(Opening film clip—from Reds: Jack Reed (Warren Beatty) at meeting of The Liberal Club, asked what he things World War I is all about. "Profits," he says, and then sits down.)
I'm not here tonight to talk about war. I'm here to talk about peace—the sort of inner and outer peace that comes from doing good work, rooted in enduring values.
I know many of you probably see that clip from Reds as a relevant commentary on the armed conflicts we are fighting today—war has always, to some degree, been about profit. I also know that some of you share the view of the character who introduced Jack Reed—that our conflicts abroad are principally about the preservation of freedom. I have my own views on the matter; but far more important to me than the validity of any single opinion is that we listen to one another with open minds and hearts. I always tried to make that my core operating principle when I was editor-in-chief of Port Folio Weekly, and I stand by that principle still. It goes to the heart of the original definition of liberalism, which we need to reclaim from forces in the media that have trivialized it.
I chose that clip from Reds not because it was about war, per se, but because it gets to the heart of what I see as a larger central problem of our culture: the fact that the profit motive is far too dominant in every sphere of life. Profits in our personal lives and in our business are certainly welcome. I'm not suggesting the pursuit of them is inherently wrong. I'm just asking, to what end are we seeking them? Is it for some greater good—the realization of a noble dream—or do we get caught up in a never ending quest for more and more and more?
I want to return to that point in due course. But first, let me back up and elaborate more generally what I'm doing here.
Not long after I left Port Folio, Tench Phillips approached me about doing a lecture here at the theater. A longtime supporter and collaborator, he said he wanted to give me an opportunity to continue engaging with the community, even though I no longer had the alt weekly as a platform.
I was flattered but a bit reticent. I'd never been shy about sharing my views in print. But somehow, the idea of asking people to come to a theater to hear me speak seemed a bit egotistical and presumptuous. Then I thought about one of my intellectual and spiritual guiding lights—Ralph Waldo Emerson. We remember him as an essayist and poet; but in his own time, he was well known as a lecturer, and saw lecturing as just another means of reflecting on his ideas. Though we are fond of quoting him, he was not interested primarily in pronouncements. He was interested in thinking out loud, so that we might better understand the workings of our own minds and the potential therein.
Over the last 30 years Emerson has become a constant and inexhaustible source of inspiration for me. So here I am, making my own modest attempt to think out loud in your company.
Emerson was—and remains, through his writing—our nation's greatest advocate of the idea that there is innate genius in every man and woman. "To believe your own thought—to believe that was true in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction," he said, "and it shall be the universal sense."
"A man should learn to detect that gleam of light, which flashes across the mind from within...."
The gratifying response I got to my weekly essay over the years was, for me, an affirmation of Emerson's belief. It never suggested to me that my ideas were unique or especially distinguished in any way. On the contrary, time and again I felt that I was merely giving voice to some collective yearning. To your latent convictions, and your inner genius, which you share with grace and eloquence in a thousand ways. I had the great good fortune to have space in a weekly newspaper in which I could share my thoughts. But I was able to do so, week in and week out, only because you continually fired my imagination with your good works. I think of all of the great people in this community who are pursuing their personal visions with passion, not only for their own satisfaction but for our collective welfare. Tench and Thom Vourlas are among the first who come to mind; for 30 years they've provided a cultural sanctuary in this community, an alternative to the mainstream, not unlike Port Folio. Next door, Tim Cooper does the same thing with the video store—and I'm particularly grateful to him, by the way, for providing these film clips.
There's also the Muse Writers Center, the brainchild of Michael Khandelwal and Lisa Hartz. As we speak, some of the Muse students are giving readings over at La Bella, and if I were not here tonight I would surely be there. I urge you to check out other Muse readings—and perhaps sign up for some workshops— in the upcoming weeks.
I could go on and on, talking about great spaces and places, like the Farm Market on Church Street, and great people like the Market's Bev Sell, as well my good friends Jim Newsom, Tom Ellis, Tom Palumbo and Tim Seibles who've joined me up here tonight. I would be remiss if I didn't also mention the wonderful staff and stable of freelancers with whom I worked at Port Folio—especially film critic Greg Epps and staff members Leona Baker, Kathy Keeney, and Hannah Serrano, who is now starting her own publishing venture. I wish her well in that endeavor and believe that the new publication I'm working on will be a perfect complement to hers. More on that later.
