days that they may just have a comparable impact, despite our unruliness.

But as I reread Powell’s memo, the thing that comes through most strongly is how uncynical it seems. I think he was mistaken—and given many of the positions he took as a Supreme Court justice, I’m ready to argue that he may by now have been appalled at the consequences he failed to predict—but boy, was he sincere! A sense of belief, of embrace of a beloved mission, of congruence of conviction and action, pervades the document. I don’t doubt that Powell would have gone on promoting these ideas even if they hadn’t rung such a loud bell with his cohort, the big chiefs of American business.

Sometimes, when I hear that question spinning in my hamster-like mind—”Am I there yet?”—what strikes me most strongly is its existential irrelevancy. By now, I know I will continue to perform those acts that seem truest and closest to my essence, whether or not I think they are likely to produce results in my lifetime. By now, I know it isn’t even the right question.

When the right question is asked, past and future fall away. The wheel keeps turning, fueled by the alignment of desire and action. Sometimes it turns our way, sometimes not.

“Are we here now?” Almost.

If we were on the old “Star Trek,” I’d be Mr. Spock, peering levelly at Captain Kirk and saying, “It’s Anti-Thought, Jim, a resilient life-form from the planet InstaMedia that induces a powerful confusion, reducing highly intelligent beings to the mental capacity of a child.” And then the captain would marshall his team to devise a clever antidote that would be administered with total success by the top of the hour. Over blue cocktails in the canteen, Spock would gaze at the camera with the wry amusement that is the Vulcan equivalent of horror. “Imagine,” he would say, “if we had to live in a world where Anti-Thought was replacing the capacity for rational thought.”

Imagine! Then we would have contend with things like this:

All week, I have been reading the media’s giddy accounts of the Tea Party movement, obligingly timed to coincide with various meetings and announcements from political groups wanting to claim the Tea Party mantle. Here’s one from the New York Times. A month ago, I wrote about the Tea Party movement as exemplar of the reactivity swamping our political climate. I suggested ways to at least reduce our own skyrocketing brain chemicals, reclaiming the capacity for rational thought.

One of the most bizarre things about the movement is that many of its grassroots adherents declare themselves strong constitutionalists while advocating a remarkable degree of social control. They oppose encroachments on civil liberties, things like domestic wiretapping, and policies that make the public pay for private misdeeds, like the bank bailouts. They charge both major political parties with manipulating crisis to amass power. So far, so good.

But they slide easily into a pliant paranoia. In just about all the interviews I’ve read with Tea Party stalwarts, fear of Big Brother is the trigger for their involvement, and the response is a belligerent defensiveness which severely limits their capacity to notice how and by whom they are being manipulated. It’s kind of hilarious to see them denouncing President Obama as a power-mad despot, while forbearing to mention President Bush’s stellar role in the inflation of executive power. They don’t like a lot of the ways that government spends money (me neither, although I think we disagree on many of the specifics). But their prescriptions, such as eliminating income tax, suggest a wildly irrational view of what it takes to manage the collective infrastructural needs of 300-odd million people.

The extreme incongruity of Tea Partyers’ statements fairly cries “Use me!” to ideologues wanting to ride their momentum into office. Right now, Republican candidates are clamoring to position themselves as Tea Party mavericks and far-right organizations are proposing points of unity like the “Mandate to Save America,” vague, dog-whistle language that speaks volumes to the old-right groups endorsing it, with their long records as advocates of censorship, public control of private behavior, and an America where white is right. The media is lingering over every second of the supremely photogenic red, white (indeed, nearly all-white) and blue spectacle, which has everything TV loves: anger, conflict, irrationality, costumes, flags, and wild enthusiasm.

Help, Mr. Spock! Where is that Anti-Thought antidote now?

For the last few days, one of the New York Times’ most-emailed stories has been a column by David Brooks entitled “The Power Elite.” Brooks is an intelligent and articulate fellow who sometimes anti-thinks himself onto a ledge. In this column, he jumped off.

He begins with a raft of assertions of about how our institutions are more meritocratic than formerly, now that they are not the exclusive preserve of elite social groups or other restricted categories. (Finance used to belong to blue bloods, he writes, and now pedigree isn’t as important as accomplishment; journalism used to be “working-class stiffs who filed stories and hit the bars,” now it’s “cultured analysts;” and so on.) As he sees it, inclusion of women and people of color means greater meritocracy. Why, I wonder? It means greater inclusion and greater diversity, a wholly good thing; but can’t people of any gender and complexion be picked as their predecessors were, for criteria that include their alignment with institutional interests and their disinclination to rock the boat?

