Arlene Goldbard » z-Published Work http://arlenegoldbard.com culture, politics and spirituality Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:37:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Secular Orthodoxy http://arlenegoldbard.com/2005/10/30/secular-orthodoxy/ http://arlenegoldbard.com/2005/10/30/secular-orthodoxy/#comments Sun, 30 Oct 2005 14:35:45 +0000 Arlene http://arlenegoldbard.com/?p=174 When it comes to questions of religious observance, I am a live-and-let-live liberal. This attitude sometimes brings me into conflict with hard-liners. Some of them are Orthodox religionists and some are part of the “secular orthodoxy” — secular Jews who are intolerant of any approach to religious practice other than their own. The second category is my subject here.

As a devotee of Jewish renewal, I have prayed many times in circumstances reflecting our movement’s commitment to pluralism and tolerance. Picture a large tent filled with motley davveners: on the bimah, leaders guide most of the kehilla in a chant based on the first lines of the Ashrei, while off to one side, a group of worshipers move their bodies in a form of holy yoga based on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and near one wall of the tent, the members of an Orthodox contingent shuckel with heads bent over their Artscroll siddurim, chanting the prayer in its entirety.

Of course, there are limits to tolerance in any setting. Jewish renewalists will never accept practices that put whole groups of people outside the pale. For instance, a group challenging women’s right to be rabbis would never be comfortable with our inclusive values and customs (and vice versa), nor would a group that denied welcome to gay and lesbian Jews and their partners. The guiding principle is to allow each individual the maximum degree of freedom so long as it does not impair the freedom of others to participate fully.

Most religious Jews I’ve met — Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, post-denominational renewalists, and to a lesser extent, Orthodox — are willing to tolerate a range of personal practice as legitimate within K’lal Yisroel, within Judaism. I’ve studied Talmud with Orthodox rabbis and davvened at Conservative shuls and been made to feel warmly welcome each time. But there are too many exceptions to this general tolerance, too many people who feel entitled to dictate to others what is legitimate for Jews and what is not, rather than leaving this intensely personal matter between each Jew and the Source of Being, where it belongs.

In the circles I frequent, everyone has had such experiences with Orthodox Jews. The funniest one in my repertoire happened over the phone. I once purchased a gift from an online Judaica store in New York. When it did not arrive, I phoned to track the order. The man who answered engaged me in conversation while we waited for an update from the shipping department. He asked me if I belonged to a shul. I had already been able to discern that his own orientation was far more Orthodox than mine, so I dreaded the reactions this line of questioning might bring. But I did my best to give short, friendly answers. My interrogator quickly established that my congregation did not have a mechitza (a barrier that separates male from female worshippers). “Let me ask you something,” he said, in a mild, bantering tone. I consented. “Why can you not accept the Torah as it was handed down from Moshe Rabbenu (Moses our teacher), perfect and complete?” I said the Torah was open to interpretation: we didn’t follow the instruction to put people to death for wearing wool and linen together, or make them sleep in the wild for a week if they had a skin rash, did we? “Interpretation?” he replied. “We don’t use that word!”

To that man, my understanding of what it is to be a Jew is so flawed I might not be allowed into the category at all. But who appointed him to vet my spiritual life? I choose not to cede power to the strictest constructionists among my people. I believe those who say they find in adherence to traditional halakha (religious law) an encompassing discipline that illuminates their lives. I respect their right to make such choices so long as they are not imposed on others. And I want them to respect my choices in return. I even hold out hope that some day they will.

But in the last few years, my more serious complaints have been with members of the secular orthodoxy. I would no more say that all secular Jews are intolerant than that all Orthodox are. But clumped at both ends of the spectrum of religious observance are groups of Jews who feel entitled to force their own customs on those whose personal practice is different. They lack the generosity of spirit and open-mindedness to tolerate divergence from their own customs when they encounter it. Consider these examples of secular orthodoxy, all of which I know either from direct personal experience or from first-person accounts.

¶ My husband is a convert to Judaism, having been granted his conversion by a Conservative bet din (rabbinic court). Most religious Jews he’s encountered — Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, and post-denominational renewalists — have followed the tradition of welcoming the stranger, gladly accepting his membership in the community. In contrast, there is tremendous controversy in the Orthodox world over the legitimacy of non-Orthodox conversions. But there’s another issue that doesn’t get as much attention: the peculiar treatment of conversion in the world of secular orthodoxy.

For secular Jews, being Jewish is a fact of cultural and genetic inheritance, so it puzzles them how precisely it is possible for someone to become Jewish. Could I wake up in the morning and declare myself Asian or Native American? Then how can the descendent of generations of WASPs declare himself a Jew? Many times I have seen secular-orthodox Jews tell my husband — who takes his spiritual practice seriously— that he is not a Jew at all! At a party a few months ago, a senior member of this contingent approached my husband, whom she had just met, to declare in a voice loud enough to heard by everyone present, “You’re not Jewish!” “Yes I am,” he replied. She insisted more loudly: “You’re not Jewish!” “Yes I am,” he retorted, “and I have a certificate from my bet din to prove it.” She renewed her assertion a third time: “You’re not Jewish!” “Yes I am,” he replied, “I’ve even been circumcised twice (medically at birth and symbolically through the brit dam at his conversion)!” I doubt she found this convincing, but it did end the assault.

¶ A friend was called on the carpet by his employer, the chair of the Board of an organization with the word “Jewish” in its name. Her complaint was that “I’ve heard from a couple of people who saw you make presentations and you were coming off too Jewish. Everyone knows we’re Jewish, you don’t have to mention it all the time.”

¶ When a spokesperson for one secular-orthodox organization welcomed participants to its flagship event, he alluded to the value of welcoming controversy: “In our tradition,” he said, “questioning and debate are positive practices.” He was reprimanded for using the phrase “in our tradition,” because it was alleged to create discomfort for those who did not see themselves in that light, both non-Jews and the secular orthodox in the audience.

¶ The director of a secular-orthodox organization reported on the results of focus groups with young people, convened for the purpose of learning how to increase participation from their demographic segment. “They loved everything about it,” she said, “except the word ‘Jewish’ in our name. Maybe we should consider changing it.”

¶ A friend working for a major secular-orthodox organization outlined plans to promote the group’s events by partnering with synagogues and other religious organizations, getting them to cosponsor and help to publicize events that might interest their memberships. (The group had successfully entered into such arrangements with social-service and issue-based groups.) This was rejected on the grounds that it endangered the organization’s real mission, which — despite many public claims to serve the whole community — everyone knew was to serve the unaffiliated. When my friend protested that the organization’s declared mission was to be inclusive, he was accused of attempting to move it in a religious direction. The dominant feeling was that there was a risk of contamination or domination in any association with religious Jews.

¶ An employee of a secular-orthodox Jewish organization was reprimanded for including a small, abstract Magen David in a poster. The grounds? That it was a religious symbol and therefore offensive to the secular.

The intolerance of groups at the extremes of the religious spectrum tends to be justified by its perpetrators as a necessary defense. They cultivate a skewed world-view, in which the group practicing intolerance toward others is depicted as oppressed, marginal, in need of special protection. Even though secular Jews make up by far the largest sector of the Jewish population, the secular-orthodox view portrays them as some sort of endangered species.

Some Jews choose a secular path out of a conviction that what others see as supernatural or divine is merely deception, or out of a critique of organized religion. Some make that choice because they have never been able to get over a repressive or hypocritical religious upbringing, throwing out religion as a whole with the bathwater of their childhood wounds. The reasons may be as various as those for choosing a path of faith, but what separates the secular orthodox from the merely secular has nothing to do with such reasons: it is simply that they’ve succumbed to the pitfalls underlying all intolerance, stereotyping and scapegoating, generalizing about a whole group on the basis of specific individuals or worse, based on nothing more than propaganda.

I’m certain that someone fascinated by psychological motivations could unearth the roots of the secular-orthodox mind-set, but I’m not as interested in explaining this harmful behavior as I am in bringing it to light so it can be changed. Like all forms of intolerance, secular orthodoxy is damaging to the believer as well as the object.

By segregating themselves from their religious brothers and sisters, secular orthodox Jews deprive themselves of essential challenges and opportunities. They have a lot to learn about cultivating hope and possibility — and about articulating common values that build community — from faith-based organizing efforts. It’s hard to beat tzedakah v’chesed (justice and loving-kindness) as a platform. And in a time when progressive forces are sadly in the minority, none of us can afford pass up opportunities to learn.

Secular Jews are the majority of Jews, and it is a fundamental principle of civil society that majorities should behave well toward minorities. Many secular-orthodox Jews espouse progressive politics, yet see nothing wrong in meting out dismissive, disrespectful treatment to members of their own ethnic group. How can this stance be in secular Jews’ own enlightened self-interest? The world progressives are trying to help into being is pluralistic, egalitarian and diverse. Compared to the enormous differences in belief and practice common among the peoples of the earth, the differences between religious and secular Jews pale to insignificance. What does it say about the world’s prospects if we can’t work together in a spirit of tolerance and respect? How can just societies be built on such foundations?

The secular-orthodox insist on their right to be included in the Jewish community, and I agree with them: there should be no litmus test of belief — or unbelief — that stands in the way of respect and inclusion in K’lal Yisroel. Those who erect such obstacles deserve to be rebuked and given the opportunity to change their damaging behaviors. I am grateful for this opportunity to try.

]]> http://arlenegoldbard.com/2005/10/30/secular-orthodoxy/feed/ 2 The First Consultant http://arlenegoldbard.com/2004/04/08/the-first-consultant/ http://arlenegoldbard.com/2004/04/08/the-first-consultant/#comments Fri, 09 Apr 2004 01:11:02 +0000 Arlene http://new.arlenegoldbard.com/?p=146
© Arlene Goldbard 2004

Joseph is a fruitful bough, a fruitful bough by a well; whose branches run over the wall…

Genesis 49:22

The consulting profession has come into its own in the modern age, both as a line of work and the butt of jokes. Nowadays work is often so complex, requiring so much specialized knowledge, that it seems sensible to streamline problem-solving with the occasional employment of qualified advisors — even though the water-cooler crowd defines a consultant as “someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.”

But consulting is by no means an artifact of our times. Its lineage begins before the exodus from Egypt, in the person of Joseph, son of Jacob, the advice-giver whom Pharaoh chose to administer the affairs of his vast domain. In the few chapters of Genesis devoted to his story, Joseph set in place the key features of the consulting profession, shaping the generations that followed.

Like all good consultants, Joseph’s skills at perception and strategy stemmed from childhood necessity. Typically for a consultant, Joseph came from a dysfunctional family. He was the first child of Rachel, his father’s first love and second wife. Both wives were sisters, and both encouraged Jacob to impregnate their maids as well, the four mothers producing thirteen children in all. Jacob loved Joseph “more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age” (Genesis 37:3).

