NECESSITY OF ART - Post Covid: 7
HOW TO BRING CHANGE
Let me begin my expressing my deepest yearnings: I want us to mutually create a world thriving with love whilst creating beauty excited by knowledge and when we can attain it, to be enlightened by wisdom as a balm for our lonely souls.
I want us to share in a world of organic bounty and generosity, with the desire to care for the earth as we eradicate all social ills – poverty, hunger, inequality, lack of education, illness homelessness, war and other aggressions, and also the personal problems of ignorance, confusion, loneliness, depression, misery and fear.
I want us to fashion a world in which we celebrate the integrity of each individual whilst we each accept our responsibilities before we claim our rights. And I want to invent, through the social and productive structures we make, an authentic community of all, where cool science based knowledge sweeps away prejudices while the arts guide us into a profoundly humane future.
EMBRACING A DREAM OF DEMOCRACY
It is change that many people need and change that some people actively want. Theories, half formed ideas, plans and programs abound for change. People justifiably talk about how we need to fundamentally transform capitalism to reform democracy.
Presently the political and legal systems, masked by the media, support the political classes in poorly representing what we voted for. They do not allow us to access even limited political power. There are ideas to spread democracy into every school and workplace, onto every corporate board and every civic institution, to help democracy penetrate the very roots of our thinking and our personal relationships to others.
Yes, ideas abound about how to socially, economically and peaceably transition from where we are to where we should be but? As the Establishment know so well, this is more than a matter of real world politics, wealth and power; it is also of attitudes, unstated or unrecognised ethics, morality and yes, about who people think they are. In other words, it is also largely a question of culture.
THE CENTRALITY OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES
For the last half century the largest sector of Anglo-American and European societies, at least defined by income, have been the middle classes. As dramatic as this may sound, the fate of the world and the level of civility and humanism is in their hands.
The problem is that many of them suffer from believing that they too may rise to great wealth and in that process, whether they recognise it or not, they become one of our oppressors. Others live in moral and intellectual lassitude; many succumb to the dominant cultural canon that seduces them into believing that what is damaging to their lives is good for them. My lists would be very long if I were to enumerate the many varieties of contradictions, methods of self-imposed oppression and the layers of false consciousness that exist.
What I find sorrowful is that since the 1980’s in the US and the UK, the schooling systems along with media corporations spawn of popular culture, have purposely dumbed students down, generation after generation. Poor education and an infantilised over sexualized popular culture have accomplished two major changes: that imagination, and therefore curiosity has been crushed in many people and that millions of people, including the vast middle classes, have been left in ignorance about what is valuable for our souls, and how the real world of wealth and power work. Second, it has drumbed into our heads, the efficacy of being obedient to power and to hierarchies.
These changes expose people to the prejudices of emotions as the political right fabricate stories and simplistic slogans (Make America Great Again) to convince people of false enemies, and to feel nostalgia for some lost golden age. This is the heart of the problem - that economic unfairness and deepening inequality combined with an almost complete control over what people know and think, inhibits the momentum for change.
THE SUPER AND SUBCULTURES
Picture our world divided into two floors. In the basement is the substructure formed by the existence of and ownership over all the means of production – land, agriculture, the extractive industries, the primary raw materials industries (oil, steel etc), the secondary manufacturing industries, traders and merchants and the parallel financial markets (banks, commodities buyers, stock markets, hedge funds etc). Upon the substructure sits the ground floor: a superstructure of education, medicine and the sciences, and in fact the totality of our culture - what we know or think we know, what we imagine, how and what we dream about, how we define who and what we are, and how we attempt to live our lives. Our consciousness shares that floor with the illusion weavers: PR companies and advertising agencies as well as with the rest of the media, and out on the fringes are the arts and artists.
While the nature of the substructure and its ownership change slowly, the owners naturally resist any questioning and of course resist all desires and demands for change. When it does change, usually due to war or to significant technological developments, it also transforms the nature of work and therefore how people thrive, relate to each other and how they then live their lives. Our consciousness - what we understand and what we think - changes because the substructure is changing us as it changes itself. So too, how we think, imagine and invent, changes our expectations, our dreams and wishes and thus our culture begins to reflect these new pressures and perceptions. They then can create demands of various magnitudes, sometimes able to force the nature of the substructure to alter.
Many of us understand that the wasteful and poisonous practices of the substructure needs to change if we wish our children to have a decent future. We can see, our consciousness about climate change has grown slowly over the last 30 or so years and is now reaching a tipping point where many people are recognising that the situation is becoming desperate. We are putting pressure on our politicians to force the rich to step back from the brink. This is culture in action.
THE ROLE OF VIOLENCE
Now the system relies on repressive violence of its own people and expansive violence against others. Extracting maximum wealth from the normal citizen and transferring it via clear and hidden taxation, via the credit and interest mechanisms that keep us head down in wage slavery, by repressing wages and increasing profits on all services and material purchases is another sort of violence committed against all of us.
Meanwhile we know we are heading for an ecological disaster. What can we do? Certainly take steps where we can communalise our local economies while democratizing democracy in all of our local institutions. We need to recognize that throw-away capitalism and an American lifestyle is not accomplishable for 7.4 billion people.
We also know from history that in revolution, violence replaces violence, and corruption replaces corruption...we need several layers of fundamental change rather than simple Band-Aid like reforms of the economic and the political systems.
Next time A LIST OF CHANGES and the ROLE OF ARTS