Norman Lear on Business, Politics and Culture
Speech Excerpts, 1972 – 2005

• Network Censorship and Creativity (1972)
• Short-term Thinking: The Societal Disease of Our Time (1983)
• Traveling Hopefully in the Long Term (1984)
• The Responsibilities of American Citizenship (1984)
• The Scarcity of "Patient Capital" (1986)
• Business as a Fountainhead of Values in American Society (1987)
• Managing Our Way to Decline (1992)
• Quality and Spirit-led Behavior in Business (1993)
• The Threat of the Religious Right (1985)
• America Has Not Yet Awakened to the Threat (1986)
• Citizenship as an Act of Courage (1986)
• Education for the Human Spirit (1990)
• Confessions of an Unaffiliated Groper (1993)
• The Power of Art in Transforming Politics and Culture (2005)

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I am aware from reading the statements prepared by my fellow writers for this committee that my own remarks regarding network censorship seem soft-pedaled.  There are several reasons for this.  First, I don’t own a network, so if Mr. Robert D. Wood [then President of CBS] had not backed me at the last possible minute, All in the Family would never have seen the light of day.  And secondly, but more importantly, I think I understand what accounts for the provincial, narrow, often out-of-date, attitudes of the executives who fill out the various posts in the Departments of Program Practices at the three networks.

Somewhere, some time ago, someone coined the fiction that the mentality of the American motion picture patron averages between twelve and thirteen years of age.  And in the think tanks of American business, not just in the mass media area, but in all American business, this fiction has been accepted as truth and this “truth” has been extended to the American public as a whole. 

Another myth is: “The average man doesn’t want to come home from a hard day’s work and be faced with problems on television.  He wants escapism, entertainment, fluff.”  All in the Family has tackled many everyday problems and the average American, returned from his hard day’s work, has not only accepted it but made it the most popular show on TV.

We lose perspective if we fail to see the situation in network Program Practices as only one part of the fabric of the think-tank philosophy, which also dictates what Americans will wear and drive and listen to, etc. etc.  American think-tank leadership is out of touch with the American people.  My personal feeling is that this is also true in government, in business and commerce, as well as in the mass media.  Although the purpose of this hearing is to inquire into censorship in the television area only, I would feel remiss not to mention this connection…..

It is time, I feel, to take a new direction in television.  There is nothing to lose and everything to gain.  The American public is the final arbiter anyway, and it tells us very quickly what it likes and does not like.  What it will be allowed to see, however, is another matter, and there the writer deserves the right to express life as he sees it.

From Statement to the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights.
February 8, 1972

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Because of its high profile, my industry, television, is a prime example of this destructive phenomenon.  Fanned by the daily press, which operates on its own bottom line, the fires of competition among the networks have resulted in an unparalleled and hysterical competition for ratings – ratings which translate to profits in the short term – and I’m sure I needn’t tell you that when the sole criterion for selecting a show is how it may rate against the competition, the decision will be made at the expense of taste, creativity, innovation and public responsibility.

From "Shaping and Selling Values in America," at the Council on Foundations, San Francisco, California, April 6, 1983.

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As a nation, we thought we had “arrived” when we achieved the world’s highest standard of living; when we had the atom bomb; when we and our allies defeated the Axis Powers; when the American motor car was the standard of the world and American technology reigned supreme.  Only 20 minutes ago, it seems, our consumer electronics industry had “arrived” to the point that we manufactured the bulk – over 85 percent – of the world’s radios and TV sets and hi-fi’s and typewriters, and on and on….

As a nation, as individuals, as businesses, complacency sets in with this notion of having arrived.  And with the complacency that follows the end of a journey, we stop addressing the future.  We sit smug and satisfied in the present – until we are overtaken and overwhelmed – by other nations and businesses that have resisted the impulse toward complacency and have, instead, dedicated themselves to traveling hopefully and working industriously to build a better tomorrow…..

My industry, television, is perhaps the best example of the failure to continue traveling hopefully.  The name of the game for the networks, when they are deciding what ideas are worthy of air time, is  “How do I win Tuesday night at 8 o’clock?”  They do not ask, for example, “How do I program responsibly in the long-range interest of the viewer?”  They do not ask themselves how the sex, smarm and violence they program may be affecting your children.  They do not ask, “How do I innovate, how do I re-invent the wheel so as to keep network television consistently changing and maturing in the long-range interest of the shareholder?”  It is simply, “How do I win Tuesday night at 8 o’clock?”