Jacob showed Joseph special favor, arousing envy in the boy’s siblings; Joseph fed the flames of jealousy by sharing with his brothers dreams in which they bowed down before him, “and they hated him even more.” (Genesis 37:5) When they had him alone in the wilderness, Joseph’s brothers contemplated murdering him, but at the urgings of Reuben, the eldest, settled for casting him into a pit. While Reuben was away, the other brothers, seeing a chance to profit, fished Joseph out and sold him to passing traders who then re-sold him in Egypt to Potiphar, a captain of Pharaoh’s guard. The brothers contrived to convince their father that Joseph was dead by bloodying the boy’s coat and hinting at wild beasts, so that “Jacob tore his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his son many days” (Genesis 37:34). The hard lessons Joseph learned from his brothers (especially about watching his back and biding his time) sustained him through many ordeals, enabling Joseph to save his family’s lives and achieve a grand tikkun — a healing — of the conflicts that caused his suffering in childhood.

Like all good consultants, Joseph had a keen sense of ethics, taking care not to transgress them. Potiphar, seeing that Joseph was under Divine protection, appointed the Hebrew overseer of his household, “and it came to pass from the time that he had made him overseer in his house, and over all that he had, that the Lord blessed the Egyptian’s house for Joseph’s sake; and the blessing of the Lord was upon all that he had in the house, and in the field” (Genesis 39:5). But Potiphar’s wife lusted after the handsome Joseph, pressuring him to sleep with her. He refused, citing loyalty to both his master and to God: “There is none greater in this house than I; nor has he kept back any thing from me but you, because you are his wife; how then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” (Genesis 39:5) Incensed at Joseph’s rejection, Potiphar’s wife concocted a plot, seizing a piece of Joseph’s clothing and telling her husband “the Hebrew servant, whom you have brought to us, came in to me to mock me; and it came to pass, as I lifted up my voice and cried, that he left his garment with me, and fled out” (Genesis 39:17-18). Furious at this purported betrayal, Potiphar had Joseph imprisoned.

Like all good consultants, Joseph honed his abilities through serial challenges, finding advantage where others perceived only trouble. Prison was quite a comedown compared to Potiphar’s household, but Joseph soon endeared himself to the warden, prospering through demonstrations of his formidable management skills. “And the keeper of the prison committed to Joseph’s hand all the prisoners who were in the prison; and whatever was done there, he was the doer of it” (Genesis 39:22). Eventually, into the ranks of inmates in Joseph’s care came both Pharaoh’s chief butler and his chief baker; both had been imprisoned indefinitely for giving offense to Pharaoh.

Like all good consultants, Joseph took care to speak with everyone, gathering useful information and contacts wherever he went. One morning, when he went in to the butler and baker, Joseph “looked upon them, and, behold, they were sad. And he asked Pharaoh’s officers who were with him in the custody of his lord’s house, saying, ‘Why do you look so sad today?’ And they said to him, ‘We have dreamed a dream, and there is no interpreter of it’” (Genesis 40:6-8). Joseph was glad to oblige. Of the butler’s dream of a three-branched grapevine, Joseph said: “This is the interpretation of it; The three branches are three days; and within three days shall Pharaoh lift up your head, and restore you to your place; and you shall deliver Pharaoh’s cup into his hand, after the former manner when you were his butler” (Genesis 40:12-13). Considering his own future, Joseph added a request: “But think on me when it shall be well with you, and show kindness, I beg you, to me, and make mention of me to Pharaoh, and bring me out of this house” (Genesis 40:14).

Like all good consultants, Joseph did not shrink from delivering difficult truths when necessary. To the baker’s dream of three baskets of food eaten by birds, he offered this interpretation: “The three baskets are three days; and within three days shall Pharaoh lift up your head off you, and shall hang you on a tree; and the birds shall eat your flesh off you” (Genesis 40:18-19). Both interpretations came true: the baker lost his head and the butler was restored to his position, but having regained his comfort, he forgot all about Joseph. Two years later, Pharaoh had a pair of disturbing dreams that none of his magicians could interpret. In one, seven gaunt cows ate seven sleekly fat ones and looked no better for it; in the other, seven desiccated ears of grain devoured seven plump ears. Pharaoh’s need for interpretation awakened the chief butler’s memory of the Hebrew prisoner. Hearing his story, Pharaoh sent to the prison for Joseph.

Like all good consultants, Joseph understood the importance of a dazzling first impression (not to mention good grooming), and kept an eye out for future gigs. Joseph “shaved himself, and changed his garment, and came in to Pharaoh” (Genesis 41:14). In Pharaoh’s presence, he displayed appropriate modesty, saying the power to understand dreams is “not in me; God shall give Pharaoh a favorable answer” (Genesis 41:16). He then proceeded to knock Pharoah’s sandals off with an interpretation that included not only the dreams’ meaning, but a bonus of free advice about how Pharaoh ought to respond. “The dream of Pharaoh is one; God has revealed to Pharaoh what he is about to do. The seven good cows are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years; the dream is one. And the seven thin and gaunt cows that came up after them are seven years; and the seven empty ears blasted by the east wind shall be seven years of famine” (Genesis 41:25-27). “Now therefore let Pharaoh select a man discreet and wise,” Joseph continued, “and set him over the land of Egypt. Let Pharaoh do this, and let him appoint officers over the land, and take up the fifth part of the land of Egypt in the seven years of plenty. And let them gather all the food of those good years that come, and lay up grain under the hand of Pharaoh, and let them keep food in the cities. And that food shall be for store to the land against the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt; that the land perish not through the famine” (Genesis 41:33-36).

Like all good consultants, Joseph knew the extent of his own abilities. He did not engage in false modesty, and never made a commitment he couldn’t keep. When Pharaoh, impressed, “said to his servants, ‘Can we find such a one as this is, a man in whom the spirit of God is?’” (Genesis 41:38), Joseph did not shirk. Pharaoh made him second-in-command, saying, “For as much as God has shown you all this, there is none so discreet and wise as you are; you shall be over my house, and according to your word shall all my people be ruled; only in the throne will I be greater than you. And Pharaoh said to Joseph, ‘See, I have set you over all the land of Egypt’” (Genesis 41:39-41). Joseph did all that he had promised, storing up food in the fat years for distribution in the lean ones.

Like all good consultants, Joseph was aware that his authority derived from higher sources, not his own power, and with awareness came unease. He was prey to the same temptations that beset any consultant acting on the authority of higher-ups. Joseph knew that ultimately, his success was a gift from God. That’s why he named his “firstborn Manasseh; ‘For God,’ said he, ‘has made me forget all my toil, and all my father’s house.’ And the name of the second called he Ephraim; ‘For God has caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction’” (Genesis 41:51-52). But in Egypt, every day brought reminders that it was Pharaoh’s power he wielded. When famine came, “the people cried to Pharaoh for bread” — not to Joseph — “and Pharaoh said to all the Egyptians, ‘Go to Joseph; what he said to you, do’” (Genesis 41:55).

Joseph’s greatest ethical test came when his brothers journeyed from Canaan, where famine was severe and unrelenting, to buy food in Egypt. When “Joseph’s brothers came, and bowed down before him with their faces to the earth” (Genesis 42:6), he pretended not to know them. Instead, he “made himself strange to them, and spoke roughly to them” (Genesis 42:7). He accused them of spying, placed them in custody, and forced them to prove their honesty by surrendering Simeon as a hostage, to be redeemed when they brought their youngest brother, Benjamin — the only other child of Rachel, Joseph’s mother — to Egypt. Whether Joseph acted the part of cruel overlord for strategic reasons, out of desire to set eyes upon his only full brother, or to repay his other brothers’ heartlessness — whether he succumbed to the temptation to exercise the boss’s powers as if they were his own — we can never know. But we do know that he paid for his play-acting in tears because he “he turned himself away from them, and wept” (Genesis 42:24) before resuming the charade.

Like all good consultants, Joseph understood that the deepest lessons are self-taught, and he knew how to bring about such learning. Subjected to the callous whims of Pharaoh’s vizier, Joseph’s brothers suffered, wondering how they had brought such torment upon themselves. Seeking a reason for their punishment, they reckoned up their crimes, their abandonment of Joseph topping the list: “and they said one to another, ‘We are truly guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the anguish of his soul, when he besought us, and we would not hear; therefore is this distress come upon us’” (Genesis 42:21). “And they knew not that Joseph understood them; for he spoke to them by an interpreter” (Genesis 42:23). Despite his brothers’ remorse, Joseph did not relent. In fact, he upped the ante, contriving to replace his brothers’ money in their sacks, so that when they returned to Jacob’s house with both grain and money, “their heart failed them, and they were afraid, saying one to another, ‘What is this that God has done to us’”? (Genesis 42:28). Nevertheless Jacob, having lost both Joseph and Simeon, refused to send Benjamin to Egypt, fearing the loss of a third son. It was not until the family once again faced starvation that Jacob consented to the journey, displaying an aptitude for optimism that hinted at the origins of Joseph’s talents: he told his children to “take of the best fruits in the land in your utensils, and carry down a present to the man, a little balm, and a little honey, spices, and myrrh, nuts, and almonds; and take double money in your hand; and the money that was brought again in the mouth of your sacks, carry it again in your hand; perhaps it was an oversight; take also your brother, and arise, go back to the man; and God Almighty give you mercy before the man” (Genesis 43:11-14).

The brothers returned to Egypt full of trepidation, with Benjamin in tow; Joseph prepared a lavish welcome to assuage their fears. When Joseph saw Benjamin, he was overcome: “and he sought where to weep; and he entered into his chamber, and wept there,” yet he once again “washed his face, and went out, and controlled himself” (Genesis 43:31) in order to contrive another trick, another test, concealing his silver cup in Benjamin’s pack, and sending his steward after the brothers to “discover” it. “Arise,” he ordered the steward, “follow after the men; and when you do overtake them, say to them, ‘Why have you repaid evil for good? Is not this it in which my lord drinks, and whereby indeed he divines? You have done evil in so doing.’ And he overtook them, and he spoke to them these same words” (Genesis 44:4-6). Sure of themselves, the brothers denied the theft. When the cup was found in Benjamin’s pack, they were devastated, returning at once to Joseph’s house and prostrating themselves before him. They pleaded for mercy, recounting Jacob’s agony at Joseph’s disappearance, offering themselves to be punished in Benjamin’s stead to spare their father the loss of Rachel’s second son.

Like all good consultants, Joseph knew when to heed his feelings, despite the risks. Hearing his brothers’ anguish, “Joseph could not refrain himself before all those who stood by him; and he cried, ‘Cause every man to go out from me.’ And there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known to his brothers. And he wept aloud; and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard” (Genesis 45:1-2).

Like all good consultants, Joseph could see the big picture. At the revelation of his true identity, Joseph’s brothers were astounded, fearing his punishment. But he understood the greater purpose served by their abandonment, hastening to reassure them, “be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that you sold me here; for God did send me before you to preserve life. For these two years has the famine been in the land; and yet there are five years, when there shall neither be plowing nor harvest. And God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So now it was not you who sent me here, but God; and he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt” (Genesis 45:5-8).

Like all good consultants, Joseph understood the value of a win-win solution. As Joseph had served Pharaoh, Pharaoh protected Joseph’s family. “He kissed all his brothers, and wept on them; and after that his brothers talked with him. And the report of it was heard in Pharaoh’s house, saying, ‘Joseph’s brothers have come’; and it pleased Pharaoh well, and his servants. And Pharaoh said to Joseph, ‘Say to your brothers, “Do this; load your beasts, and go to the land of Canaan; and take your father and your households, and come to me; and I will give you the good of the land of Egypt, and you shall eat the fat of the land’” (Genesis 45:15-18).

