It’s been a little over a year since I left a decades-long marriage, and I am ready to explore relationship again, which for me means meeting men. The trouble is, I live the life of a writer and speaker whose main subject is culture. In comparison with the normal pattern of going to an office each day, I spend a remarkable amount of time alone with my computer, mostly loving every minute of it. (I’m lucky, I know, to experience bliss in the act of writing, even when the results fail to induce the same state in readers.) In between, I take to the road for work. I’m glad to have had quite a few speaking and consulting engagements this spring, mostly journeying to that corner of the universe known as “the arts,” where I am surrounded by women (roughly two-thirds of the people who work in that field, by my informal estimate) and gay men, with a sprinkling of married men in the crowd.

Wherever I go, I’ve been driving my friends a little crazy with this topic, and their response has been to urge me to register with an online dating site. Yesterday, I let myself be persuaded, which entailed answering a long list of questions about my background and personal tastes and habits. The idea is that on the basis of some algorithm, I will be matched with compatible men (although the first batch of matches has left me feeling skeptical).

Still, it’s good practice, friends say, recounting all the happy couples they know who met online. So I am practicing, and as I practice, I wonder if anyone is paying attention to the politics of mature romance, a subject ripe for exploration.

The 1969 essay that introduced “the personal is political” focused on women’s experience in newly formed consciousness-raising groups, on understanding that talking about personal life and feelings was in itself a form of political action.

When the feminist movement popularized the slogan, the focus was most often ways that matters seen as purely personal—who does the dishes?—had political significance, upholding a hierarchy of value in which “women’s work” enhanced men’s social power at women’s expense.

But before long, “the personal is political” expressed a way of seeing the world in general. It recognized something that now seems so true I can’t quite remember why it was ever contested. From the far right of the political spectrum to its opposite, it is now generally understood that putatively personal matters such as views of sexual identity and reproductive choice, of racial differences and same-sex marriage, make loud and clear political statements.

But there are things we still don’t bring into the conversation, because they conform to our even older and deeper proclivity to treat public issues as private troubles (to borrow C. Wright Mills’ words). The classic example is the common tendency to regard unemployment as a personal failing, even when mere statistics inarguably demonstrate its public dimension. When businesses fail or flee, jobs are lost without regard to the merits of personal performance; but the impersonality of the experience doesn’t seem to have sunk in. Too often, the odor of blame still clings to those whose jobs have been lost.

Love’s many varieties of failure are treated as purely personal, but they too are shaped by social values. When I think of my parents’ generation, my mind fills with images of stoic spouses, sticking it out in marriages grounded in cold calculation or hot desperation: I’ll trade the fact that you see me as furniture for the houseful of overstuffed accoutrements your salary buys; I’ll trade the fact that you feel no desire for me for the way you make me look like a successful family man for the boss, the church, the neighbors.

Then as now, we see happy couples, determined to stay awake and alive, to welcome change in themselves and in their partners, to meet in the sanctuary of loving relationship. Now as then, we see spouses who put parts of themselves away in the interests of coexistence, sleepwalking through the years, shadows of their possible selves.

In my generation, many more of us lately seem to be single, in part due to having finally refused the bad old bargain, trading ourselves away in exchange for some version of security. “Only connect,” said E.M. Forster, and like most human beings, that is our desire. The newer systems devised to connect potential mates may work well for the young, and even for those members of our own generation who evaded the great awakening that imprinted so many in the sixties. But from what I hear, they do not seem to be serving us—the ones who heard “the personal is political” as a newly minted mantra and still hear its echo—because they can’t get past what we do and what we like to the only question that finally matters, who we are.

It’s been a long time since I was last single, and everything has changed.

I was fortunate to be young when sex and danger were not keeping quite such close company as in the age of AIDS. It seemed to me then that the attraction of appearance was a tremendous power source, one I could wield without much care, just for the pleasure of it. I’m not making any claims of superiority for a cultural moment in which people looked at each other, liked what they saw, and leapt into bed without exchanging names. You’d have to be blind not to see the downside. But I was lucky: nothing really bad happened to me; I learned something; and I delighted in the dance of instant attraction and its aftermath.