If the heads of the three networks were standing in a circle with razors to each other’s throats, they could not be committing suicide more deliberately.  Just as, it seems clear now, the big three were doing all those years ago in Detroit, when they refused to innovate, to build small, fuel-efficient cars; refused to sacrifice a current quarterly profit statement to invest in the future, and meet the threat of the imports from abroad.  Or the steel companies when they wouldn’t modernize.  Or the labor unions in both industries, when they fought only for added wages and benefits – instead of fighting to modernize and to protect their members’ jobs in the long term.

There are no villains in all of this.  It is a matter of climate.  The average network programming executive is trapped.  Imagine yourself in this job:  You wake up in the morning and read in The New York Times that your network didn’t have one show in the Top Ten.  Your palms sweat.  On your way into the office, you pick up The Wall Street Journal, which now prints an analysis of projected earnings based on ratings.  Your network’s projected earnings are down.  You walk into the office and a warm Xerox of last night’s overnight ratings are on your desk.  You didn’t win a single time slot.  Now your first appointment of the day is with tomorrow’s Rod Serling or Paddy Chayefsky who has a fresh, innovative idea.  I submit that you are in no condition to hear a new idea.  What you must have, and quickly, is a new version of something that is working on one of the other networks….

Television must, of course, pay attention to business, and prosper economically.  But it must never overlook the human essence, that spirit which defies the marketplace and its economic calculus of motives.

From "Traveling Hopefully in the Long Term, " at The Securities Industry Association,Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, May 7, 1984.

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But the responsibilities of citizenship are not discharged simply by voting.  Being an American citizen means exercising our rights fully – and this can sometimes invite abuse.  The history of America is rife with examples of citizens who were willing to brave threats and jeers and imprisonment in order to spread the mantle of constitutional justice.

This nation’s first Commander-in-Chief, George Washington, recognized that genuine citizenship can be a risky thing.  In his Farewell Address, Washington warned: “Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious.”  It is true:  citizenship does not always win instant, easy acclaim.  That’s because it so often requires challenging the “intrigues of the favorite” – the tyranny of the majority.

In a democracy, the will of the majority rules – as it should.  But at the same time, the conscience and rights of the individual are sacred, and also deserve protection.  So the Founding Fathers came up with one of the greatest inventions of modern statecraft: an independent judiciary.  Without the Federal courts, our constitutional rights could evaporate overnight.  An irresponsible majority, hell-bent to punish its enemies, could suddenly decide to suspend freedom of speech or freedom of religion.  Need I add that the first victims of a self-righteous majority would be ethnic and religious groups and individuals who happen to be unpopular?  Scapegoats, sacrificed on the altar of freedom.

What is the spirit of liberty?  Learned Hand once raised the question – and answered it.  “I cannot define it,” he said, “I can only tell you my own faith.  The spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is a spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even one sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him, who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind a lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten.”

Josiah Quincy, a colonial patriot and pamphleteer, wisely noted in 1774: “It is much easier to restrain liberty from running into licentiousness than power from swelling into tyranny and oppression.”  Which is why I believe we must welcome the First Amendment’s breathtaking liberties and tolerate its inevitable excesses.…The price that Americans must pay for their unparalleled freedoms is a civil tolerance and respect for citizens who are different, who disagree and who may, in fact, be disagreeable!

Let me commend to you an equally important fight, in its own way as perilous and as rigorous:  the fight for freedom on America’s home front – the fight to ensure that every citizen can enjoy the liberties promised by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  Now there’s a challenge for America’s patriots…. Why should such a giant wish come true with less than great difficulty?  We have come a long way in relatively little time.  There can be no doubt that together we can go the distance.

From “The Rigors of Liberty, Citizenship and the First Amendment,” upon acceptance of The U.S.O. Distinguished American Award, June 6, 1984.

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It took three years and turn-downs by all three networks before we finally got on the air.  But in retrospect, we were lucky:  at least CBS was willing to give us 13 shows and 13 repeats – to work out the bugs in our product and find our audience.  That kind of long-term investment is virtually never made in television today.  One new show this season was cancelled after just one airing.