Like all consultants, Joseph was unable to foresee the ultimate impact of his work. When Joseph’s brothers returned home laden with gifts and told their father his long-lost son was alive — and what’s more, that he ruled over Egypt at Pharaoh’s side — Jacob was shaken, but determined to see his son before he died. As Jacob traveled to Egypt, God spoke to him, saying “I am God, the God of your father; fear not to go down to Egypt; for I will there make of you a great nation; I will go down with you to Egypt; and I will also surely bring you up again; and Joseph shall put his hand upon your eyes. And Jacob rose up from Beersheba; and the sons of Israel carried Jacob their father, and their little ones, and their wives, in the wagons which Pharaoh had sent to carry him” (Genesis 46:3-5). Jacob and his offspring were given good land for their flocks and herds, and Joseph continued to work for Pharaoh, bartering first the Egyptians’ money, then their animals, and finally their land in exchange for food and seed, until at the famine’s end Pharaoh owned all the wealth of Egypt that had not been set aside for the priestly caste. When Jacob finally died, Joseph buried him in Canaan with Abraham and Sarah, and Jacob’s first wife, Joseph’s aunt Leah, repeating his forgiveness of his brothers: “‘You thought evil against me; but God meant it to good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. Now therefore do not fear; I will nourish you, and your little ones.’ And he comforted them, and spoke kindly to them” (Genesis 50:20-21).

But as often happens, security based on the boss’s favor may quickly be withdrawn when a new boss emerges. “The people of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and became exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them. And there arose up a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph. And he said to his people, ‘Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we; come on, let us deal wisely with them; lest they multiply, and it may come to pass, that, when there would be any war, they should join our enemies, and fight against us; and so get them out of the land.’ Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses” (Exodus 1:7-11).

Was it a good thing that Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery? Did it enable him to scale the heights of Egyptian bureaucracy and provide the Israelites with a new home and full bellies?

Maybe so, but look a little further: wasn’t it Joseph’s alliance with Egypt’s boss that led the Israelites to drop their guard, settle in that narrow land, and multiply? And wasn’t that precisely why the new boss made them slaves?

Maybe so, but ultimately, the oppression of enslavement might have been needed to teach the Israelites the true meaning and value of freedom. Perhaps nothing short of the entrenched power of a tyrannical Pharaoh could have produced a Moses, a leader who could simultaneously inhabit two identities, royal prince and child of slaves, who was uniquely able to imagine freedom.

Next time you are tempted to repeat a consultant joke, give this noble profession the respect its founder warrants. Where would we be now if Joseph had jettisoned his principles and said yes to Potiphar’s wife, or donned a mask of false modesty and said no to Pharaoh’s call for an interpreter of dreams?

]]> http://arlenegoldbard.com/2004/04/08/the-first-consultant/feed/ 1 Why Art Matters: Bringing Light to A Dark Time http://arlenegoldbard.com/2003/10/11/why-art-matters-bringing-light-to-a-dark-time-2/ http://arlenegoldbard.com/2003/10/11/why-art-matters-bringing-light-to-a-dark-time-2/#comments Sat, 11 Oct 2003 16:54:17 +0000 Arlene http://new.arlenegoldbard.com/?p=152
New College of California, 22 October 2003
© Arlene Goldbard 2003
Not to be reprinted without permission from the author

Before I begin, I want to offer a dedication. Each of us is one link in a chain of souls that stretches back to the beginning of human history and forward to its end. When we stand to offer whatever wisdom can be drawn from our own lives and thoughts, the voices of our teachers echo in our hearts, and our voices extend to the students of our teachers and to their students, and to their students, generation to generation to generation.

I’d like to dedicate my talk to the memory of the great teacher and student Paulo Freire, whose brilliant work helped us understand how minds may be colonized by oppressive ideas, and how culture can help those who live as the passive objects of history to become its subjects. These are two of the themes I want to talk to you about tonight. May his memory be a blessing to all those who are touched by his work.

Let’s start with a reality check. How many of us see ourselves as reasonably intelligent, perceptive people, who can generally comprehend what is happening around us? (Show of hands)

And how many of us still have trouble believing that Arnold Schwarzenegger has been elected governor? Like when you wake up in the morning and glance at the headlines, is there a persistent little voice in your head that says “Holy shit, I still can’t believe it!”? (Show of hands)

The way I see it, there are two possible explanations for this dissonance. Either we have sadly overestimated our ability to perceive what is actually happening, or there is a warp in the fabric we are being asked to accept as reality.

My money is on the second proposition. For about half our time together this evening, I am going to tell you why I believe the reality we are being asked to accept is profoundly distorted, and suggest what we can do about it. At the end of my talk, we’ll have time for questions and discussion.

When we encounter a remarkable dissonance between reality as we perceive it and what others are telling us is real, that triggers our anxiety. Some people hate this feeling so much, their response is to do everything in their power to end it. They anesthetize themselves with the drugs that support the illusions of ego; they numb themselves with conspicuous consumption; they seek to dispel their own sense of helplessness by bending others to their will; or if they happen to be world leaders, they order troops halfway around the world to bomb their anxiety into oblivion.

But some of us embrace our anxiety because we know it carries essential information. The feeling that we are living in a surreal society is a sign, the canary in the coal mine. It says that something big is happening, and we had better pay attention. My friend Gary Stewart describes himself as being not on the cutting edge, but on the bleeding edge, of cultural change. Here on the bleeding edge, we can see that there is a great deal of movement, conflict, and dissonance. We cannot know now whether the contractions we feel are birth pangs or death throes, whether we will live to see an old paradigm crumble and give way to a new, more encompassing understanding. But we can welcome our anxiety — that surreal feeling gathering in the pit of the stomach — because it awakens us to our task as midwives for a new paradigm, and wide-awake is what we absolutely need to be.

In the old paradigm, art is entertainment, a marginal enterprise of no great consequence. Attempts to justify public arts funding, for instance, are almost always made on the basis of secondary effects that are presumed to carry more weight: we should support the arts because they create jobs; we should support the arts because they attract industry to a community or because students who take art classes earn higher test scores, or because babies who listen to Mozart in the womb read at an earlier age. If you want to know how effective such justifications have been in convincing public policy-makers — those guardians of the old paradigm — consider that the budget of the California Arts Council, whose advocates have been making these arguments for decades, was cut from $32 million two years ago to $1 million today, effectively ending its grants programs.

Out here on the bleeding edge of the new paradigm, we perceive that culture is central to our future, that in fact, culture is the crucible in which social change can now take place. We perceive that art expresses our reasons for living and for dying. We are part of the phenomenon the writer Carlos Fuentes has described as the “emergence of cultures as the protagonists of history.” We feel the power of cultural expression to illuminate, inspire, and connect; and at the same time, we see how this power may be used to obscure, dishearten and isolate.

Everywhere we turn, the tools of cultural expression — audio-visual media, computers, publications, every sort of sound and image — are being used to construct false realities and impose these falsehoods on huge segments of society.

This cultural manipulation has been so skillful and seamless that earlier this month, millions of citizens voluntarily surrendered the right to govern this vast state to an animated celluloid image of muscle-bound vengeance.

Paulo Freire wrote that each era is characterized by its own “complex of ideas, hopes, doubts, values and challenges in dialectical interaction with their opposites.” In his terms, that is our “thematic universe.”

At one pole of the dialectic, life is tightly compartmentalized. Questions of public policy are reduced to trivialities: instead of democratic dialogue about our cultural values and how we wish them to be reflected in our laws and social arrangements, we are given opportunities to make fake choices predigested by those who think they know better. Should the state spend 3 cents person on the arts, or should we fight really hard to up that to where it was before the cuts, still less than a dollar per capita? Should we cut visual art or music classes to save money in the public schools while we spend it on prisons?

In our thematic universe, insistent, pervasive forces tell us we have no way to engage with the great ideas and challenges of our time, that the best we can do is go along with the game, pretending that the choice between Davis and Schwarzenegger is democracy at its finest. They tell us the best way to live is to stick to a little life, tightly bounded by family, work, and consumption. They tell us to keep our heads down and hope for the best, which increasingly translates into the hope that not too much will be taken away from us.

Being attuned to this voice, being addicted to its perpetual whisper — that is the common trance of our time. Far too many of us stumble through life under its spell.

The countervailing voice — the voice of wakefulness, a voice which is to a large degree carried by artists, activists and intellectuals like those in this room tonight — asserts the interconnectedness of all life, our mutual responsibility, our essential equality, the moral grandeur of which human beings are capable.

There is a mystical idea that each blade of grass has its own angel whose only purpose is to hover overhead repeatedly whispering a single word: “Grow, grow!” In the warped reality imposed on our societies by what Hans Magnus Enzensberger has called the consciousness industry — which we might also call the cultural-industrial complex — there is a malicious spirit dogging each and every one of us, whispering in our ears that we should “Shrink, shrink!” to compliance and passivity.

Which voice will we listen to? As artists, activists and intellectuals, which words will we speak?

We are in a dark time, here on the leading wedge — the bleeding edge — of cultural change, we are pushing into terra incognita. To hack our way out of the thicket of false realities, to shine a light on real possibility, we possess powerful tools: vast creativity, resilience, resourcefulness.

Our task is not one of manufacturing hope from the remnants of despair: false hope obscures reality, impairing our ability to act. Instead, our task is to see clearly, and through our clear sight, to help awaken awareness, empathy, and self-respect in others.

When we see through imposed realities, we are reminded of the essential truths of the human condition. These are the things that most of us know, but under the pressures of the common trance, it has become uncool or embarrassing to say so. In the inspired words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, our true consciousness is one of “radical amazement.” We know we are living on an enormous rock spinning through space. Through the prodigious investigations of science we know a great deal about how that rock and all its component parts and companions behave. Increasingly, we know almost all there is to know about the how of life. But no matter how hard we try to explain things, we can never know why we are here.

We are reminded of this truth when we experience the ineffable: gazing out over the Grand Canyon, standing at the edge of the ocean, listening to music that transports us to another dimension, imaginatively entering the life of another human being as portrayed onstage or onscreen. When we are present to this truth — when we are fully awake in our lives — the common trance has no attraction for us. We cannot be manipulated into using other people as things, into wasting our spirits in the preoccupations and distractions of a shrunken life. We can face disappointment without surrendering desire, we can pursue desire without expectation, suppressing neither vulnerability nor courage.

When we are awake to our radical amazement, astounding truths of our existence emerge. A core element of the common trance is to see the problems of the world as overwhelming, intractable, and dangerous even to contemplate. People who feel this way retreat into private life; socially, they are compliant and easily intimidated. To promote this stance, the operatives of the cultural-industrial complex have effected a transformation of consciousness described by the great sociologist C. Wright Mills as the conversion of public issues into private troubles.