Skipping over all that (as well as any requirement to actually demonstrate cause and effect), Brooks says that greater meritocracy has generated even greater public mistrust. He proposes several wildly disparate reasons: social-class segregation, a lack of “leadership class solidarity,” deficient empathy, short-term thinking caused by truncated ancestral memory, and the availability of too much information about government to preserve a respect formerly protected by veils of secrecy.

Brooks’ column is as crammed with unexamined assumptions as a pillow holds feathers. The overarching one is this: “that Americans actually feel less connected to their leadership class now than they did then.” I assume he is working in at least some vague way off polling data that shows a decline in Americans’ trust of government, Wall Street, or the media. I don’t dispute that it’s low. I just wonder whether the halcyon age of trust in our betters and wisers ever existed. It certainly wasn’t in my sphere growing up, where the leaders of these institutions seemed so far from our own reality that they might have been another species.

It certainly wasn’t in the 1890s, when “yellow journalism” flourished in a war between Hearst and Pulitzer to see how low they could go, and everyone knew that news was whatever the fat cats who owned the papers said it was. Nor in the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s, nor in the 1930s, when Wall Street was widely seen as a hotbed of self-dealing crooks who had failed the public trust. As the 1950s approached, it was easy enough for Senator McCarthy and his ilk to discredit government with Red Scare propaganda, and later on, for Ronald Reagan to ignite the general mistrust that is now flowering anew at the Tea Parties. Reading through Brooks’ column, I was stunned by its total indifference to evidence and by the way he didn’t scruple to examine a single one of his assumptions and assertions.

Please, Mr. Spock! The Anti-Thought antidote!

Not long before President Obama was inaugurated, Jeremy McCarter of Newsweek wrote a nice piece highlighting the WPA and art’s public purpose. But recently, he interviewed National Endowment for the Arts’ Chair Rocco Landesman, taking a tone and approach that bears a remarkable resemblance to most Tea Party coverage. McCarter regurgitates a gaggle of received opinions, without shedding a single beam of new light on his subject.

When Landesman made his first public faux pas back in August, I wrote about it. At the time, I hoped Landesman had spoken in haste when he said, “I don’t know if there’s a theater in Peoria, but I would bet that it’s not as good as Steppenwolf or the Goodman.” After all, what responsible person would consciously assert an opinion that begins with an admission of total ignorance of his subject? But half a year later, Landesman told McCarter “there’s nothing I’d retract in what I was saying.” Too bad, because while snobbery can be relatively harmless and even amusing as a private vice, in a public official it insults democracy.

McCarter practically swoons from the charm of it all, then tries to spin it into a point of principle: Landesman’s commitment to “artistic excellence” versus his predecessor Dana Gioia’s commitment to “access.” This is so silly. During Gioia’s tenure, the NEA may have made at least one grant in every congressional district, but so what? Regardless of who chairs the agency, close to half of the NEA’s budget is committed to formulaic grants to the state and regional arts agencies, who in turn support all kinds of projects, many in places far smaller than Peoria.

What Gioia did was waste a substantial portion of the NEA’s remaining funds on national initiatives that did nothing to support actual living, creative artists, to add to our stock of creative imagination, or strengthen art’s public purpose. Instead, he opened a uni-directional cultural transit system, de haut en bas, including such elements as: The Big Read (whereby the residents of an entire community are encouraged to read and discuss a single book); Poetry Out Loud (whereby high school students “memorize and perform great poems;” Shakespeare in American Communities, a national tour of professional productions to smaller towns and cities; or American Masterpieces, financing revivals, restagings and so on of works “from the American classic canon.” Excellence versus access is a bright-red herring. Gioia was all about P.R., and so far, Landesman is continuing most of his programs.

Despite the NEA’s minuscule budget, it is widely perceived as emblematic of national cultural policy, with the agency’s Chair as our national arts spokesperson. McCarter reports that Landesman is energetically lining up colleagues and elected officials, singlehandedly attempting to introduce more coordination into the public cultural apparatus, a process he compares to “lining up backers for a show.” But what show? So far, we have a punning advertising slogan (”Art Works”), $5 million to be split 35 ways on a program called “Our Town,” and an encouraging willingness to tell the truth about arts funding (”pathetic and embarrassing,” says Landesman, and right he is). He still has time to live up to his role, and I hope he does it.