The climate in television today – and in manufacturing, and in finance – skews more and more toward short-term results, and away from the entrepreneurial.  It has become something of a societal epidemic too.  We are raising generations of children to believe that there is nothing between winning and losing.  The notion that life has anything to do with succeeding at the level of doing one’s best is lost to our kids in this short-term, bottom-line climate.

How far will we go in sacrificing certain enduring societal values in order to “maximize economic value” in the marketplace?  A Heritage Foundation scholar recently urged that the right to immigrate to the United States be auctioned to the highest bidders – the idea is that the winners would be people with a propensity for “maximizing wealth.”  I suppose the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty could be rewritten to proclaim:  “Give me your tycoons, your professionals, your select few yearning to pay fees….”

From “The Rewards of Patient Capital,” at the Securities Industry Association, The Wharton School, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 13, 1986.

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Philosopher Joseph Campbell has said that in medieval times, when one approached a city, one saw the cathedral and the castle.  Now one sees the soaring towers of commerce.  People build their lives around these towers.  Communities take shape.  Work skills are learned.  Social relationships are formed.  Attitudes and aspirations are molded.  A dense matrix of values grow up around the towers of commerce and spread beyond.

Never before has the business of business been such a cultural preoccupation. If media attention is any indication of popular interest – and it is – today there is an unprecedented interest in business affairs.  In recent years, a dozen new business program have burst forth on commercial television, public television and cable.  There are business news updates, talk shows, panel discussions, news magazines and even a business-news quiz show – not to mention a flurry of new regional business magazines.  Americans once found their heroes in Congress, or the entertainment world, or sports; now more and more people find them in business – Lee Iacocca, T. Boone Pickens, H. Ross Perot, Carl Icahn, and until ten minutes ago, Ivan Boesky…..

America has become a game show.  Winning is all that matters.  Cash prizes.  Get-rich-quick.  We are the captives of a culture that celebrates instant gratification and individual success no matter the larger costs.  George Will, in his book Statecraft as Soulcraft, argues that the country’s future is imperiled unless our leaders can cultivate in citizens a deeper commitment to the commonweal.  Yet rather than heed that admonition, we are turning the commonweal into the Commonwheel of Fortune.

From “Cashing in on the Commonweal for the Commonwheel of Fortune,” at the Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 17, 1987.

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What was happening to the networks had happened earlier to the three major motor car companies.  Failing to heed the warning, refusing to meet competition from abroad because of a fixation on that quarter’s bottom line, they had slowly but surely ceded their dominance.  Other industries had gone the same route.

This was confirmed for me in the early ‘80s when I came to Harvard to meet a wonderful man, Professor William Abernathy, of the Harvard Business School.  With his colleague, Robert Hayes, he had just published a path-breaking article in the Harvard Business Review entitled, “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline,” which argued that business leaders’ obsession with quarterly profits and numerical abstractions was blinding them to their real long-term interests – and would lead them inevitably to ruin.

I could never forget that first lunch with Bill Abernathy.  It was only as we received the check that he told me that much of the future we’d been discussing, he would never live to see.  He had just six months to live.  What he shared with me that day, at a time when personal computers were just catching on, could not have been more prescient.  He told me how investors would soon be moving billions of dollars in capital from Tokyo, to London, to New York, in seconds….that number systems would become the new currency of public values….and that the economic future of millions of people would be determined by people hunched over computer screens, peering at a collective simulation of reality.

“They’re all going to be looking down, Norman,” he said.  “No one is going to have to look up any more!”  The implications in his prediction were clear.  Any they have become reality.  The number-crazed world he foresaw was a world with no sanction for vision, no view of the long term, no sense of anything but that which can be quantified.  As we define our values by SAT scores, Nielsen ratings, box office grosses, public opinion polling, throw-weights, cost-benefit analyses, quarterly reports, bottom lines, we can see the iron grip that these numbers have on our sense of the possible – our sense of our inner selves.

From “Social Responsibility:  A Cure for the Loneliness of Our Time,” Joint Faculty Seminar of the Harvard Divinity School and the Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 28, 1992.