If you can’t get a job, that’s a private trouble and a private shame, not the expression of an exploitive economy or a degraded public sector. The vast migrations from the south to the north of this planet by what the Europeans euphemistically call “guest workers” are private troubles multiplied by millions. People make the unfortunate choice to be born to starving parents, or have too many siblings, or forget to obtain higher education, or merely have the bad judgment to live in a country that globalization is remaking into a feed lot for cheap labor — and isn’t that just too bad for them? But hey, that’s their problem to solve.

In reality, our public issues are approachable. Everything we need to heal the world is already in place on our poor suffering planet. There is enough food to feed the hungry, care for the sick, shelter for the homeless, love for the rejected. In the end, the obstacle is not a dearth of resources or ideas, it’s getting human beings to agree on a course of action.

Let me give you an example. I am an admirer of the economist Amartya Sen, whose ground-breaking work on the causes of famine turned on the elegantly simple observation that “Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.” The impoverishment of much of the world, which we are now accustomed to see as private troubles (or at best an “act of God”), is in reality the aggregate of decisions by some human beings that poorer people’s access to food and the other means of sustenance is a negligible concern. Reams of analysis on famine and every other social problem have been published, and much of it ignores this basic truth: the main thing holding us back from making needed change is awareness strong and clear enough to rouse us, to turn us toward healing the world and to reject what keeps us from it.

Artists have the power to shine a light on these truths, to bring light into a dark time. But we don’t always use it. The common trance is not the only form of waking slumber. As we see all around us in the tidal wave of advertising that engulfs our public space, even artistic creativity can be distorted toward greedy or heartless ends.

Even positive impulses, such as the desire to oppose injustice, can be distorted into oppressions. Consider how expression and creativity are suppressed in authoritarian states, where a party line rejects artwork that does not reflect the myth of the state as the source of justice and freedom. In any society, in any movement on the right or left, there are always ideologues ready to tell us what we must do to be real artists, what style or content we must adopt. But in truth, adherence to any ideology or fixed position puts us to sleep. Instead of responding to reality as it unfolds in the moment, loyalty to an ideology causes us to view experience through a grid of preconceptions. We cannot see what is there, only our ideas about it.

In the face of all this, how do artists and intellectuals remain awake and aware? How do we keep our own vision clear? It seems to me that falling into complacency is very easy, but the antidote is close to hand: self-questioning, rather than locking onto a position and holding tight. It is human to want to feel confirmed in our convictions, especially when we espouse marginal or controversial views. But this often translates into insulating oneself from the world with a cocoon of easy approval. This form of comfort is a trap, luring us like the sweet scent of a poisonous flower.

Earlier, I invited you to welcome your anxiety as a sign that you are awake. Now I advise you to welcome self-questioning as the means of staying that way. Every one of us views the world through warps and flaws and biases in our perceptual apparatus; no one is a perfectly clear lens. No one can bring the full picture into focus simultaneously. Identifying with any interpretation leaves others out. To keep our vision clear, it is essential to remain aware of our own particular distortions, to interrogate our own assumptions.

I want to touch on just one of many possible examples, the problem of figure and ground. Have you seen that optical puzzle that transforms the image of a goblet into two people in profile, face-to-face? If you stare long enough at the goblet, the profiles pop out. Once you get the knack of it, it’s easy to toggle the two images at will: goblet-profiles-goblet-profiles.

This trick demonstrates a characteristic of human perception. Images of both goblet and profiles are there all along. What changes is our perception of the figure and the ground on which it rests: when we bring one into the foreground, the other recedes. The imposed realities of the consciousness industry often turn on such matters of figure and ground. When we try to understand what is happening around us, what do we tend to see as foreground or the main event, and what tends to fade into the background?

We encounter many situations where designations of figure and ground are central to meaning, forcing a particular interpretation. For example, in medicine, the intended effects of a drug are brought to the foreground by characterizing its other effects — equally real and often equally profound — as “side-effects.”

Or, as we’ve seen so much lately, the language of war is full of terms that assert a fixed relationship between figure and ground. Bombs are aimed at “strategic targets,” such as military installations. If they miss the mark and destroy a schoolyard, that’s called “collateral damage,” a bloodless term for “side-effects.”

When war statistics are announced at a press conference, a uniformed spokesperson lists successes: how many planes and tanks destroyed, how many soldiers killed or captured. A reporter might flip figure and ground, probing beyond the euphemism of “collateral damage” to learn about civilian casualties. A lot rests on which aspect of the war is considered the foreground: if the number of non-combatants killed vastly exceeds the number of enemy soldiers, as in Vietnam, perhaps this will become the foreground, and the war will lose popular support.

In magic, this is called “misdirection,” creating a distraction to direct audience members’ attention elsewhere while sleight-of-hand is being performed. When George Bush and his minions do it on television — shoving arguments about 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction into the background and foregrounding the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes for their own sake — I think of the end of the Wizard of Oz, with the wizard insisting that Dorothy and her friends should “ignore the man behind the curtain.”

Artists have the power to pull back the curtain, allowing reality to be seen in its full complexity.

Let me tell you about theater artists Paul Heritage and Barbara Santos, who work with the Center for the Theatre of the Oppressed in Rio, Augusto Boal’s organization. In the Community, Culture and Globalization anthology (available free from the publications section of www.rockfound.org), Paul wrote about a project they did in prisons in Brazil, working with both guards and prisoners. Going into the project, the foreground seemed clear: the appalling situation of the prisoners was the main concern, with guards perceived primarily as obstacles to the work.

As Paul wrote, “The role the guard has come to play in the prison is to extend the boundaries of punishment beyond that of the sentence. To do so they must sever the human connection the men have with each other, with themselves as guards and with society beyond the prison. The theater we are trying to create seeks to do the opposite.”

But what they learned through that theater work is that the roles guards play are also conditioned on the treatment meted out to them by society, which then helps to shape their treatment of prisoners. “What I could not have predicted,” Paul wrote, “was the level of emotion and anger toward the society that discriminates against them for where they work. As one of them said in an early workshop, the three worst jobs in Sao Paulo are street cleaner, grave digger and prison guard, but the prison guard is the worst because it combines the work of the other two. Nor could I have expected to hear a guard say at the end of one of the workshops that he loved the chance to do the drama games because for the two hours of the workshop he forgot he was in prison.”

It would be ridiculous to claim that doing theater work together will make guards and prisoners one big happy family. But neither are their human potentials completely circumscribed by their respective roles: just as not every prisoner is a hero, not every guard is a sadist; just as not every prisoner is a villain, not every guard is a protector. We are all people of mixed motives, and that is the basis for real hope.

The point is that I cannot conceive of a context other than the crucible of art — other than enacting their stories in equal humanity, a possibility in theater that often eludes us in “real life” — that demonstrates how much can be changed by pushing past our assumed or imposed ideas about what is worth our attention, by flipping figure and ground to show how things look from the other side.

If we are wide awake as artists, we see much more, both of our own lives and of the big world. It’s easy to let the focus slide inward into a narcissistic self-involvement, or conversely, outward into an obsession with the news. Where is balance? How do artists and intellectuals integrate our deepest individual truths with our concerns for the world?

Let me tell you about one answer. Choreographer Liz Lerman has a framework she uses in creating dance that touches on social issues. Liz calls it “big story, little story,” shorthand for connecting one’s own truth with the larger truth, for looking “for our own personal stories inside the larger fabric of history.” It’s the opposite of the consciousness industry’s conversion of public issues into private troubles. In this process, self-knowledge unlocks knowledge of the wide world. The artist asks, “What kind of headache do I have? Who else has a headache?” The artist asks, “What dream do I have? Who else has a dream?” The artist asks, “How can my own little story connect with the big story of my times?”

Liz’s company created a piece entitled “Safe House: Still Looking,” inspired by the history of the Underground Railway in Wilmington, Delaware. Each individual dancer devised a solo telling a personal, contemporary story that touched on the themes of running away, aiding refugees, the comfort of the known and the fear of the unknown. These were interspersed with “larger-group sections that contained either fierce dancing, stories taken from the narratives of escaped slaves or sections involving the whole group in a kind of prayer.” Here’s how Liz wrote about it in Community, Culture and Globalization:

“So we found ourselves making a dance about historical safe houses while also performing in houses. One of these performances took place in a rather small home, which meant that most of the dancing occurred in very tight spaces. At one point in the evening, the dancers scattered throughout the house to perform their solos…. Each reported how strangely real it became to try to move expansively in small spaces and to tell stories of running in the night, terror, escape and comfort while dancing in a linen closet, a tiny space under the stairs, behind a door or in a dark bathroom. All reported that it changed the way they next performed the work on stage….

“The final performance…took place in the Quaker meeting House where Thomas Garrett and Harriet Tubman did so much of their work…. He was a member of the Quaker Meeting and is buried in the courtyard. She led many escaped slaves through Wilmington, often relying on his protection. At the conclusion of the performance, we taught the audience a simple dance made up of some of the gestures they had just seen. We again mentioned the incredible strength of these two individuals. We asked the audience to think of their own ancestors who they would wish to ‘walk with them’ in this life.

Then we invited everyone outside to perform the dance in the courtyard in close proximity to Garrett’s grave. Suddenly the first movement of the dance, reaching down and touching the earth, had concrete meaning; it was no longer just a symbol. Likewise, the gesture of reaching back to make a beckoning circle of the lower arm took on new meaning, as if we were calling Mr. Garrett and Ms. Tubman to join us in the present.”

Or consider another example, a wonderful documentary film called Galoot, which means “exile” in Hebrew, by Asher de Bentolila Tlalim. The Israeli filmmaker and his wife move to London, both to escape the horror of life at home and so that she can study for her PhD. At graduate school, for the first time in their lives, they meet Palestinians as equals, Palestinians who also find themselves in exile in a foreign land and have never before encountered Israelis on equal terms. Cautiously, they begin to forge friendships, and the experience is like walking on slippery rocks over deep icy water. They struggle to peel away the layers of myth their parents’ generations have used to muffle the rough edges of their separate and mutual histories, to find their own true stories beneath the curtain.

In one masterful sequence, a pair of Palestinian students reach deep inside themselves trying to convey to the filmmaker the pain, the extremity of their exile. They ask him to imagine what it is like to be ejected in the night from one’s home, to take only what you can quickly carry away, to know that others now live in the house that is rightfully yours, that others are using your stove to cook the dinner that should have fed your family.

You can feel the Palestinians’ desire to connect, and at the same time see them shrugging with the expectation of frustration you might feel in asking me to imagine life on Mars, so far-fetched does it seem.

But in truth, not much imagination was needed. The next shot cuts to a faded Fifties snapshot of the filmmaker’s family walking down a street in Tangiers, a short time before they were forced out of Morocco under cover of night with just the clothes they could carry, never to reclaim what had been theirs. Decades later, the filmmaker and his brother visit Morocco, find their family house, are admitted by the current inhabitants to briefly walk its halls, remarking on a familiar lamp, a stretch of tile that evokes tender memories. The merchant whose shop stands across the street tells them he remembers the family that used to live in that house, that he wonders whatever happened to them.