Now I am a woman of a certain age. I don’t think I have anything new to say about our society’s equation of youth and beauty, of the way it treats women no longer young as less than they were, invisible, and surplus to requirements. Awareness is growing, and with awareness, women can sever their inner sense of value from those social distortions, can remember who they are and not allow a contingent idea of worth to take root in their own minds.

But I have also changed. The intrepid among the young perceive identity as wide-open to question and influence. Part of such a youthful relationship is playing with identity: Who am I in this relationship? Who are you? What about now, and now, and now? Decades ago, I was drawn to men with a fluid, unformed sense of self, learning themselves through adventure and misadventure. I still prize openness to learning, but much more so when it is grounded in the self-awareness that can come through experience and reflection, making identity far richer and far less conditional.

When I was young and time was infinite, relationships could be specialized, like reading different chapters in a big book. I could learn politics from one man, and music or silence or cooking or the names of wildflowers from another. I could spend time with a man I couldn’t really talk to, but who had ways of communicating. I practiced dumbing myself down, or amping up my defenses to get through a passage of not being fully received. But now, I recognize the erotic character of brain-power. The quip that the brain is the largest sex organ has been around for ages; but now that science has given us the capacity to observe brains in action, we know it is true. For a woman like myself, who delights in playing with her brain, no compensation would suffice to trade away the delicious meeting of open and active minds, which is not an easy thing to find.

I don’t mean to repudiate the past. There is no denying the power of youthful animal attraction, the erotic equivalent of the impulse to sink one’s teeth into a ripe peach.

But it doesn’t take long after devouring the peach to feel the need for another. The long-simmered quality of mature erotic energy is something else. My attention is drawn to a beautiful young man as to an object of art, but there is something in a lived-in look, the mature face and body of a man who resides comfortably inside his own skin, that moves me much more deeply. It’s the knowing look that made George Clooney wait so long to morph from minor soap-star to national heartthrob; the tactile sensation of watching Gary Cooper or Denzel Washington in middle age, in contrast to the fragile beauty of their youth; the swooning crowds that fill concert halls to hear the 70-something Leonard Cohen sing “I’m Your Man.”

“The lineaments of gratified desire,” wrote William Blake, capturing it exactly.

Our culture is distorted by ideas about aging ungrounded in physical reality. Sixty-five is still considered the boundary of old age (of course, for some North Americans, 65 equals decrepitude, but not so very many). At birth, the life-expectancy of a white woman who is now close to that age would have been in the high 60s; today, if she has survived past 60, that same woman’s life expectancy would give her another 20-odd years of life. (For white men and both men and women of color, the numbers are a little lower.)

There is a pervasive expectation that after a certain age, we will start to go quietly, deflating as life force leaks away. The young naturally want to move up. The French have an expression: “Pousse-toi de là que je m’y mette“—basically, “Shove off so I can take your place.” Economic concerns exacerbate the trend. In my brief exposure to the online dating site, I’ve already read a dozen profiles of men a few years older than myself whose own words paint a picture of withdrawal into a half-life of vicarious experience and board games. With diminished hopes, it appears to be relatively easy to strike the bad old bargain online: companionate marriage, someone to watch TV with, insurance against finding oneself ill and alone. It is human to want these things; and human to hope they provide the desired satisfaction for those who choose them.

But what about those who were unable to find sanctuary in an earlier relationship, and who now eschew the bad bargain, even at the risk of isolation? The politics of mature romance are intensely personal, but they are still politics, shaped by social distortions concerning age, eros (and Psyche). The generation experiencing them may be gamely treading the paths to relationship now on offer, but I think something different is not only possible, it is required. I want to volunteer for it, but I don’t know where to sign up.

In the meantime, if you meet a highly intelligent, self-aware, comfortable-in-his-own skin single man of a certain age (give or take), point him to my Website, where a lot more than my favorite color is revealed.

I love the song “But Beautiful” by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke:

Beautiful to take a chance
And if you fall, you fall,
And I’m thinking,
I wouldn’t mind at all.