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The Japanese have a wonderful word that is used when someone asks a question whose premise is too narrow to yield a truthful answer.  They respond, “Mu” – which basically means, re-ask the question in a different way.  That’s how I feel when business people ask whether quality can be enhanced through Management Theory X or Technology Y or Public Policy Z.  I want to scream… Mu.

If you think more about it, the questions about quality need to be asked differently.  The questions should go something like:  “How do we create and sustain the desire for quality in the workplace?  What fosters a sense of creativity and cooperation and pride?  How do we encourage a genuine concern for our fellow human beings?”

As I see it, quality is primarily a product of the human spirit – which is not a thing, but a dynamic and pervasive force.  The desire for quality and one’s pride in it must therefore begin by focusing on our inner selves.

The most common mistake in business is to see quality as an isolated product attribute, a simple material fact.  In fact, isn’t quality a reflection of how we feel about ourselves – and how we wish to treat each other?  Isn’t quality a sign that we take pride in our work…. that we wish to maintain relationships of caring and concern for each other?

Sustaining quality, then, has everything to do with helping a workforce develop its character.  Quality is about inspiring a workforce to give its best, despite the sacrifices that that usually entails.  “Inspire” literally means “filled with spirit.”  “Enthusiasm,” in its Greek root, literally means “filled with theos,” or God.

Whoops!  There’s that embarrassing word.  The “G word” that our culture pretends does not exist, except on ceremonial occasions and on the backs of coins.  Maybe it’s time to dust off that word, and begin to pay attention to becoming “filled with theos” and become “in-spirited.”

Some of you may remember that famous book of the 1970s, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig.  The book was an extended discussion about quality as it relates to spiritual well-being.  Pirsig has some great advice for corporate decisionmakers.  “Peace of mind,” he writes, “produces right values, and right values produce right thoughts.  Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.”

Perhaps you can begin to see how quality is a manifestation of our inner selves – of the kinds of persons we want to be, of the principles we want to represent.

The market offers many temptations to degrade quality – or not to strive for it in the first place.  That’s because many aspects of quality are subtle.  Consumers may or may not notice that a car has certain design amenities.  They may or may not realize that their vegetables are free of pesticide residues.  TV viewers may or may not appreciate that, in order to achieve a certain effect, the script was rewritten ten times, or a certain scene re-shot twenty times.

Seen this way, quality is something that cannot be forced.  It cannot be elicited by management decree or federal regulation.  The marketplace may signal that it wants better quality by paying premium prices.  And governments may enact laws demanding safer or environmentally benign products.  But the real capacity to meet such demands effectively – to show creative, motivated leadership in producing better quality goods and services – must come from within.  It can only come from an inner reservoir of spiritual energy.

What’s really remarkable about this “spirit-led” behavior is that it unleashes entirely new supplies of energy.  Many business people just don’t understand this.  Quality tends to feed on itself and become a catalyst and inspiration for others.  It’s like a magnetic charge that invisibly attracts people who want to experience the same energy and pride in achievement – who want to give their best.

Quality resembles the magic of a hot musical jam session.  First, if it’s going to work, the whole must be greater than the sum of its parts.  Second, everyone must realize that when the magic happens, no individual is alone responsible.  It’s a collective affair.  Quality is thus borne aloft and sustained by this invisible and infectious energy that simply flows and grows bigger.  What else can we call it but spiritual?

You ask me how to create and sustain quality?  Nourish your spiritual impulses – and discover your invisible means of support.  Realize that quality is not the final destination; it is the byproduct of a much bigger, much more significant journey – a journey toward harmony; the desire to do and care for each other; to deliver to one another the way the universe delivers to us.

From “Creating and Sustaining Quality,” a speech to the graduating class of 1993, Claremont Graduate School, May 14, 1993.

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In times of hardship, voices of stridency and division always replace those of reason and unity, and the results have always been a deterioration of free and open dialogue, a tension among races, classes and religions, and the temptation to grasp at simple solutions to complex problems.

In our time of hardship, it is the ultra-fundamentalist evangelists of the electronic church and their absolutist counterparts, in and out of politics, that feed on the deep and valid concerns of the mass of Americans.  With the growing division between the haves and the have-nots, the shifting, uncertain nature of jobs and job opportunities, the increase of street crime and violence, the surging growth of our drug problems, the splintering of American family life, the mounting concerns over nuclear proliferation, our people may be more anxious, frustrated and fearful than at any time in recent history.