In the little stories of these two families — the Palestinians ejected from their homes in what became Israel, the Jews ejected from Morocco — an enormous saga of pain and loss is told. It’s not that an easy answer to the big story emerges from the shared experience of exile, but rather that the sharing of little stories makes it impossible to accept easy answers, and that is real progress.

Let me move on to one of Paulo Freire’s most potent concepts, “internalization of the oppressor,” the way we absorb disabling or belittling ideas about ourselves from those who have an interest in keeping us powerless and small.

To remain awake, we must notice when we’ve tailored our sense of possibility to someone else’s specifications, and that’s not always easy to do. As artists, how do we protect our own imaginations from being colonized?

My own life as an artist began in another era and another medium. I had grown up in the Fifties certain that I wanted to be a painter. I drew obsessively, read as many art books as I could lay my hands on, took all the classes my school had to offer. I also had a keen sense of injustice and a passion to make the world a better place, expressed in such actions as refusing to take part in the duck-and-cover air-raid drills I felt were training us to accept the inevitability of war.

In the Sixties, the early years of American military involvement in Vietnam, I became a committed peace activist, working as a draft counselor, taking part in demonstrations, turning my artistic talents to posters and flyers for the cause. Later, I also worked as an organizer for activist artists — for example, for a group called the San Francisco Art Workers’ Coalition, dedicated to reforming publicly-funded cultural institutions, pressuring them to diversify the art they exhibited and to make their governing boards accountable to the public whose taxes paid the bills. I still think these were worthy and constructive projects.

But through this experience, I absorbed a mass of leftist political and cultural lore, a prefab ideology. The militant spirit and critique of privilege at large in that period called into question the whole enterprise of “being an artist.” It came to seem a most unworthy role — in essence, creating decor for wealthy patrons — and selfish to boot, indulging one’s appetite for beauty and meaning as compared to subsuming personal desires in the great struggle for peace and justice. I allowed the direction of my life to be shaped only by my social imagination and political dreams, repeatedly choosing to use my talent only to carry messages for others, or to help others express their creativity, which was deemed a socially worthy goal.

It wasn’t until my mid-forties that I began to feel the headache I had suppressed twenty years earlier. I was swamped by a sense of the futility of my efforts. Although I still subscribed to many of the same values — inclusion, equality, self-determination — I began to question the baggage I’d picked up while pursuing them. I had rejected potentially useful criticisms and worthy ideas because they’d been put forward by people who didn’t share my political identification, sometimes accepting instead harebrained notions that echoed the familiar pieties of the Left. (For example, I dipped frequently into the Left’s bottomless supply of benefit-of-the-doubt for Cuba and China, doing my best to dismiss those regimes’ critics as reactionaries.) Opportunities for personal creative advancement came my way, but I disdained them as reinforcing privilege or associating my work with institutions of which I disapproved.

Irony of ironies, looking back from twenty years on, I saw that I had surrendered my own voice as an artist to work instead for the principle that everyone should have a voice! I had traded the multi-dimensional, impassioned, numinous world of my artistic vision for a flattened, materialist universe in which all things could be reduced to the distribution of goods and services, to contested rights and power-struggles.

The fact that I stopped questioning orthodoxies in service of a good cause doesn’t cancel the stark reality that in doing so, I allowed my imagination to be colonized. I surrendered wide-awake unbounded awareness for an ideology that amounted to sleepwalking through life. I saw myself as free because I took exception to the received idea of the artist as serving wealth and privilege, but I failed to notice that in doing so, I had fallen into another ready-made closely constrained identity, the artist as servant of the revolution.

Apart from the distorting effect this had on my own life and work, it also limited my impact as an activist. To be effective, activists need to be wide-awake, so as to observe and correct our own shortcomings. For example, one of the chief weaknesses of progressive activism is its proclivity to advocate general principles of liberty and justice while demanding its own rank-and-file work under conditions and within constraints that would be loudly protested if imposed on, say, factory laborers or office workers.

If we are for freedom of expression, that has to include our own expressions. If we believe everyone is entitled to a decent livelihood, that includes ourselves. If we believe that every person’s story has value, and everyone has the human right to grow and develop — and in the words of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that everyone has the right to culture — well then, that has to include ourselves. Doesn’t it?

Writing rather than painting has become my art form, and my goal as an artist is to awaken people to the empowering, open-hearted, ideology-free state of radical amazement, which leads to the pursuit of mercy and justice. The antidote to the common trance is to dream boldly, act boldly. The ultimate questions of art are the ultimate questions of life: what is it to be fully alive, to make use of the gift of life in a way that honors its awesome nature? What does it mean to live in alignment with our deepest values, the sources of our dynamism instead of the things that hold it back? How do we focus our considerable energies on healing the world, instead of wasting them in engagement with things that don’t matter?

I don’t pretend these are easy questions. An artist who embraces them will face many obstacles. The discouraging social forces I have already described are arrayed against us, urging us to shrink into our little selves, our more tractable and malleable selves.

But these forces cannot prevail unless we accede to their arguments. Under the common trance, that acquiescence is often tacit, even unconscious: the tongue of personal inhibition slides so easily into the groove of social passivity. We are loyal to our first fears — of public embarrassment, of risking unpopularity, of disapproval, of irking someone we see as having power in our lives, of having to defend convictions against others more glib or forceful than ourselves. We repeat our first desires — for comfort, safety, the protection of hiding behind something larger than ourselves, to be left alone. It requires a tremendous commitment to awareness to stay awake in the face of these temptations.

But there is also great potential for excitement, intensity, and meaning, the priceless satisfactions of a creative life. So far as I know, this is the only life we will have. How can we bear to waste it? We have been given an astonishing task: to awaken from the common trance that co-opts us into repulsive violence, destructive greed, new depths of exploitation and indifference. No one knows how many people need to wake up before the trance is effectively broken. For all we know, it could need only one more to tip the balance. Look around the room: it could be the person sitting in front of you. It could be you.

There is no art form that cannot be deployed in the service of awakening, there is no style or approach that cannot help. There is no form of social action that cannot be shaped by the values of awareness, empathy, and self-respect. Even mundane tasks — filling out forms, going to meetings — are elevated and intensified if understood as part of the meta-act of awakening awareness. With this understanding, I want to pose one more question: how would your work change if you chose each step, each gesture, each utterance mindful of its potential to help to break the common trance? If we choose tasks and collaborators hospitable to our own open-eyed truths, if we allow ourselves to be inspired by whatever we find most urgent and real, everything we do as artists, activists, and intellectuals will help.

In my daily life, music is the art form that most fully engages my spirit, offering consolation and inspiration. It allows us to glimpse the ineffable source of radical amazement through its mysterious power to attune, evoke, to move our bodies and our spirits. And I can listen while I write. Leonard Cohen, a writer and musician for whom I feel a great affinity, has a way with words as well as notes. I especially admire his ability to join heaven and earth, the transcendent and the immanent. I want to end by quoting a lyric that for me, sums up the heart and soul of the artistic mission of bringing light to a dark time, and the hilarious, courageous absurdity of accepting it.

I fought against the bottle,
But I had to do it drunk —
Took my diamond to the pawnshop —
But that don’t make it junk.

Cohen’s lines say that the difficulties we may face in our endeavor in no way degrade or diminish it. The moral grandeur of this effort to awaken compassion cannot be tarnished by exposure to the common trance.

May each and every one of us know the truth of this simple message. May all of us find ways to connect to the big story; may all of us resist the message to shrink. May our hearts, minds, and spirits remain free, and may we use our gifts to heal the world.

]]> http://arlenegoldbard.com/2003/10/11/why-art-matters-bringing-light-to-a-dark-time-2/feed/ 0 Fringe People http://arlenegoldbard.com/2003/04/08/fringe-people/ http://arlenegoldbard.com/2003/04/08/fringe-people/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2003 01:38:55 +0000 Arlene http://new.arlenegoldbard.com/?p=147
© Arlene Goldbard 2003


And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to the people of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a thread of blue; And it shall be to you for a fringe, that you may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the Lord, and do them…

Numbers 15:37-39

Two women share a park bench, sipping hot tea from paper cups, dazzling their eyes with autumn leaves. This is their first fall in Seattle. Naomi, the elder, having lost her husband Eli two years earlier, found herself rootless in Chicago, longing for her old chevre in Seattle. A dozen years before, she and Eli had left the Northwest in pursuit of opportunity — that is, the chance for Eli to cure his mid-life crisis by working himself to death, which is how Naomi now thinks of it.

The younger woman staring at a liquidambar leaf as if deciphering a text is her daughter-in-law Ruth, who has never been west before. Ruth is the widow of Naomi’s son Leon, who died while Naomi was still saying Kaddish for Eli. Naomi shudders to think of that terrible year. She had been certain Ruth would want to return to her own family in Ohio, to re-launch her young life. But as soon as Naomi mentioned moving, Ruth had begged to come along. Tell the truth, she hadn’t needed to beg very hard. The companionship of a loving and loyal daughter-in-law has helped Naomi to heal, and she hopes her presence has been a help to Ruth. But not even the sweetest consolation can repeal loss.

“Oh!” sighs Ruth, running impatient fingers through a tangle of curls the color of the deepest red leaves. “What is with this Jewish Renewal business anyway? I am so tired of having to explain everything.” Ruth is making an adjustment to this new life, but it isn’t always easy. She has just come from a frustrating debate with Naomi’s cousin-by-marriage, Boaz, who also happens to be Ruth’s employer. She can’t quite decide whether this turn of events was a matter of luck — arriving in Seattle at just the moment Boaz needed to expand his staff — or of charity, Boaz creating a job to fit her need. She suspects it was charity and tries to work with a diligence that will make her suspicions irrelevant. But after work, chatting with Boaz before they go their separate ways, the limits of her pliancy emerge.

“I tried to explain about eco-kashrut, how protecting the earth is more kosher to us than buying over-processed white-sugar white-flour food with a hecksher, but I don’t think he gets it. I told him we’re having a service and lunch this Saturday, and he actually said he wasn’t sure he’d feel like going! Boaz, who’ll davven shacharit, mincha, and ma’ariv at the drop of a hat! Every time I talk to him, that’s how it goes. It would be so easy if I could mean exactly what he means when I say ‘dinner,’ or ‘Shabbos,’ not start a big tzimmes every time.” Ruth stares into the wise brown eyes of her mother-in-law, saying more without words. The women share unspoken knowledge that Ruth’s feelings for Boaz do not stop at gratitude. “Why can’t we just do things the normal way for once?”

“Stop the presses!” Naomi announces to the flashy trees. “Ruthie wants to do something the normal way! Look, tatelah,” she says, “look at your life.” She begins to count on her fingers: “You go to an ‘alternative’ health clinic, you eat organic food, you’re a convert, you picked up and moved halfway across the country just to be with your old mother-in-law…. Whereas my dear cousin Boaz, whom I love like a brother, who had the big heart to give you, a total stranger, a job, Boaz has never been an alien. He didn’t choose his life in the same way. He goes to the shul where he was Bar Mitzvah’d. He has his ways of doing things. He’s respected in the community. He’s not a young man. When you’ve lived in different places, seen other ways of living, then you understand that these things are choices, but Boaz hasn’t learned that yet. If he did, he still might decide to do the identical things,” Naomi muses, considering the possibilities, “but it would be a choice.”