I’ve asked for it in more piano bars than I can remember, enough to know that those who can play it by heart can really play. I wanted to share Betty Carter’s version with you, but I couldn’t find it online. Never mind, this sublime rendition by Billie Holiday will do very nicely, a theme song for our cohort.

A few days ago, my friend told me that her daughter and her twenty-something activist cohort see life differently from their parents’ generation. They gaze through open eyes at something terrible coming toward us, and are working with great commitment to limit the damage, to live with conviction and enjoyment despite it.

Perhaps we all want Arcadia. Even under the worst conditions, desire is free. But if history is any guide, I’m beginning to think the path of wisdom steers clear of disappointment when Arcadia doesn’t arrive. In Jewish mysticism, the divine energy poured into the creation of the world was too intense to hold. The vessels were shattered, and ever since, it has been our task to reassemble them. Can it be ambition enough to make something beautiful out of the broken pieces?

In Juan Jose Campanella’s mesmerizing film, The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos), a broken typewriter plays a small but pivotal role. It can type only the capital A, making every page an Alpine lAndscApe. In the wild clockwork of the film, that brokenness becomes a tiny lever the protagonist finally pulls, turning a lifetime of fear into the realization of love.

That’s the moment we crave, isn’t it? In politics, in love, in a thousand reasons to worry, we want to be there when the blockage clears, when the debris of a storm finally allows the river to lift it past the rocks, when spiritual impediment floats away, a parched leaf riding the wind. When certainty gallops into the frame astride a white horse.

I’ve been realizing I usually wait to write till the brokenness subsides. I like to know what I think and feel before I set it down. But my own levers are a little stuck and rusty these days. I’m postponing writing a grant proposal for my new book, doubting that the operators of our post-meltdown arts economy will finally choose this moment to anoint me with livelihood. I’m postponing starting the new book, even though I know absolutely that it must be written, and what’s more (whether this is authorial hubris or mere realism) that it must be read.

This is all a matter of a few days, mind you. Next week, I know, the proposal will be in and the draft in progress. Most likely, starting to act instead of agonize will create its own pleasure and momentum, and the stuck, rusty feeling will flake away.

But just now, the gap between my sense of how things should be and how they are has opened wide, and my normally indefatigable energy has been leaking into the breach. I see the toxic spill of disappointment, of discouragement, and the damage it does, but I’m having trouble cleaning it up. In the meantime, I’m seeking guidance from movies.

In the documentary Examined Life, by Astra Taylor, a slew of hip and cool philosophers ruminate on life as they walk or ride or row with the filmmaker. Cornel West went straight to the heart of what is bothering me, by pointing to the Romantic desire for wholeness and harmony as the source of our perpetual (and often disabling) disappointment:

Can you make things whole? Can you create harmony? If you can’t: disappointment….

[T]he language of failure and disappointment, disenchantment, disillusionment, is a little bit Romantic for me…. Why not have a sense of gratitude that you’re able to do as much as you did? That you’re able to love as much and think as much and play as much? Why think you need the whole thing? Where’s the expectation that you need the whole thing coming from?

… America’s a very fragile, democratic experiment predicated on the disposition of the lands of indigenous people and the enslavement of African people and the subjugation of workers and women and the marginalization of gays and lesbians. It has great potential, but this notion that somehow we had it all or ever will have it all—that’s got to go, you’ve got to push it to the side.

And once you push all that to the side, then it tends to evacuate the language of disappointment and the language of failure. And you say, OK, how much have we done? How have we been able to do it? Can we do more? In some situations you can’t do more. It’s like trying to break-dance at seventy-five, you can’t do it anymore! You were a master at sixteen; it’s over! Does that make you a failure? Hell no! …You don’t need to be disappointed you can’t break-dance at seventy-five the way you did at fifteen. The way you can’t make love at eighty the way you did at twenty—so what? Time is real!

Neither West nor any of the other filmmakers and subjects I quote here believes that accepting the brokenness requires—or even invites—resignation. So I am asking myself, what if surrendering my expectation of wholeness and harmony amounted to nothing more than sacrificing an illusion? What if doing that enabled me to drop the burden of disappointment?