Responding to this time of crisis is a new breed of monopolists, monopolists of truth and values, with their simplistic solutions to our most complex problems.  We have lost our way, they say, because we have turned our back on Jesus and followed the devices and desires of our own hearts – and America’s purity and strength can be restored only if the nation submits to the political and moral answers which they see as Biblically self-evident.

To disagree with this extremist coalition on numerous matters of morality and politics is to be labeled “satanic,” “anti-religion,” “unpatriotic,” or “anti-family.”

These moralists see the dissonant variety inherent in this blessed pluralistic society; they see Christians who disagree with other Christians; they see Jews and Buddhists and Muslims, people of all races and religions and lifestyles; they see hotheads, sybarites and ascetics, mockers and madmen; they see people who decline to submit to an ordered morality….and it frightens them.

And so they would tame the dissidents.  They would contract this multi-faceted land into their own tiny garden of saints.  To make us properly moral, they would settle for a nation where there is no way of life which differs from their notion of a Biblically oriented family.  This is their vision for America – a society composed of solid, middle-class, one-morality families, leading conformed lives on the model of a colony of ants.

From “Whose Vision for America?” at the Central Synagogue, New York City, May 10, 1985, upon receiving the Shofar Award.

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We have a tendency to scoff at the televangelists I have mentioned – those political, religious-based charlatans who harness the desperate longings of discarded people.  We have dismissed them as “fringe” leaders, more diverting than threatening, like those old-fashioned throwbacks – the Bible-thumping, openly racist, blatantly anti-Semitic, rough-hewn whackos of long ago.

But that is not who they are.  No, sir, these are the 1980s variety – smooth, buttoned-down, middle-American business-oriented demagogues – entrepreneurs of the spirit – who have a genius for responding to the market’s desire for stable values.  Unlike so many of our leaders who are currently out of touch with their constituencies, these ultra-fundamentalist preachers, occupying hundreds of hours of television weekly, have their fingers and their computers on the pulse of the emotional needs of the crowd.  They raise and spend millions of dollars each year.  And that, friends, is power.

But America has not awakened to the threat.  Our heads are in the sand in spite of the fact that fundamentalist preacher Pat Robertson – who appears on television in this town and across the country for ninety or more minutes every day of our lives – is undoubtedly running for the Presidency!  Last month, he trounced Jack Kemp and equally George [H.W.] Bush’s efforts for the Michigan Republican Convention.  It was a victory that made the earlier victory of the Lyndon LaRouche forces in Illinois seem like child’s play.

We are accustomed to thinking of our Constitution as an unshakeable rock that commands nearly automatic public support.  In today’s political climate – with the thunderbolts of demagogues raining down around us – I believe it’s time to re-examine this assumption.

From “A Republic – If We Can Keep It,” at the Beverly Hills Bar Association, Beverly Hills, California, June 10, 1986.

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As dozens of such judges are appointed by the Justice Department, the role of our courts as a guarantor of civil rights and liberties is being jeopardized.  Instead of protecting the rights of individuals against the tyranny of the majority – instead of acting as a co-equal, independent branch of government – our courts may soon become an ideological lackey of the radical right – a rubberstamp for its political agenda.

In times of trouble such as today, we must develop a deeper sense of patriotism.  Love of country means more than ritualistic celebrations and flag-waving.  It means the active, daily exercise of our constitutional rights.  It means the vigilant defense of our constitutional rights.

Justice Felix Frankfurter may have said it best when he declared that the highest office in a democracy is the office of citizen.  I believe that with all of my heart.  In these times, to be an active citizen in defense of constitutional liberties is a declaration of hope and an act of courage.

Whatever habits and inhibitions our culture has conditioned us to accept, this civil libertarian believes that, embedded in our genes is the belief that there is a greater force and mystery framing our lives, to which attention must be paid.  And the First Amendment advocate and student of the culture also knows that we will not solve our problems as a society – or preserve the planet – simply by making more horizontal advances.