Ruth holds up her hands, already defeated. “So how’s he gonna learn? I’m supposed to teach him?” Suddenly, Ruth brightens, shoots her mother-in-law a smile. “He listens to you, Naomi. He worships you — he wants to canonize me for looking after you, and I don’t want to spoil it by telling him it’s you who really looks after me. Like I said,” she repeats, “I’m tired of having to explain everything.”

“Get used to it,” says Naomi, who enjoys thinking of Ruth in the role of Jewish saint. She performs one of her full-body shrugs, speaking volumes. “We’re fringe people.”

“Fringe people?”

“Say it loud,” Naomi declares, fist in the air, “I’m fringe and I’m proud. Fringe — you know, out there on the edge, exploring the frontier, innovating at the periphery, pushing the envelope — fringe.”

“So this is good?” Ruth looks mildly interested. Even though she seldom fits in, Ruth likes to imagine herself blending seamlessly into her surroundings. She isn’t inclined to make being on the fringe a point of pride.

“Is it good?!” Naomi shifts into high gear. “Don’t you remember, it’s in Numbers somewhere, and again in Deuteronomy: ‘You shall put fringes on the corners of your garment,’ with a blue thread. It’s a mnemonic device, a reminder. The tzitzit are there on the corners of your tallis as a mindfulness practice.” Naomi seems delighted at having retrieved this Buddhist turn-of-phrase. That East-West stuff always hooks Ruthie and the multitudinous ambivalent Jews who feel most comfortable with precepts that are shared by other faiths. It reminds her of patients who aren’t satisfied until they seek a second opinion. “We are to the Jewish people, my dear daughter, as the tzitzit are to our garments, a reminder of holiness, a reminder of the Divine spirit.”

“That’s not bad,” Ruth allows. “Boaz might even go for that.” She begins to plan exactly how she’ll sneak it into their next conversation about Shabbos. He won’t be able to resist asking if their congregation still does group aliyot, just to hear the astounding answer — just so he can have the pleasure of responding in horror to the very idea that the honor of coming up to the Torah could be shared with anyone who happened to be walking by, even Gentiles. “C’mon, Bo, ” she’ll say next time, “you’ve known Naomi and Eli forever. Our family, we’re fringe people — you know that by now.”

But just as Ruth begins to bask in this imagined moment of mutual comprehension, Naomi throws a monkey wrench into the dream-works. “Of course,” says Naomi, examining a flame-colored leaf she plucks from the dirt, “not everybody likes to be reminded. Some people might even see it as nagging, hearing that commanding voice say ‘Remember!’ every time they look at their tzitzit. Some people might find us annoying, the way we’re always claiming a true connection to essence — the true spirit of the Shema, the deeper meaning of Jacob and Esau. ‘These fringe people,’ they might think, ‘why don’t they shut up already?’”

“So it’s not wonderful after all, to be fringe people?” Ruth drains the dregs of her cup, lets it dangle forlornly from a limp hand.

“But it is,” Naomi insists, “even for the ones we annoy. Because when they look at us — women rabbis and scholars, men and women davvening and dancing together, new music, gay marriages — even though they say ‘meshuggenah,’ the fact of us still forces them to think in some tiny corner of their minds, ‘So why do we use exactly the same tune for Adon Olam every Shabbos and where did that melody come from, was it handed down by God at the creation?” Contorting her face into the human equivalent of a thunderbolt, Naomi barks out the martial cadences of the ‘traditional’ melody, one of those 19th-century Mitteleuropa things. “So regardless of whether they think we’re chutzpahdikh to the max,” she concludes, “we still fulfill our prime directive as fringe people, to always remember the Source, and never let ourselves go on automatic. And by the way,” she adds, “if Boaz is so appalled by all this, why does he keep starting with you? Why not just drop the whole topic?”

“Mmm,” says Ruth, cautiously encouraged. “I can almost see that working,” she muses. “I’ll remind him of how easy it is to get annoyed in Torah study when someone comes up with a really irritating interpretation, but how later, you’re glad because it made you think. I’ll suggest that our annoying qualities are actually endearing.”

Naomi grins, nodding. “There you go,” she says. “Except…”

“Except what?” Ruth wails. “I’m getting whiplash.”

“Except the other thing about fringes is that they’re messy, and they get tangled. I mean, why is it that people keep asking for a definition of Jewish Renewal, and they never seem satisfied with the answer? Jewish Renewal includes too many conflicting tendencies for people who want to avoid tangles. We’ve got the politicos, for whom every text is an incitement to revolution, even if you have to turn it and turn it and turn it until you’re dizzy. We’ve got the meditation folks, whose mission impossible is to get Jews to quiet down. We’ve got the ecstatics, who want to help us fly. At every Kallah, there’s a line of bearded frummies outside the tent shuckling over their little ArtScrolls, and across the way, a very mixed minyan is doing yoga versions of the Hebrew letters. And you know what, sheyneh maidelah? I love each and every one of them, because no one has any other motive than to get close to God. If you want to show off your new clothes or meet people who can help you get ahead in business…”

“Or find a partner?” Ruth interjects.

“Well, I admit we’re working on that one.” Naomi mentally lines up all the unattached-and-looking members of the community, trying for hitherto overlooked matches. “But still, a shul like ours isn’t the one you’d join for the side-benefits. You’d have to be attracted to spiritual inquiry, davvenology. Out here on the corners of the tallis, we’re committed to research, but in a lot of shuls in the middle, they do the same thing the same way every time — the ‘right’ way. You can see why we’d drive them crazy.”

“I can,” Ruth admits, “I can. So I guess being fringe isn’t really all that great, in the final analysis.”

“Don’t be so sure about that,” Naomi advises her daughter-in-law. “Fringes have another quality: they’re decorative, no purpose other than to adorn, to beautify.”

“Please,” beseeches Ruth. “Please don’t treat me to another rehearsal of your theory that God is an artist.”

“And I can prove it,” says Naomi. But before Ruth can protest, she’s back on track. “Let’s just stipulate that Jewish Renewal has added to the stock of beauty in the world, okay? Liturgy, music, art. Half of the shuls in America are doing Renewal music and don’t even know where it comes from.”

“You’re right,” says Ruth, recalling a particularly beautiful Elohai Neshama she learned the previous week. “Fringe people have a lot of creativity, and everyone needs that.”

“Maybe,” says Naomi, handing Ruth the flame-colored leaf. “But maybe not. There are Jews who think we’re sugar-coating the tradition, tarting it up. They think all this attention to beauty is frivolous, why are we wasting our time out on the fringes, when we should be right in the middle of the tallis, the strongest part — where they are. What was good enough for my grandfather, etcetera.”

Ruth buries her face in her hands. “Fringe people,” she mutters.

“Don’t despair, Ruthie, I’ll tell you something. They say that every soul is born with a unique mission, some tikkun that can be performed by only that particular soul. Maybe when the world was smaller, a single soul would have been brought forward as the blue thread in the tzitzit, to deliver a powerful reminder to the whole Jewish world — the Baal Shem Tov, some would say, or in our own times, maybe Reb Shlomo, Reb Zalman, Reb David. But even tzaddikim have to deal with the confusions of being human — contradictory thoughts, unwanted feelings, false starts, dead ends. Their souls are as torn as anyone’s. But that’s private, their battles were fought privately, silently in the middle of the night, or loud at the edge of an ocean, calling God to task.

“Nowadays, things are different. We’ve entered a democratic age. The spark, the mission that might have been entrusted to one soul has become too large and urgent for any single person to carry. Instead, God has divided it into manageable little sparks, and a whole flock of imperfect vessels carry them. But there’s a penalty. Instead of experiencing our mishegas in the dark night of a solitary soul, we are forced to act it out, collectively.”

Naomi gazes at the trees, letting her eyes fill with scarlet, rust, and gold. “Sad things happened to you and me, my darling, but out of that, something brought me back here to be with my people, to be in it together, and whatever it might mean, there’s some reason you came too. So we might as well enjoy it. There’ll never be a winner, or a right answer, that much we know. The holy thrill of it all is in the struggle for renewal — the search, the contradictions, the visions, the leaps of faith. Something in that attracts my handsome cousin Boaz too, or he wouldn’t keep bringing it up.” Satisfied, Naomi sits back and begins to fish in her handbag for the car keys.

“Wow!” says Ruth, “it’s like all of us, working together — shelshelot neshamot, the chain of souls — we fringe people are on a mindfulness mission, the big tikkun.”

“Yeah,” Naomi agrees, dangling her car keys in front of Ruthie’s face. “But tatelah, don’t tell Boaz that. He’ll think we’re nuts. Why don’t you sing him that beautiful new version of Ma Tovu? Bide your time, that’s my advice, and work your way up to the mind-blowing stuff.”

Ruth gives Naomi a kiss on one rosy cheek. “You’re getting cold,” she says, “time to go. Don’t worry. All that you say to me I will do.” She smiles at her mother-in-law. “Want me to drive?”

]]> http://arlenegoldbard.com/2003/04/08/fringe-people/feed/ 0 The Permanent Crisis http://arlenegoldbard.com/2003/01/11/the-permanent-crisis/ http://arlenegoldbard.com/2003/01/11/the-permanent-crisis/#comments Sat, 11 Jan 2003 16:19:35 +0000 Arlene http://new.arlenegoldbard.com/?p=151
© Arlene Goldbard 2003
This talk was delivered in January 2003 as part of the University of Texas at Austin’s Cultural Policy Series.

When Ann Daly asked me in July to speak in this series, she needed a title for the talk I hadn’t yet written, so I suggested “The Crisis in Cultural Policy.” As I hung up, I had a moment of regret. Wasn’t it a little pessimistic to predict in July a crisis in January? But I concluded it was merely realistic, because U.S. cultural policy is and always has been in a permanent condition of crisis, partly due to larger social forces, and partly due to the ineptitude and short-sightedness of its advocates. Nevertheless, I had no way of knowing in July how painfully apt my title would be, because the crisis is truly upon us and it shows no sign of letting up.

To explain, I had better start with definitions. “Culture” is a spacious idea that can accommodate virtually everything created by human beings. At its most expansive, it includes whatever falls outside the category of “nature” — even our relationship to nature. Culture is the sum-total of human ingenuity: language, signs and symbols, systems of belief, customs, clothes, cooking, tools and artifacts, the built environment and everything we use to fill it up — and the cherry on the sundae, art.

“Cultural policy” can therefore include support for creators; distribution systems for cultural products; tax policies; regulation of expression in all forms, broadcast, publication, and public speech; preservation; community design; cultural research — and much, much more. Today, you will hear me argue for this broad definition. But for a moment, I want to narrow my focus. Most often in this country, cultural policy is taken to mean arts policy, full stop. Now, arts policy is very important, but by no means the whole story. Arts policy is central to cultural policy, just as art is emblematic of culture, the uncut substance of culture. Art is the canary in culture’s coalmine; so how we treat art and artists tells a lot about the whole of our cultural policy.