A month ago, The Shalom Center (which I have the honor of serving as Board President) presented the playwright Tony Kushner and several Philadelphia-based artists and activists with its Prophetic Voices award. (Here are my remarks on that occasion.) In lieu of a speech, Kushner was interviewed by another honoree, filmmaker Ilana Trachtman. He said on that evening that if President Obama is defeated for re-election, it won’t be because the right has a better candidate or campaign, but on account of the left’s despair, which he characterized as impatience with Obama’s failure to achieve enough change with enough speed to satisfy progressives.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since: my disappointment with so many of Obama’s policies has been vocal. Is it that old infantile disorder, left-wing dissatisfaction? But then I realized that what I feel about Obama isn’t despair. It isn’t that I expected him to bring heaven on earth and find myself crushed by disillusionment. Nor have I given up on him; I want him to be better.

In Freida Lee Mock’s 2006 documentary about Kushner, Wrestling With Angels, he addresses despair as an ethical lapse:

As far as I’m concerned, it is an ethical obligation to look for hope. It’s an ethical obligation not to despair if you can possibly not despair. If you look, there’s always a possibility of finding a place where action can change the course of things.

And maybe that’s what it comes down to, that my idea of that place—of the space for generative action—differs from Kushner’s. That he sees President Obama as more fenced in by systemic exigencies than I do, while I have a hard time getting past the untold billions for Afghanistan, the offshore drilling, the failure to create publicly funded jobs in the face of epidemic unemployment.

But I also see his point. A few months after Obama’s election, I was on a panel with a scholar who said he’d had hopes for Obama, but now he understood they were vain. Expecting Arcadia breeds despair, no doubt, and despair opens space for those who come from certainty to gallop into the frame and seize the day.

In Examined Life, Cornel West says,

[W]hy start with this obsession with wholeness? And if you can’t have it then you’re disappointed, want to have a drink, and melancholia, and blah blah blah blah.

No, you see, the blues—my kind of blues—begins with catastrophe, begins with the angel of history, and Benjamin’s thesis, you see. It begins with the pile-up of wreckage, one pile on another, that’s the starting point. The blues is personal catastrophe lyrically expressed. And Black people in America and in the modern world, given these viscous legacies of white supremacy, it is how do you generate an elegance of earned self-togetherness, so that you have a stick-to-it-ness in the face of the catastrophic, and the calamitous, and the horrendous, and the scandalous, and the monstrous.

West is referring to a famous quote from the philosopher Walter Benjamin, inspired by a little painting of an angel by Paul Klee that he owned. He saw the figure as the angel of history: “His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.”

Elsewhere in the film, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek uses the same word, catastrophe, to demolish our Romantic idea of nature as whole and perfect, with nothing but our own interventions to destabilize the balance:

Nature is a series of unimaginable catastrophes. We profit from them. What is our main source of energy today? Oil. Are we aware what oil is? Oil reserves under the earth are material remains of unimaginable catastrophes. We all know that oil is composed of remains of animal life, plants, and so on. Can you imagine what kind of unthinkable catastrophes had to occur on earth?

We humans have pitched our tents on the wreckage. “Why not have a sense of gratitude that you’re able to do as much as you did?” asks Cornel West. “That you’re able to love as much and think as much and play as much?”

The Secret in Their Eyes comprises two related stories, one an event from twenty-five years earlier, the other a contemporary attempt to make sense of the past and to set it right. One thing I loved about the film is the way shards of dialogue, plot, and image are redeployed from the flashback story to the current one, a mosaic remaking itself, radiating new meanings with each new configuration. One character after another demonstrates both the splintering extremity of human brokenness and the tremendous grace of which we are capable, despite being shattered.

What if that were enough? What energy might flow then, to clear away the debris of despair?

On the second night, instead of a seder, I will share a less-structured meal with friends. During the Passover week, the food we eat will be free of chametz—leavened foods, symbolic of whatever is puffed-up with pride or ego or clogged with resistance in our own selves and societies. And the spiritual nourishment we consume will be meditation and the sharing of teachings on freedom. So I’ve been thinking about what I have to say on the subject.