But what about McCarter? It’s tempting to see the huge disparity between the sizzle McCarter sprinkles over his article and the barely visible meat of it as just another example of the trivialization of cultural policy. Why should journalists be expected to know the territory or ascertain the actual facts when the public officials overseeing cultural programs aren’t? But then I think about how remarkably widespread is this refusal to examine one’s own assumptions, the proclivity to instead repeat what one has heard without first testing it, and I find myself wishing I could dose the water supply with the Anti-Thought antidote.

I may be indulging in a long overdue rant, but I’m not equating disagreement with Anti-Thought, obviously. To the contrary, no matter how supple our thought processes, only time can reveal the meaning of contemporary events, and while we wait for it to unfold, we are free to speculate and disagree. It’s the premature certainty that gets me. The Chinese tend to take a longer view of history than is typical of the U.S. addiction to frantic bulletins from the present. Lately I have thought many times of the story about Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s reported response to a question on the impact of the French Revolution of 1789: “It’s too soon to say.”

I’d like to hear that more often. Right now, for instance, highly intelligent and well-informed commentators are differing markedly on the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, striking down certain restrictions on corporate campaign speech. Flying in the face of most liberal commentary, Ira Glasser, former Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Unions, calls it a clearcut victory for freedom of speech. He says that laws regulating campaign speech “have generally suppressed insurgent candidates, advantaged incumbents and increased inequity in election campaigns,” that remedies intended to level the playing field actually made things worse. In contrast, much-honored liberal law professor and author Ronald Dworkin, writing in the New York Review of Books, called it an “appalling decision” that “will further weaken the quality and fairness of our politics.”

It appears that there is something to be said for both positions. Our electoral system is badly flawed. Many have advocated public financing as a more equitable (and less corruptible) alternative, but millions applauded when candidate Obama eschewed public financing because he thought he could raise more money without its restrictions. We will have to wait and see how both for-profit corporations and not-for-profit organizations respond to both the opportunities our present electoral system affords and the need for reform (and also to see the role this Supreme Court decision plays in those responses). In the meantime, there is plenty of room for analysis and debate. Spiraling into a louder and more paralyzing state of alarm, not so much.

At times, as dubious as I am about the value of much existing formal education, I fantasize about a couple of courses that ought to be compulsory, like Drivers’ Ed. One would be Real Democracy; that is, democracy as it is actually practiced, instead of a quick sprint through U.S. history and a show of hands to elect the class president. I imagine that if young people had in-depth exposure to the elements and texture of participatory democracy—to the required research, education, reflection, negotiation, the craft of balancing conflicting interests, the challenge of holding one’s self-interest and the group’s interest in simultaneous awareness, the monitoring and mid-course correction, the impossibility of perfection—they may grow up to be better at actually practicing it.

The other class would focus on How To Think, especially how to notice and correct for the characteristic blind-spots and biases that come packaged with human cognitive capacity. I love to peruse the list of cognitive biases on Wikipedia. Many of them cluster around what is called the “confirmation bias,” our tendency to look only for confirmatory information. Typically, we form a hypothesis, then set out to gather substantiating evidence. The trouble with this approach is that the world is so jam-packed with evidence, there is abundant data to support almost every hypothesis (as well as its opposite).

Unless you have considered all the data in the world (an obvious impossibility), confirmation can never definitively prove your point. To confirm the hypothesis that “all birds can fly,” for instance, I can list flying birds until I run out of paper, accumulating confirmation in abundance. But it takes only one penguin sauntering by to refute the hypothesis. The strongest way to test an idea is to seek to disprove it: and how many times have you seen that done that lately?

I think Mr. Spock could help write the curriculum, illustrating it with tales from his encounter with Anti-Thought. “Imagine,” he would say, “without this course in How To Think, we might have to live in a world where Anti-Thought was replacing the capacity for rational analysis and understanding.”

And wouldn’t that be terrible? Beam me up, Scotty.

“Life is a mistake that only art can correct.”

Stew, Passing Strange

I discovered this week that I have become a member of a religion I used to reject: the Church of Art. (I’m guessing you clocked this before I did.)

I discovered it during the swooning spiritual experience of watching the DVD of Passing Strange, the uniquely beautiful and rich musical story of the musician Stew’s coming of age, as an artist and a man, a journey that took him from a two-story home with all the mod cons in L.A., through cannabis coffeeshops in Amsterdam, post-punk clubs in Berlin, communes, collectives, love affairs that ended on the border of realness, and back again.