So to quickly highlight the crisis in cultural policy, I want to cut right to the chase and describe the current situation in arts funding. I was recently commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation to prepare what was called a “terrain check” on support for artists. Anecdotal evidence of serious funding cuts had been building, and the foundation’s leaders wanted to know how bad the situation might truly be. What I learned suggests that things are bad indeed, and growing worse.

I interviewed 45 foundation executives, public funders, policy experts and artists’ organization directors, and “bleak” was the word most often used to characterize the situation. Here’s how one director of a national arts organization put it:

It’s pretty bleak. Two things are intersecting: the general conservatism about dealing with artists from the NEA, and what’s happening in politics and the economy overall. In 2003, it’s going to be the “perfect storm” of contributed income: huge statewide deficits, a House and Senate that are both Republican, foundation assets down, same with individuals, a continuing softness in corporations. Some foundations weren’t hit as badly because of their investments, but all the major arts foundations are scaling back. I’ve been in the field a long time, and I’ve never seen such a general downturn.

Here are a few highlights:

State arts agencies

  • According to figures compiled by the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA), SAAs overall are seeing a 13% budget cut, with 42 SAAs down in comparison to last year, and 11 staying flat or receiving an increase.
  • Within these figures, fortunes differ greatly. While only ten SAAs have seen cuts in excess of 10% so far, the extent of these losses has been chilling to arts supporters: California was cut $1.2 million (about 5% of the total budget) in the current year and anticipates at least 40% in 2003, with Colorado projecting a 41% loss, Indiana 34%, Iowa 50% and Massachusetts 62%.

Corporate/individual giving.

  • Overall, business support to the arts has declined as a corporate philanthropic activity, with 45% of businesses generating revenues of $1 million or greater contributing to the arts in 1994 and 38% percent contributing in 2000, now trending steeply down in the period of corporate scandals and dot-com failures.
  • According to Americans for the Arts (AFA), although the overall dollar amount has increased over the last decade, arts funding has decreased as a percentage of total giving in the U.S., from its height of 8.4% in 1992 to 5.7% in 2001, and given recent foundation and corporate cutbacks, this trend is expected to accelerate.

Foundations.

  • The Pew Charitable Trusts’ cultural program anticipates a 40% cut, eliminating its national cultural policy program to focus instead on local grants. Multi-year grants will be paid out, but the initiative will end.
  • The Packard Foundation’s assets dropped from nearly $13 billion in 2000 to approximately $4 billion as of August 31, 2002. In 2001, arts grants totaled $15 million out of $454 million; in 2002, they totaled just $3 million out of $88 million.
  • The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation also radically altered its arts giving, focusing on its targeted communities, 26 cities that had been eligible for local grants at the time of founder Jim Knight’s death in 1991. It ceased making national arts grants (which had totaled $10.6 million in 2000, out of nearly $26 million in arts grants overall, before the policy change kicked in).
  • The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s arts giving will decline by 50%, from roughly $20 million at its height to $10 million (arts grants in 2001 totaled just under $15 million).
  • The List Foundation has announced it will spend down its endowment and go out of business by May 2005.

Federal

  • The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is currently projected for a budget increase of as much as $10 million if House appropriations survive conference negotiations. But if this succeeds, it will leave the federal agency with $50 million less than its highest appropriation in 1992, $176 million (and a much greater gap if adjusted for inflation).

If you are one of the direct beneficiaries of the arts funding system, the net effect is pretty grim. (”Grim” was the second most-used word.) As one of my interviewees said, “The message to everybody is ‘Drop dead, you’re on your own.’” Times are hard, the market is down, cuts have to be made, and let’s face it, this arts stuff just can’t compete with food stamps and emergency health services. Bye, now!

It reminds me of Flash Gordon serials I used to see at kiddie matinees: Flash would be trapped by evil aliens and imprisoned in a windowless room. Just as he thought things couldn’t get much worse, the walls would start to close in! There is the same airless, compressed quality to the current discourse on arts funding, which leaves absolutely no room to move.

Flash’s predicament seemed truly hopeless. There’s not much play in this dialectic: the steel walls of the shrinking prison trump the soft flesh of the rocketeer every time. Yet Flash had to be saved so the serial could go on. Something had to radically redefine the terms of his dilemma — he cobbled together a doorstop from his ray gun, or got a signal to the mother ship. One way or another, his problem was redefined to transcend the escalating logic of thesis-antithesis, steel wall and human body.

Just so, our crisis doesn’t turn on how artists and arts organizations can withstand the pressure of budgets that are closing in. To cut or not to cut isn’t the story. It’s how the dilemma gets redefined, how the airless, compacted arts funding narrative that’s being told can be reconceived and enlarged to encompass the expansive nature of culture and cultural policy. As one of my interviewees for the Rockefeller study described our moment,

There’s no valuation of art and artists. The arguments haven’t been made. The government morphed from sympathetic to the arts to hostility to any form of human investment. We have to go to the core of what it means to be a human being in this society. Where do you make that argument?

Little Story, Big Story

So what does this all signify? How do we extract the kernel of meaning from this mass of information?

In ancient times, oral transmission was the primary means of culture-formation, and memory was prodigious. The bible tells us that King Solomon was considered the wisest man of all, in part because he composed 3,000 proverbs — proverbs being the mnemonic devices, the sound-bites, of an earlier day. They say that in ancient Greece, one who knew 300 proverbs was considered truly learned. Today we have a tremendous amount of information, but few of us can locate the underlying structure of wisdom that turns it into sense. Try it sometime: write down all the aphorisms you can think of without opening a book or a Web page. I would be very surprised if you can get to 100.

I think our way of conceiving problems is too constrained by, too conditioned on, the blind-spots and orthodoxies of our era. We have a tendency to accept problems as they are posed, trying to beat them into submission with data or stun them with the escalating push-pull of dialectical debate. What we should do is peek behind the curtain of the problem to discover the dimensions we are being directed to ignore. I find it helps shake loose my thinking to consider such problems from the perspective of earlier day.

Rabbi Hillel was a great sage born about 100 years before Jesus. One of his most famous sayings takes the form of three questions recorded in the Mishnah Torah, the compilation of oral wisdom redacted in the second century. “If I am not for myself,” Hillel asked, “who will be for me? But if I am for my own self only, what am I? And if not now, when? (Pirke Avot 1:14)

I can’t count the times I’ve asked myself these three questions. To me, they sum up what it is to be fully human: to stand for our own dignity and worth, to extend compassion and respect to others, to make the most of our limited time in this life. They are intended as tools to examine the little story of a single human life, but I think they work just as well in relation to the big stories of human societies. I want to use them now to suggest essential social roles for artists and intellectuals in redefining the cultural policy project so that it breaks out of the shrinking room to which it has been consigned, fully occupying the social space it warrants.

Hillel’s first question calls upon us to examine our own courage and fortitude in pursuing what it just.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

It reveals that we have not stood up for democratic cultural values.

Public policy-making in this country has reached an extraordinary condition. Limited by the options thrown up by a money-bound system, the American people elect policy-makers who advance the interests of the rich at the expense of everyone else. As described by Princeton economist Paul Krugman, our average annual salary rose about 10% from $32,522 in 1970 to $35,864 in 1999 (figures in 1998 dollars); while the average annual compensation of the top 100 CEOs went from $1.3 million (39 times the pay of the average worker) to $37.5 million, more than 1,000 times the average worker’s pay. Income and wealth disparities are now huge: in 1998, the top 1% of income included people who made $230,000 or more per year; within that 1 %, 60% of the income gain went to the top .01%, those who made at least $3.6 million — and whose average income was $17 million. In 1970, that top .01% had .7% of national income, or 70 times the national average; by 1998, they received more than 3% of all income. Thus, the 13,000 richest families had almost as much aggregate income as the 20 million poorest households, with incomes about 300 times the average family’s.

Right now, with remarkably little protest, the Bush administration is proposing tax changes that will exacerbate this situation. If they pass, the rest of us will continue participating in a redistribution scheme from which the vast majority can never hope to benefit. Middle and low-income people make up the majority in this country, yet these are the policies that prevail. Is it because people fantasize that they will someday be rich and want to protect their imaginary earnings? Is it because our notion of freedom has shrunk to mean little more than license to grow rich without social responsibility?

Cover stories aside, arts funding is not being cut to free up public funds for food stamps and emergency medical care. Arts funding is being cut — along with virtually every other form of human investment — to further reduce the taxes of the obscenely wealthy and callous interests whose money and influence put the present administration into office. When we allow this to happen, we are not standing for ourselves, and as has been amply demonstrated, when we are not for ourselves, no one is for us.

To be for ourselves in the realm of cultural policy-making means artists and intellectuals must advocate for the fundamental democratic values that create a vibrant culture. We must assert the socially valid and necessary roles of government and the nonprofit sector in balancing the cultural dominance of the marketplace, advocating for voices and visions that do not turn a buck. Markets are perhaps the best single mechanism we have for distributing goods and services, but there are some things they cannot do: protect minority voices, preserve the cultures of ordinary people, provide cultural education, create vibrant, participatory, accessible institutions of community cultural life. We must say this, out loud.

Now that global saturation of American commercial media product has reached undreamed-of levels, we face certain realities. Traditional multidirectional means of cultural transmission and preservation can seldom withstand the onslaught of mass-produced cultural products such as film, television and recorded music; and the pervasive passivity of consumer culture tends to overtake live, in-person activities that bring people into the commons and into direct contact with each other, which leads to a decline in the vitality of civil society. To be for ourselves, we must assert as a goal of cultural policy encouraging and supporting active participation in community life, so that ordinary citizens can have roles in cultural development that cannot be summed up by a list of purchases.

Now that the forces of globalization have pulsed untold economic and political refugees from South to North, we know the pain of trying to maintain cultural continuity in diaspora. The ongoing transformation of the American cultural landscape through immigration has led in recent years to a resurgent backlash of anti-immigrant feeling. According to a study conducted earlier this year by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 60 percent of the public regards the present level of immigration to be a “critical threat to the vital interests of the United States.” To be for ourselves, we must assert as a goal of cultural policy respect for cultural diversity, the social value of communication, curiosity, parity in the distribution of resources, recognition of the polyglot richness that has been the engine of American cultural dynamism.

One of the characteristic themes of our period has been polarization of cultural values. The impulse to eliminate cultural expression that offends received religious and social beliefs contends with the impulse to promote free expression of divergent views. Now we have a third force ready to sacrifice freedom of expression to a fundamentalist idea of national security. There has been an unending stream of controversy over works of art that are perceived as dangerous when viewed from one or another fundamentalist camp: in the United States, Robert Mapplethorpe’s erotic images, Andres Serrano’s religious works, and Marlon Riggs’s challenging transgressions of racial and sexual taboos are best-known; the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan; the burning of books in Iran. To be for ourselves, we must assert as a goal of cultural policy the cherished value of freedom of expression enshrined in our Constitution, to be nurtured — not feared — and limited only by the most extreme necessity.

These values — ameliorating market dominance, promoting active cultural participation, respecting and valuing cultural diversity, cherishing freedom of expression — ought to be the informing values of any democratic cultural policy. We ought to be advocating them without reservation. But policy discourse is frozen in its tracks. No one really thinks the current policy-making and implementation apparatus is going to have significant social impact. I don’t know any scholar, artist or activist with intellectual integrity who can assert with a straight face that allowing the present market dominance of culture to expand is going to make our collective expression as a people in any way more viable, interesting, useful or beautiful.