I’ve just returned from a week or so of traveling, giving talks and taking part in meetings with colleagues across the country. It’s been a hugely interesting and satisfying experience for me, because the messages I’ve been carrying, about defining and asserting an expansive public interest in art and culture, have seemed to be what people now need to hear. It feels wonderful to be told that my work is inspiring. Counteracting the temptation to become puffed-up with it isn’t too hard, because I know there is a long distance to travel between the message that ignites desire for change and actualizing the change one desires.

Have you ever looked at a map of the small-scale territory the escaped slaves traversed in their forty-year journey to the promised land? “Running around in circles” would not be much of an exaggeration. One teaching that makes great sense to me is that it was necessary to delay their arrival until the generation imbued with slave-consciousness had died out, so that upon attaining a place where it was possible to live in liberty, their descendants would be capable of acting as free people.

On Passover, we are asked to retell the story of liberation as if we had ourselves escaped from Mitzrayim, the Hebrew word for Egypt, which is very near to the word for “straits” or “narrow places.” The outward Exodus is seen to symbolize the inner journey out of whatever binds and pinches, whatever holds us back from the realization of our potential, from the exercise of our freedom.

For some time now, when I am called upon to give a talk or write an essay, I have been challenging myself to unzip any feeling of constraint to speak my own truth in my own voice. This has been a remarkable experience for me: many times, I have anticipated that what I have to say will trigger passionate opposition, the kind that shuts people’s ears. Of course, it’s not as if the whole world agrees with me; reasonable people hold all sorts of views. But the more I have allowed myself to express a coherence of inner and outer realities, the more I have showed up as myself, the more people have opened in generosity to what I have to say.

This is an important lesson to me, that the greatest impediment to internal freedom is an outer shell, a persona that fits too tightly, that pinches in important places, with the result that you find yourself speaking words, taking actions, offering gestures which you know to be false. Of course, the world invites this, constantly. If someone approaches me after a talk, on the one hand offering a positive response, and on the other hand seeking agreement with a particular viewpoint, the temptation to nod and say yes is extremely powerful. It takes conscious choice to stop and consider, to condition a response on an inner sense of truth, and to risk making someone who has just said something very nice to me reconsider whether he or she really means it.

Since the topic of many of these conversations is politics, I seem to be involved in a perpetual (if informal) survey of the regard in which my fellow artists and activists hold the actually existing exemplars of our democratic system. It will be unsurprising that the most common criticism of politicians is the false personae so many of them wear, the way they clothe their messages in coded words and concepts that conceal their true nature. To the extent that we believe the system to be conditioned on lies, democracy is always in peril.

Seeking the freedom that amounts to congruence between inner and outer realities doesn’t guarantee that one’s positions will be coherent or true or right by any particular standard. As Isaiah Berlin wrote in his great 1958 essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” “Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.” But they will be freely chosen, which matters a great deal.

This freedom we are given to reject the constraints that keep our essence and persona from coming into alignment and focus is both social and personal. We are coping with daunting economic, social, cultural, and environmental injustice in this country. Yet still, because we can preserve Constitutional freedoms with our intentions and actions, because we can seek and stand up for human rights and the obligations they entail—still, despite formidable countervailing forces, to a remarkable extent, we have the scope to exercise our liberty in freely chosen outward actions.

It’s the inner imposition that still seems most powerful. It amazes me how often I hear people whose work is the expression and communication of deep knowledge—artists, teachers, spiritual leaders—say that they cannot be themselves, they cannot speak their truth, they cannot reveal their feelings, because they feel constrained by others’ expectations. To be sure, there are plenty of rules we must all follow: consideration for our fellow human beings’ feelings, no “Fire!” in crowded places, and so on. But it remains true that censorship is the element of public policy most fully decentralized in this country. So many of us self-censor in anticipation of disapproval that mostly, the inner Pharaoh does the job: there is no need for the heavy hand of the state.

So whether or not you celebrate Passover, please accept my blessings for a season of liberation, the kind that allows all of us to slough off the carapace of a constricting persona, the freedom to choose our own words and actions, and the obligation to demand the same of those who hold our democracy in trust.