What I want to emphasize now is that these played instrumental roles in shaping a paper that came to mean a lot to many people in the community.
Of course, along with all the good response we got at Port Folio over the last 10 years, we also took our shots from people who saw the magazine as an exercise in bleeding-heart liberalism and intellectual snobbery. I remember one voicemail in particular from a guy who said, "You people are just a bunch of bisexuals running around Ghent thinking your better than everyone else."
I suppose the assumption of bisexuality stems from our commitment to things like civil rights for gays and lesbians, not to mention ballet. What could be more suspect than that, right?!
What I never understood was the notion that we thought we were better than everyone else, simply because we tried to speak intelligently and passionately about politics and art and the life of the mind and spirit. We did so out of a pure love of ideas and respect for the intelligence and sensitivity of our readers. I continue to believe that many people crave more elevated fare from the print and electronic media.
But in the relentless pursuit of readership and ratings, the mainstream media pander to the lowest common denominator of their audiences, speaking to them with a fourth-grade vocabulary and patronizing them with expressions of pseudo populism.
I'm far more insulted by that than I am by the occasional encounter with so-called intellectual snobbery.
I suspect you are too.
The degradation of our mainstream media—and, by the way, I'm speaking from personal experience in the field over nearly three decades—is a result, to my mind, of an inversion of priorities.
As I noted in my farewell column, all the great magazines and newspapers of the last century—from Harold Ross' New Yorker to The Washington Post under Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee—succeeded because they had visionary publishers and editors behind them. Those folks did not go into the business with the primary objective of making a fortune. Like Frank Batten Sr. who built the Virginian-Pilot into a formidable and sometimes crusading newspaper, they were motivated by a sense of social and cultural mission. They understood that advertising revenues are the lifeblood of publishing ventures, but they had faith that if they pursued their vision, the money would follow.
That started to change, in publishing companies across the land, about 20 years ago. Of course there have always been some profit-driven publishers. William Randolph Hearst cynically manipulated the public consciousness toward that end.
But Hearst Magazines, in time, became a great publishing company, nurturing a variety of visionary editors. I got to know many of them when I worked for Hearst in the late '80s and early '90s. During that period, however, I also saw a change in fundamental philosophy. Increasingly, executives began to rely on market research to determine what sorts of magazines they should launch or how they should revamp existing publications.
It rarely if ever worked because it is a soulless undertaking. Magazines and newspapers are like people—they must follow those inner lights that Emerson talked about. They must stay focused on ideals of truth and beauty. Looking to focus groups and such to try to determine what readers want results in something that feels cold and calculated. Very often, it also fails to produce those coveted profits.
It fails, I believe, because people don't want to be pandered to. They want to be surprised by joy, to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis. They want to be inspired by deeply human writing and photography. They want to feel connected to something greater than themselves and to share in a vision of a Great Society.
A few publications and broadcast operations still offer these things to us. The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Mother Jones and lesser-known enterprises like The Sun and Parabola—not to mention some of what's on public radio, like our own local gems HearSay, Out of the Box and Sinnett in Session.
But these cultural institutions work against the grain of mainstream culture. The problem is certainly evident on prime-time television. Long after the phrase "vast wasteland" became part of our vernacular, commercial TV had its golden moments. When All in the Family was introduced to American audiences in the 1970s, viewers did not respond positively to it. But Norman Lear and the network stuck with it, believing in its quality and its cultural importance. The program shaped our views of prejudice and deepened our understanding of our misplaced fears. Today, networks are no longer willing to stick with things for the long haul. If a show isn't an immediate mega-success, the patience of executives quickly wears thin. We saw this play out with shows like Studio 60 and American Dreams, which were beautifully written and well acted; they addressed many of the same concerns that I'm talking about. But they didn't last long.
What we now have instead are things like, I Survived a Japanese Game Show—programs that appeal to executives not only because they're far less expensive than quality dramas and sit-coms but because they appeal to our basest instincts and thus to the widest possible audience.
We see the same phenomenon play out in politics, of course. Emerson observed in one of his essays that "Men in power have no opinions, but may be had cheap, for any purpose."