“Progress” as we have known it – such as a new source of energy, that bigger super-collider, the colonization of another planet, or a floor polish without waxy yellow buildup – none of this, no technological advance or discovery – can provide the cure for all of what ails this culture.

The progress of our species, I believe, requires a giant vertical leap – a leap in our inner development.  We have embarked from the beginning of human history on a search for transcendent meaning, connection with a higher order – and that is where the next great improvement in our condition, where the next bit of progress, must occur.

We must respect each other’s faiths, of course.  But let’s not be so squeamish or parochial as to think that one of the great human imperatives of our time – the rediscovery and reinvention of a common spiritual life in our desolate modern age – can or should be suppressed.  The answer is not to banish these issues from the schools.  It is to fling open the doors – and find new ways of learning more about each others’ values and spiritual traditions and what we all hold in common as a species.

If one were to look at a very long river, one might see flora and fauna, trees and shrubs, of varying nature along the many miles of its banks.  If we think of our many and varied religions as uniquely different trees along a thousand-mile river – and appreciate that they are all nurtured by the same stream – can we not agree to discuss that stream openly, freely – and anywhere and everywhere – as a common river of values?  It nurtures all of our spiritual traditions while uniting us as a people.

In that metaphor, perhaps, lies our challenge.  There is no doubt that we must address the question of humankind’s relationship to the planet and all of its life forms.  The glory of the human cannot continue to mean the desolation of the earth.  So there is ample reason to strip away our cultural conditioning and give free rein – to a fresh examination of what we regard as sacred in the universe, on earth, and in our daily lives….

“In the long run,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “men hit only what they aim at.  Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.”

You could not aim higher, or better prepare the next generation for the world that we live in, than to teach it to look deeper into itself, to that place where humans from the very beginning of time have shared the same sense of awe and wonder as they groped for meaning.

From “Education for the Human Spirit,” at the National Education Association national convention, Kansas City, Missouri, July 7, 1990.

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There was a book called Edith the Good written about Edith Bunker of All in the Family.  The author’s thesis was that Edith’s every reflexive reaction to any situation was what the writer thought Jesus’ reaction might be.  He was right; that’s how Edith was conceived.  Now, I’m not in Edith’s league by any means – though I ache to be – because everything in me tells me the world would be an exquisite place to live, were everyone able to respond to life as Jesus did.

I am reconciled to the fact that not everyone who reads these words will agree that I qualify as a religious person, because I have not expressed myself in a manner they could accept.  My words lack scripture, theology, ecclesiastical authority.  Still, ever since my early twenties when I smoked my first good cigar, I have felt and said that if there was no other reason to believe in God, it would have to be Havana leaf.  I have said the same thing while biting into a ripe peach, a just-ready piece of Crenshaw melon, or a great ear of sweet summer corn.

I have sensed God’s presence sitting in the back of a dark theater when a comedy was playing, watching an audience of 600 strangers coming forward, rising in their seats and then falling back, as people do when they are laughing from the belly.  I have fallen in love with a total stranger several aisles and many rows away at the sound of his or her distinct laugh.  I have experienced God’s presence in the faces of my wife, my children, my grandson – and every time throughout my working life when I have gone to bed with a second-act problem and awakened in the morning with the solution.

There was a time when I wouldn’t have dared to write an essay like this.  I couldn’t because I didn’t have the vocabulary.  The language of religious expression seemed always to belong to the professionals – and I simply do not make the sounds that are heard in churches and synagogues and on television when these matters are being discussed by the pros.  Then my wife, and a good friend, a noted church historian, suggested I read William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience.  And there I was – between the lines, between the experiences.

So, now, I ask myself:  Why can’t I share my sense of all this – in any way I am able to express it – without being made to feel like a second-class “groper after meaning”?  Because that’s what I am – a groper, searching every step of the way for a better understanding.   And because I am not specifically attached to any synagogue, I suppose you can call me an “unaffiliated groper.”

From “The Search for E Pluribus Unum,” at the National Press Club,
Washington, D.C., December 9, 1993.

