flickr image By BlueRobot
Cultures that
endure carve out a protected space for those who question and challenge
national myths. Artists, writers, poets, activists, journalists,
philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors, directors and renegades must
be tolerated if a culture is to be pulled back from disaster. Members of
this intellectual and artistic class, who are usually not welcome in
the stultifying halls of academia where mediocrity is triumphant, serve
as prophets. They are dismissed, or labeled by the power elites as
subversive, because they do not embrace collective self-worship. They
force us to confront unexamined assumptions, ones that, if not
challenged, lead to destruction.
They expose the ruling elites as hollow and corrupt. They articulate the senselessness of a system built on the ideology of endless growth, ceaseless exploitation and constant expansion. They warn us about the poison of careerism and the futility of the search for happiness in the accumulation of wealth. They make us face ourselves, from the bitter reality of slavery and Jim Crow to the genocidal slaughter of Native Americans to the repression of working-class movements to the atrocities carried out in imperial wars to the assault on the ecosystem. They make us unsure of our virtue. They challenge the easy clich'es we use to describe the nation -- the land of the free, the greatest country on earth, the beacon of liberty -- to expose our darkness, crimes and ignorance. They offer the possibility of a life of meaning and the capacity for transformation.
Human societies see what they want to see. They create national myths of identity out of a composite of historical events and fantasy. They ignore unpleasant facts that intrude on self-glorification. They trust naively in the notion of linear progress and in assured national dominance. This is what nationalism is about -- lies. And if a culture loses its ability for thought and expression, if it effectively silences dissident voices, if it retreats into what Sigmund Freud called "screen memories," those reassuring mixtures of fact and fiction, it dies. It surrenders its internal mechanism for puncturing self-delusion. It makes war on beauty and truth. It abolishes the sacred. It turns education into vocational training. It leaves us blind. And this is what has occurred. We are lost at sea in a great tempest. We do not know where we are. We do not know where we are going. And we do not know what is about to happen to us.
The psychoanalyst John Steiner calls this phenomenon "turning a blind eye." He notes that often we have access to adequate knowledge but because it is unpleasant and disconcerting we choose unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, to ignore it. He uses the Oedipus story to make his point. He argued that Oedipus, Jocasta, Creon and the "blind" Tiresias grasped the truth, that Oedipus had killed his father and married his mother as prophesized, but they colluded to ignore it. We too, Steiner wrote, turn a blind eye to the dangers that confront us, despite the plethora of evidence that if we do not radically reconfigure our relationships to each other and the natural world, catastrophe is assured. Steiner describes a psychological truth that is deeply frightening.
I saw this collective capacity for self-delusion among the urban elites in Sarajevo and later Pristina during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. These educated elites steadfastly refused to believe that war was possible although acts of violence by competing armed bands had already begun to tear at the social fabric. At night you could hear gunfire. But they were the last to "know." And we are equally self-deluded. The physical evidence of national decay -- the crumbling infrastructures, the abandoned factories and other workplaces, the rows of gutted warehouses, the closure of libraries, schools, fire stations and post offices -- that we physically see, is, in fact, unseen. The rapid and terrifying deterioration of the ecosystem, evidenced in soaring temperatures, droughts, floods, crop destruction, freak storms, melting ice caps and rising sea levels, are met blankly with Steiner's "blind eye."
Oedipus, at the end of Sophocles' play, cuts out his eyes and with his daughter Antigone as a guide wanders the countryside. Once king, he becomes a stranger in a strange country. He dies, in Antigone's words, "in a foreign land, but one he yearned for."
William Shakespeare in "King Lear" plays on the same theme of sight and sightlessness. Those with eyes in "King Lear" are unable to see. Gloucester, whose eyes are gouged out, finds in his blindness a revealed truth. "I have no way, and therefore want no eyes," Gloucester says after he is blinded. "I stumbled when I saw." When Lear banishes his only loyal daughter, Cordelia, whom he accuses of not loving him enough, he shouts: "Out of my sight!" To which Kent replies:
"See better, Lear, and let me still remain
The true blank of thine eye."
The story of Lear, like the story of Oedipus, is about the attainment of this inner vision. It is about morality and intellect that are blinded by empiricism and sight. It is about understanding that the human imagination is, as William Blake saw, our manifestation of Eternity. "Love without imagination is eternal death."
The Shakespearean scholar Harold Goddard wrote: "The imagination is not a faculty for the creation of illusion; it is the faculty by which alone man apprehends reality. The 'illusion' turns out to be truth." "Let faith oust fact," Starbuck says in "Moby-Dick."
"It is only our absurd 'scientific' prejudice that reality must be physical and rational that blinds us to the truth," Goddard warned. There are, as Shakespeare wrote, "things invisible to mortal sight." But these things are not vocational or factual or empirical. They are not found in national myths of glory and power. They are not attained by force. They do not come through cognition or logical reasoning. They are intangible. They are the realities of beauty, grief, love, the search for meaning, the struggle to face our own mortality and the ability to face truth. And cultures that disregard these forces of imagination commit suicide. They cannot see.
"How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea," Shakespeare wrote, "Whose action is no stronger than a flower?" Human imagination, the capacity to have vision, to build a life of meaning rather than utilitarianism, is as delicate as a flower. And if it is crushed, if a Shakespeare or a Sophocles is no longer deemed useful in the empirical world of business, careerism and corporate power, if universities think a Milton Friedman or a Friedrich Hayek is more important to its students than a Virginia Woolf or an Anton Chekhov, then we become barbarians. We assure our own extinction. Students who are denied the wisdom of the great oracles of human civilization -- visionaries who urge us not to worship ourselves, not to kneel before the base human emotion of greed -- cannot be educated. They cannot think.
To think, we must, as Epicurus understood, "live in hiding." We must build walls to keep out the cant and noise of the crowd. We must retreat into a print-based culture where ideas are not deformed into sound bites and thought-terminating clichà ©s. Thinking is, as Hannah Arendt wrote, "a soundless dialogue between me and myself." But thinking, she wrote, always presupposes the human condition of plurality. It has no utilitarian function. It is not an end or an aim outside of itself. It is different from logical reasoning, which is focused on a finite and identifiable goal. Logical reason, acts of cognition, serve the efficiency of a system, including corporate power, which is usually morally neutral at best, and often evil. The inability to think, Arendt wrote, "is not a failing of the many who lack brain power but an ever-present possibility for everybody -- scientists, scholars, and other specialists in mental enterprises not excluded."
Our corporate culture has effectively severed us from human imagination. Our electronic devices intrude deeper and deeper into spaces that were once reserved for solitude, reflection and privacy. Our airwaves are filled with the tawdry and the absurd. Our systems of education and communication scorn the disciplines that allow us to see. We celebrate prosaic vocational skills and the ridiculous requirements of standardized tests. We have tossed those who think, including many teachers of the humanities, into a wilderness where they cannot find employment, remuneration or a voice. We follow the blind over the cliff. We make war on ourselves.
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