I wouldn't agree that this applies to all politicians, but many of them, needless to say, are in the very same business of pandering that I talked about before. They will set aside opinions and principles they once cherished, in order to maintain their status and line the pockets of their wealthy supporters.
The result is a failure of leadership. I agree with the character Lewis Rothschild in the film The American President.
"People want leadership," he says to the president, "and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.
"Lewis," the President answers, "we've had presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference."
Whether people drink sand, as it were, out of desperation or ignorance, I'm not sure. The important point is that people crave authentic leadership, grounded in virtue that is both firmly rooted and always growing, through thought and the search for higher knowledge.
We need leadership from our politicians, which is why so many people have responded to Barack Obama's soaring rhetoric, and we need it from the news media. I continue to draw inspiration, in particular, from Obama's speech about race relations. He could have told people what they wanted to hear, but instead he told us what he thought we needed to hear.
The news media need to do more of that, not only in the sphere of domestic and international crises—genocide in Sudan, let's say—but on cultural matters.
I devoted a disproportionate amount of attention to jazz in Port Folio, not simply because I have a personal passion for it but because it is one of the most important cultural products of modern times. I was inspired in this effort some years ago by the arts editor of The Wall Street Journal who said it is not our job to simply give people what they want. It is our job to learn about culture and world affairs and the goings on in our own community and say, This is important! We all need to pay attention to it.
In the case of jazz, it was always my firm belief that if people were introduced to it and educated in its fundamentals they would come to cherish it. Jae Sinnett does this brilliantly on his program on WHRV. So has my friend and mentor Nat Hentoff in his books and columns.
We need more leaders like them, lest our cultural landscape be reduced almost entirely to the formulaic and the inane.
But the challenge is formidable. I think the trend is evident not only in politics and news and entertainment media but in higher education, which is increasingly market-driven. The result has been a diminished emphasis on liberal arts, which is thought to have no practical benefit, and growing support of degrees that would appear to have immediate "cash value."
Again, this is not an entirely new phenomenon—Richard Hofstadter identified it as a streak in American culture, going back to our nation's beginnings, in his book Anti-Intellectualism in America. But our colleges and universities, at least, used to be sanctuaries in which intellectual inquiry was encouraged for its own sake.
Now, more and more parents are demanding degree programs that promise to lead students down a yellow brick road toward an Emerald City of high-paying jobs. And colleges, facing increasing financial pressure, are only too happy to oblige.
The same thinking, I believe, underlies the standards movement in elementary and secondary education. On the surface, it might appear that schools are pushing for greater intellectual rigor. But in my experience, as both a journalist and a parent, just the opposite is true. The SOLs and similar programs have resulted in schools that marginalize the arts and devote little attention to critical and imaginative thinking, in favor of the old factory model that was designed to turn out standardized minds, ready for the industrial workforce. There is certainly no room for questioning fundamental assumptions and paradigms.
It seems to me that all of this is driven by fear. We're caught up in the machine of industrial consumerism—like that famous image of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.
As we struggle to keep our bearings, we seek what appear to be the most reliable routes to prosperity and job security.
And yet, we've lost our way. Companies across the land are laying people off in droves, and real wages are continuing to fall for most people, even as the richest of the rich get richer.
Meanwhile, those who still have jobs are working harder than ever. Last week I came across an article published in 2007 in The American Prospect, asserting that 25 percent of American workers got no paid vacation at all in 2006, while 43 percent didn't even take a solid week off. A third fewer American families take vacations together today than they did in 1970. American workers receive the least vacation time among wealthy industrial nations.
And what are we gaining from our workaholism? As I said, it is certainly not job security. The unspoken message out there in the corporate world is that you'd better be willing to work twice as hard, for lower wages, if you want to keep your job. Like the migrant workers in Grapes of Wrath, we're continually reminded that if we don't like it, there are plenty of other people who will be glad to take our places.
So what's the solution?