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This, I submit, is precisely what so many cultural conservatives are fearful of.  To them, the idea that a work of art may have multiple meanings or, heaven forfend, contradictory interpretations, is moral relativism – and we know what kind of a slippery slope that is!  No sooner do you admit that there might be two sides to a story, or shades of gray, or historical complexities, and you’ll wake up as a secular humanist and start condoning condoms, or promoting the theory of evolution, or civil rights for gays and lesbians – or, bite your tongue, Norman – you might even toy with the notion of defending the separation of church and state.

Politics, of course, is all about collapsing human complexities into simple-minded stories and sound bites – “messages” highly crafted in manipulative ways to mobilize as large a base as possible for political ends.

The Official Version in politics, where power resides, tends to be simple and comforting and self-evident.  Life, of course, is almost exactly the opposite.  The best films and music and dance and art recognize that life is messy, inconsistent and complicated – and they strive to depict that messiness in all of its beautiful, evocative ambiguity.

So there tends to be an abiding tension between power and art.  Power aims to anesthetize and retain.  Art aims to probe and startle.  But what happens when the art of a given period fails to do this – when artists pull their punches, pander to their audiences, sell out to the power of commercial interests, and fail to take risks by expressing their real feelings?

This is where you critics come in; it is the reason you are so vital, no matter how media technologies and businesses evolve.  You are there to give us some perspective on how truthfully and skillfully creative works are speaking to power, and to point out when they are not.  You are our visionary guides.  The great critic is to an artist as the great psychotherapist is to a patient or the great editor is to a writer.  You have the insight to see the artist’s best potential and the talent to help elicit it.  The big difference, of course, is that the advice is not privately conveyed, but broadcast to the general public.  You are, in effect, the host of an ongoing conversation between art and the political and social culture of the moment.  It’s a conversation, I might add, that is not as alive and well in today’s world as one might wish.

In the wake of 9/11, the United States Government has become far more secretive, authoritarian and fear-inducing – and the American culture has become far more volatile, polarized and fear-full.  The disturbing truth-telling of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial or even the early Eminem – artistic entities that force us to pay more attention to those who suffer and to reconsider what we have taken for granted – are too much the exception.  More than ever we need the wisdom that only art and art criticism can provide.  More than ever we need its insistent humanity and its power.

What power?  At the United Nations, when the United States came to make the case for the Iraq War, the Bush Administration literally could not face up to the power of a painting that depicted the monstrous death and horror that occurred when the Germans bombed a tiny Basque village – and so the government of the most powerful country in the world had a blue drape placed over Picasso’s Guernica, one of the great works of art of the 20th Century.  Talk about the power to disturb and startle!

Not to be out-done, a little while later, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft demanded that the bare breasts of a statue of “Lady Liberty” be covered lest they send the wrong message.  This is, in fact, the core problem with the aesthetics of power.  All art must be politically correct.  It must either support the prevailing political mood or serve as a kind of aesthetic decoration, a pleasant amusement.  The banality, mediocrity and trivialization of culture are directly linked, I believe, to the degree of political correctness that is current.

The poet Allan Ginsberg used to rail against the “emotional fascism” of television and other media.  He was convinced that his poetry could stave off cultural insanity – or as Robert Frost put it more modestly, poetry can serve as “a stay against confusion.”  In the 1980s, one tactic that Ginsberg used to speak truth to power was to imagine Ronald Reagan as a homosexual.  It was an idea too outrageous for respectable opinion to entertain – and so it naturally broke through the bullshit.  It was Ginsberg’s way of defying Power – and re-humanizing it….

Artistic works – of whatever medium – are the most important forms of expression that we humans possess.  It’s the way that we survive.  It’s how we declare our individuality while affirming that we all belong to a larger family of man.  That will never change:  only the technology of expression and delivery will.

As you confront the next dance performance or sculpture exhibit or gallery showing or journalism review, that is what you must help us remember.  I recently encountered a brief paragraph by Albert Einstein that says this more eloquently than I have over the past fifteen minutes.  It goes:

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

Freeing ourselves by widening our circle of compassion – and, I would add, understanding – lies at the heart of any successful art.  And so, the best thing that you can do, as critics, is to celebrate this achievement wherever you find it.  We have so much ground to regain in helping the human heart be heard through the bullshit.  You have an indispensable role to play.

From “Seeing the Critics as Critical,” at the Art Critics Group Conference, Los Angeles, California, May 26, 2005

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