Yet almost everyone is embarrassed to say this. We are tongue-tied by a worldwide shift toward privatization that does not bode well for humane cultural values. When cultural subvention is an element of public policy, guiding questions relate to public meaning: what aspects of our heritage should be preserved and extended? What cultural expressions exemplify our people? What makes up our nation’s cultural commonwealth? How can artistic expression best represent our nation around the world? Although the answers will almost certainly be contested, the questions themselves are recognized as valid for the public sphere. But when privatization occurs, the guiding questions shrivel. Which artists are safe to support and likely to reflect well on the image of a corporation? What type of underwriting is likely to return the most value to the donor in the currency of public relations? Which projects advance the specific agenda of a philanthropic organization or individual, as opposed to a broad public agenda?

When the discourse is so tightly bounded, to assert democratic values is to invite ridicule, and few of us are willing to risk that. We are not for ourselves. Who will be for us?

Hillel’s second question reminds us that to be human is to connect in common cause.

But if I am for my own self only, what am I?

It exposes the failure of arts advocates to engage the world beyond their own sphere.

Interest in cultural policy in the United States has begun to expand only within the last decade. While international cultural policy debates have been passionate and exciting since the post-World War II period, through the decades following creation of the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities in the mid-Sixties, the official American line was that we had no cultural policy, or that our national policy was simply to follow the lead of private patrons. Our national arts funding apparatus was based on something an early Sixties Rockefeller panel on the performing arts called the “culture gap,” which was the difference between red-carpet arts institutions’ budgetary aspirations and their ability to raise private money. The NEA was created to fill that gap, a very modest purpose in comparison with the broad scope of culture and the potential sweep of the public interest in its development.

Or consider the media. Unlike virtually every other nation on the planet — where radio and television were introduced as public interests first, then opened to private profit in a regulated fashion — our broadcasting apparatus and policy were shaped by the aim of creating maximum opportunity for private economic exploitation of the airwaves, with public broadcasting coming late and little, as an afterthought.

So I think it’s time for another proverb: as the twig is bent, so grows the tree. With such roots, advocacy for cultural investment in this country has been one long, unimpressive drone of special pleading for the direct interests of a tiny segment of the vast cultural complex. The arts orthodoxy turns on the idea that all that matters to the cultural vitality of the nation are the fortunes of professional nonprofit institutions. The first time it came home to me how astoundingly short-sighted and narrow-minded this outlook was, I was at a talk by the president of the San Francisco Symphony. She laid on a glowing description of her organization’s in-school programs. Generally, they involved a few musicians demonstrating their instruments, talking about the orchestra, and playing recorded music to the kids. This had meant the world to the children, she told us. In fact, she said, some of these young people had never heard music before!

For a brief moment I wondered if they had been kept sequestered on a desert island, but then I realized she was using the word “music” as shorthand for “symphonic music.” Now, you and I know that virtually everyone listens to music, most of us daily — especially young people. A lot of us play instruments or sing. We go to the movies or rent videos. We take photographs or do needlework or write poetry in our spare time. The symphony president was able to utter her fatuous statement because she had thoroughly internalized a piece of the nonprofit arts orthodoxy: most cultural activities either register too low on the economic-activity scale to be recognized in that discourse — singing in a choir or drumming with your friends are “amateur” activities, beneath consideration; or they register too high — popular music and feature films stink too much of commerce, evoking a fastidious revulsion in the nonprofit arts sector, so they are declared invisible.

Looking at “the arts” as a specialist preserve of professional nonprofit institutions is a form of being only for oneself that has isolated and impoverished cultural policy discourse, reducing arts advocacy to little more than the assertion that “We are special, so you should support us.” This approach removed the most widespread and potent manifestations of culture from the agendas of cultural policy-makers, leaving them to fiddle with the residue, as if it were all that mattered. In response to arts advocates’ special pleading, elected officials’ and policy-makers’ general message has been “Prove you deserve our support.” They’ve stimulated a brisk business in economic indicators, in studies of culture and community development, in new ways to justify culture in social-science terms. Mozart is good for math scores; arts programs in prisons reduce recidivism; public art raises use-rates of public plazas.

All true, I’m sure. But the assignment turned out to be a form of bait-and-switch. If you don’t want to fund human investment, a good stalling tactic is occupying its advocates with costly and time-consuming studies that go through contortions to prove its validity by standards alien to their enterprise. Decades of this has led to the absolute impoverishment of any argument from the power of art to stun, to speak truth, to celebrate, to condemn, to refresh perception, to suggest what cannot be adequately expressed outright. And surprise! The studies are not being rewarded by increased resources for arts support and cultural development — in fact, as we have recently seen, support is declining.

We can jump through every hoop that’s extended, but there is no way to win the special-pleading game: artists and their advocates can never mobilize even a fraction of the resources or attention commanded by those who mesmerize our policy-makers with large infusions of campaign cash.

If we are to avoid being only for ourselves, without supporters, artists and intellectuals must assert the broad, common purpose of cultural policy, awakening and making common cause with our allies, vast numbers who also want livable communities, who like going to the movies but want something to balance the overwhelming commercialism of the consumer cultural industries, who want occasionally to see their own voices and visions reflected on television, whose teeth are set on edge to contemplate a nation of couch potatoes, who want their kids to have access to art classes, to learn an instrument or take part in creating theater or record their own music.

Hillel’s third question calls on us to consider what needs doing right now.

And if not now, when?

It shows us how cynicism, disappointment, and procrastination exacerbate our predicament.

The standard response to such ideas is that they are impractical. The time is not right, people say, for ambitious aims and new proposals. These days, victory would be holding the line, and few people believe even that will be possible.

My answer is to ask when the time is ever right for ambitious aims and new proposals. I have been active in this field for going on thirty years, and the argument from pragmatism has been deployed to oppose new thinking for that entire time. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy and a self-imposed limitation: when policy thinking is restricted only to what has already proven doable, no significant progress is possible.

Indeed, this has already been demonstrated by the way the newfound interest in cultural policy has been distorted by the assignment of proving culture worthy of support. In my “terrain check” of artists’ support, many interviewees raised questions about the Pew Charitable Trusts’ investment in cultural policy research, which is now being discontinued — not because of criticism from the field, but because Pew’s highest leadership had not been convinced of its worthiness as compared with other priorities. Pew spent millions of dollars to commission the RAND corporation to study the arts — RAND was chosen not for its arts expertise, which was zilch, but because it was hoped its establishment credentials would impress policy-makers. The first RAND report on the performing arts came out some months ago. Unfortunately, it lends aid and comfort to that old saw, “a consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.”

The people I interviewed questioned Pew’s huge investment in research that was primarily descriptive rather than propositional. Given time to reflect, I suspect almost everyone I interviewed would acknowledge that part of any effort to affect policy is compiling data, building an accurate description of the given situation so as to consider how best to improve it. But thus far in the budding U.S. cultural policy field, there has been almost no movement from description to action. So far as I can see, none of the well-funded new think-tanks is proposing alternative systems of financing or alternative approaches to cultural development. Presumably, the feeling is that they are not yet ready. To that I say, “If not now, when?”

The truth is, progress in social affairs is never made by those trapped like Flash Gordon inside the shrinking room of what is currently perceived as doable. The criterion of immediate feasibility reduces meaningful discourse to a whisper, silencing the passionate countervailing voice that could help to balance the drone of the status quo. Change requires bold proposals, boldly declared, creating room for negotiation and compromise. Right now, the debate is between settling for a lot less or a little bit less — and how many hearts are going to be stirred by that diminutive dialogue?

Here are a few ideas whose times have come because they acknowledge and incorporate the larger culture, suggesting ways that markets can actually support cultural development rather than retard it:

  • Tax advertising, a completely discretionary expenditure, to provide revenue to support non-commercial arts activities. In 2000, TV and radio advertising alone amounted to over $79 billion — and that doesn’t begin to touch the massive revenues from print, point-of-purchase and online advertising. A 1% tax on just broadcast advertising would have produced $790 million!
  • Tax commercial cultural product to support noncommercial independent media. In 2000, domestic box-office movie receipts topped $7.6 billion; in the music industry, album sales totaled about $8 billion; and consumer spending on video totaled about $20 billion. A 1% tax on these expenditures would have yielded $356 million dollars.
  • Link the construction of publicly financed entertainment and cultural facilities to community cultural development. In Seattle, for example, two sports stadiums have been built in recent years, with the public financing portion of their costs totaling over $600 million. A public policy that 5% of such public construction costs must be matched for facilities and activities based in low-income neighborhoods would have yielded $3 million.

Yes, it would be necessary to stand up to wealthy and powerful interests to ensure the adoption of such policies. Yes, it could not be done in a day. Yes, it would require a long-term campaign of consciousness-raising and common cause-making. And yes, that would most likely demand persistence in the face of initial defeat. And if not now, when?

Ultimate Things

Back in the Sixties, when I had a lot of time on my hands, some friends and I used Hillel’s three questions as a check-in. Once a year or so, we would ask ourselves which three questions, considered together, summed up our take on life. I was a very serious person then, and my questions were always virtuous and hard — “What is the correct thing to do right now?” My friend Tom was a pleasure-loving guy, and his three questions still make me laugh to remember: “Is this fun? How long will it last? When can I do it again?”

Here are the three questions that I think are guiding the current debased and diminished enterprise of cultural policy-making: Whose interests really matter here? How can we placate them? How can we ingratiate ourselves with those who neither respect nor appreciate culture’s power?

Here are the three questions that I believe should guide all policy-making in our nation, most especially cultural policy-making: Who are we as a people? What are we here for? How can we realize that mission?

Those of you who are students are faced with a stark choice right now. There may be a nook or cranny for you even within the shrinking room of current cultural policy discourse. As in so many sadly diminished professions, you may find a slot as a functionary of the existing system, you might make a living out of economic impact studies or season subscription campaigns. It isn’t that these are such terrible things to do: compared with dumping toxic chemicals, harvesting old-growth trees, or selling crack to inner-city children, they are positively saintly. It’s just that they are so trivial in relation to the urgent, essential, earthshaking work of redefining the whole policy-making enterprise so that it reflects culture’s awesome power as a container for our reasons for living and for dying and what we make of our short time in between.

My personal terror is a wasted life. In these times, the way we are encouraged to waste our lives is to make them very small. The general feeling is that we can do little to affect the ills of the big world, so we should focus on the little world of private life, downscaling our dreams to fit the times. What a waste! We have the opportunity to tackle a great task, to bring about cultural democracy, described by French philosopher Francis Jeanson in these terms:

[I]ts aim is to arrange things in such a way that culture becomes today for everybody what culture was for a small number of privileged people at every stage of history where it succeeded in reinventing for the benefit of the living the legacy inherited from the dead; that is to say, each time it was able to assist in bringing about a deeper sense of reality and closer bonds of communication.”

May each of us have the vision, courage, and endurance to take up our part in this task, and may we live to toast our success.

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