One of my strongest desires is help potentiate a paradigm shift in which things like artistic creativity and justice tempered by love move to the center of our social concerns, instead of remaining out on the margins where they’ve been pushed by the mechanistic, materialistic force that has dominated for far too long. Pursuing that desire, I generate essays, talks, workshops, letters, teachings, polemics, parables, and often, these resonate with the people who receive them.

But resonance doesn’t always initialize action. Even when something has the ring of truth, a countervailing force—a powerful inertia—may impede our will to act on it. It’s expressed in different ways:

“I don’t see anyone in Congress who’s going to sponsor a new WPA right now.“

“Yeah, the old healthcare system isn’t working, but people aren’t going to to change; they’re just too comfortable, too lazy, too easily fooled.“

“Teaching to the tests is poisoning the next generation’s education, but all Washington understands is metrics and optics, so what are you going to do?“

“The entire financial system needs an overhaul or the country is going down. But Wall Street will block it, and people are too stupid or too complacent to make it happen despite their objections.“

All of them add up to the same recipe: the fear of alignment with a lost cause, of failing or looking foolish; the irrational conviction that we know the future and it’s against us; anger and resentment at indifference to injustice; all of that baked into a pièce de résistance that keeps us from trying—thus fulfilling the proposition that trying isn’t worth the effort.

The biggest obstacle to progress I encounter, in myself and others, is a immobilizing disappointment. And every day, I see something more clearly. While we can’t know that our efforts will bring the desired results, this much is clear: the longer we postpone the sustained work of shifting the culture toward humane values because the odds are against us, the longer we will wait for the change to begin.

Everything happening in the external world of politics and culture has its correlate in the little world of the individual and family, of course. Through a quirk of the Hebrew calendar, even though the secular dates are weeks apart, this has been a week of yahrtzeits: the anniversary of my father’s death 53 year ago last Saturday; and of my mother’s death in 1999 today.

There are many people who endured much worse childhoods than mine, who grew up in war zones or detention camps or orphanages, sustaining unimaginable abuse. But my household of social and economic marginality, petty crime, ruthless self-preservation—suffice it to say that when I tell the tale, the unfailing response is surprise, the kind you’d reserve for a child with excellent table-manners who just happened to be raised by wolves.

This year, I suppose because I am at such a crossroads in life, the anniversaries hit me hard. I have been easily activated into anger or despair. It has been easy to tip the stream of my thoughts onto a rocky course, where I see myself as singled out for punishment. Along the stream, familiar objects float and bob: the feeling from childhood that I am being used; my identification with distorted ideas, such as the certainty that what I want will never come to pass. I keep hauling myself out of the water, reminding myself that old feelings are dragging me along, getting snagged on new situations. What with toggling back and forth between the limbic system and the neocortex—between emotional activation and rational thought—my brain in getting a big workout, and it is tiring.

Yesterday, a wise friend told me to look at the sense of entitlement, the narcissism, that was feeding the system. Since I prefer to see myself as an altruist, I didn’t much like the view. “You think because you’ve suffered and worked hard and want it so much,” my friend said, “you should have it. But why? Where is that written?“

My friend reminded me how important it is to break the chain between wanting and the expectation of getting. “Hold your desire. Get up every day and make your best offering. Then surrender. It’s out of your hands.“

I am familiar with the teaching that desire is suffering, but for me, it isn’t true. It’s not the wanting, but the conviction that desire should be fulfilled that brings pain. History is full of lost causes. Some stopped being lost and became real changes. Sometimes it happened in a surprising, tectonic shift, sometimes the change came by almost imperceptible degrees. But when such change arrives, it is always in the company of people who didn’t give up on what they knew just because the odds were against them, people who weren’t afraid to want and work, whether or not their wanting was fulfilled.

Surrendering feels like a big relief. I don’t entirely trust my ability to remember that, but I’m guessing life will provide abundant reminders. And along the way, I hope to get up each day, make my best offering, beam my desire into the world like a homing beacon, and tune out the tyranny of the instantly achievable. Desire, offering, surrender.

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.