Repeatedly, Stew’s story draws a hard, straight line between the redemptive, clarifying, transcendent capabilities of art and spiritual ecstasy or enlightenment. I’ve drawn a few hundred of those lines myself in talks and essays over the years, I admit. But I have resisted tethering myself with them, because when I contemplated joining the Church of Art, my feelings about some of my prospective coreligionists made me think again.

You see, my nature and inclinations are deeply democratic (despite the disappointments of that faith). And so many of the stalwarts of the Church of Art are anything but egalitarian. At the extreme elitist end of the spectrum, worshippers eschew the mundane, living for sublime aestheticized moments involving the exhibition or performance of classic works requiring vast skill and capital to achieve in the form they crave: La bohème or La traviata, Giselle or Coppélia, the Eroica or The Magic Flute.

I heard my favorite story of high-church aestheticism when working as a consultant with a small theater company in Minneapolis. A feature story in the local paper had included the cost of authentic, handwoven tartans the Guthrie Theater had commissioned for a production of MacBeth. That single expenditure exceeded the annual budget of the excellent small theater.

My response to the grotesque excess of this type of red-carpet display—and after all, its utter irrelevance to the actual art being mounted—can be compared to liberation theologists’ repulsion at the Catholic Church’s willingness to invest in material splendor while countless faithful starve or endure severe hardship and oppression.

The gilded frames in which high art is so often presented serve not so much to enable its full expression as to call attention to its place of pride in the pecking-order. I wrote a few years ago about an experiment in which the superstar violinist Joshua Bell performed incognito in a Washington, DC, Metro station, failing to attract either attention or donations from passers-by. I imagine that even the most fervent devotees of the highest Church of Art close their eyes when a particular passage of music touches their hearts most deeply, blotting out the glare of chandeliers on red velvet and white marble so as not to intrude on the essence of the experience.

In London on Wednesday, an anonymous bidder spent over $100 million for Alberto Giacometti’s bronze “Walking Man I.” (Sotheby’s had expected it to sell for less than $30 million, still a remarkable sum.) This has nothing to do with the intrinsic merit of the piece itself, but with the glorification of its owner. However much an encounter with the work might touch or engage you or I or anyone else who passed time in its company wherever it were to be installed, that experience has little connection with the thrill of ownership at a headline-grabbing price. The transaction comments not on the power of Giacometti’s work, but on the economic power of its buyer, and on this ravenous beast, the high-art market, that—even as the global economy falters—grows in size and appetite, not even troubling to notice the ocean of suffering that could be alleviated by equivalent investment.

Having joined the Church of Art, I place myself among its liberation theologists, interested in the essence of its teachings, in the expansion of their practice, rather than the glory of its institutions.

To be sure, the DVD of Passing Strange represents significant investment: productions at the Public Theater and Berkeley Rep before Broadway, workshops at Sundance, and more. If the artists had been content with a one-off show in some small club, I never would have seen it at all. But Spike Lee’s production is a concert film, the record of a performance, modest as films go, and very right for its subject. I suppose that is one of the church’s tenets for me, a sense of purpose twinned with a sense of proportion.

Late in the play, Stew, as the narrator, recounts a conversation with a friend at a bar, a friend who sells pretzels for a living:

[H]e said, “The Real.” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “The real is not real, my friend. The real is a construct. The real is a creation. The real is artificial. The kid in your play is looking for something in life…that can only be found…in art.”

I keep working that blind spot in our social self-understanding, our inability to see the astounding extent to which our lives are infused, uplifted, and deepened by the experience of art, whether it comes to us via iPod or YouTube, the multiplex, the Met, or the work of our own bodies and spirits. I am hopeful we are going to awaken soon out of the trance that prevents us from seeing, understanding—and therefore pursuing—the public interest in artistic creativity, in beauty and meaning and all they bring. In the meantime, I do my bit to clear out the idols, and I worship.

The epigram that started this post introduces a remarkable moment in the play. Consumed with regret, the main character (”Youth”) creates an imaginary redemptive encounter with his mother, who has died as he lingered in Europe, refusing her entreaties to come home. His older self, the actual Stew as the narrator, sings that he will never see her again. Youth replies:

That’s it? You know, you’re right: you cannot bring her back. But why lose faith in the only thing that can? I will see her again…. Because life is a mistake…that only art can correct. I will see her again…Every night….

Amen.