I would suggest, first, that we need to return to fundamental values of classical philosophy and the great wisdom traditions—to a cultural emphasis on ideas like truth, beauty, authentic compassion, real connection with the natural world, and the quest for transcendence. These should be the things that are emphasized in our schools and colleges, even as they teach basic practical skills. These should be the values at the center of our public and political discourses. These should be the things that our mass media dwell upon, instead of the fear-mongering that has shaped a society in which, as Thoreau put it, "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
I believe Thoreau was right about that because I meet far too many people who seem to fit that description. In spite of all our hard work, many of us feel that there is something missing in our lives. More power to you if you can't relate to this. But I suspect you've encountered the phenomenon in others, at least.
Our society's emphasis on profit and material gain, rather than true freedom and creativity, imprisons many of us. Thoreau said, "I see young men...whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms [and houses]...; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of."
Admittedly, it's not easy to acquire a house, these days, never mind a farm. But think about it. Think about how we can become trapped by circumstance, growing ever more dependent upon a certain "standard of living," all the while living with a nagging sense of dis-ease.
We could learn a lot, I think, not only from Emerson, Thoreau and a host of other great writers and artists from across the ages, but from our contemporary poets.
Poetry is one of the last endeavors in our culture that has no motive behind it other than the quest for truth and beauty.
Toward that end, in the introduction to his superb book Buffalo Head Solos, Tim Seibles calls for an outpouring of "a sublimely reckless poetry," in response to a culture that "mocks the complexity of our loneliness, our spiritual hunger..., and our thirst for genuine human community—for good magic and good sense."
That thirst for genuine human community—and good magic, as Tim puts it—is what drew us here tonight. Well most of us, anyway. A few members of the audience are my students at ODU. I coerced them into coming by offering them extra credit.
With any luck, I've corrupted a few of them by encouraging them to question the most fundamental assumptions of the prevailing corporate culture—the notion that simple and beautiful dreams are to be set aside, as impractical, shelved for life or at least boxed up until we retire, so we can spend 40 or 50 years chasing material wealth and serving the interests of corporate power.
I know, I know... Sometimes I sound like a raving socialist. My grandfather, an ardent union man who worked in the granite quarries of England and the northern United States, would be proud. But I'm really not bashing capitalism. I'm suggesting that capitalism works best when individuals pursue visions of excellence, with a steady eye on the inherent beauty of their idea, rather on than on profit increases for their own sake. The latter approach, in my experience, leads to a dispiriting mediocrity.
The former approach eventually leads to success. I'm fond of quoting Thoreau's concluding remark in Walden that "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours."
I tend to focus on dreams—the importance of imagining lives for ourselves and our communities—because, as I said, I think the importance of dreaming has been denigrated. Even as we give lip service to the "American Dream," we are often quick to settle for lives that bear no resemblance to the dreams of our youth.
But the importance of advancing confidently needs emphasis as well. Emerson in his essay "Power," writes that "no matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken."
There is a time for dreaming and a time for action.
Which leads me to the new publication I'm working on with Shannon Bowman of Kaboom Advertising, and Melissa Troutman. Both are here with us tonight.
We're calling it TReehouse—A Magazine of Possibilities. The tagline was inspired by a poem by Emily Dickinson, which begins, "I dwell in possibility—A fairer House than Prose..."
The name itself was inspired by the idea that a treehouse serves a sanctuary for the imagination, nestled atop something that is forever branching out in all directions. And yet, even as it reaches toward the heavens, the tree and treehouse alike are firmly rooted, creating an enduring sense of place and unwavering princple.
TReehouse Magazine will serve as a sanctuary of the imagination as well—a place where writers and artists from across the Seven Cities and beyond can plant seeds of possibility through articles, essays, stories, poetry and the visual arts. We are committed to nurturing new and emerging writers and artists as well as veterans.
In the process, we hope to articulate an ever-evolving vision for our world—one that honors art, the life of the mind, public consciousness and, to quote Tim Seibles again, "our thirst for genuine human community."
As I think about this, I'm reminded of Pete Seeger's closing comments in the wonderful documentary The Power of Song.
(Clip from Peter Seeger: Power of Song)
On one level, that film is about Seeger's career as a musician—someone who played beautiful, simple music of the soul to rally people for change. But in a more general sense, it's about the power of sincere human expression and effort of any kind. I honestly believe that each and every one of us here tonight has the power to change lives—and thus to change to world—if only we begin by looking within and contemplating our most fundamental yearnings of the spirit.
—Tom Robotham
tomrobotham@gmail.com