Our Greatest Danger

Making bombs will only destroy. It doesn’t matter whether or not we use them. They will destroy us either way.

                                                                                                            — Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy, 2013

 With that remark, first published in 1998, Indian writer Arundhati Roy shows herself to be walking along the same path German thinker Martin Heidegger walked more than fifty years earlier. In his “Memorial Address” of October 30, 1955, at the 175th anniversary of the composer Conradin Kreutzer, his regional predecessor, in Heidegger’s hometown of Messkirch, Germany, Heidegger at one point said (in my own translation):

            For the time being, to be sure—we don’t know for how long—humanity finds itself on this earth in a dangerous situation. Why? Only because, unexpectedly a third World War could break out, one that could have the complete annihilation of humankind and the destruction of the earth as a consequence? No. In the Atomic Age a far greater danger threatens—exactly then, when the danger of a third World War is averted. A bizarre assertion. To be sure, but strange only so long as we do not reflect.

            To what extent does the just spoken claim hold? It holds insofar as the revolution of technology that unfolds in the Atomic Age can so enchain, bewitch, bedazzle, and blind humanity that one day onlycalculative thinking will continue to matter and to be exercised. What great danger would then draw near? Then the best and most efficiently skillful intelligence for planning and invention would go together with indifference toward reflection—that is, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then humanity would have denied and thrown away what is most proper to it, namely, the reflective thinking that is its definitive nature. Thus, what matters is to save this definitive human nature. Thus, what matters is to keep reflective thinking awake. 

Indeed, insofar as the bombs we make remain in their hangers, that very fact becomes our most effective soporific. It keeps us locked in the delusion that everything is just fine, so long as we somehow—through international conferences, treaties, brinksmanship, mutual threats, or whatever other means we come up with—manage not to blow ourselves up, along with the earth we all jointly inhabit. The more deeply we sink into that delusion, however, the less chance remains that we can salvage anything human in our once shared humanity.

That, in short, is truly our greatest danger:  the danger of all of us human beings, collectively and individually, losing our very humanity.

So, at any rate, thought Heidegger, back in 1955—a thought that is at least echoed by Roy’s remark in 1998.  

Conradin Kreutzer

Lithograph by Joseph Kriebhuber,1837

*     *     *

Here we are today, in the fall of 2021, twenty-three years after Arundhati Roy first published her warning above and sixty-six years since Heidegger voiced his concern in his memorial address at his birthplace, and the situation has in no way improved. To be sure, the bombs have still not dropped. Indeed, since the end of the Cold War and the ensuing global spread of triumphant capitalism—and despite the accompanying global spread of nuclear weapon capacity to nation-state after nation-state—concern about the danger of nuclear global annihilation has actually plummeted.

In truth, concern about the potential of “nuclear winter” has been in our day replaced by concern about “global warming” (or “climate change,” for those who prefer that even less truthful term). Concern about pending ecological catastrophe has already for a long time now altogether overshadowed concern about pending nuclear disaster.

So haven’t things gotten better in that process? No. They have not gotten better.

Rather, things have gotten far worse. They have gotten far worse, precisely because our truly greatest danger is thereby buried ever more deeply under the façade of far more manageable worries. Indeed, it is the very manageability of the ecology—at least in principle if not so far at all in fact—by sharp-witted intelligence making appropriate plans and taking effective action, that keeps our greatest danger masked. If only we can get our collective act together, so the dominant popular opinion presents itself as believing, we can avert global ecological collapse. Then we can all rest easy as we watch billionaires go on spaceflights, and even take the likes of Captain Kirk with them. We can most certainly rest especially easy once the current global Covid pandemic is also brought, through skillful application of the same sort of intelligent planning and action, to its end. When that happens, as surely and inevitably it eventually will, then we can all just relax and sit back, enjoying all our social media connectedness with one another around the whole earth—and even beyond, since our digital devices will even keep us on touch with all the rich explorers and exploiters on Mars and elsewhere, throughout infinite space. 

At least that way we will never again feel any need to reflect! 

*     *     *

That is, in truth, our greatest danger. 

Inclusive Exclusion

“Goin’ Back to T-Town” is an hour-long PBS documentary that was first broadcast on in 1993, then rebroadcast in February of this year — 2021, one hundred years after the white riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that laid waste to the vital Black business section of the city — as an episode of the 33rd season of the PBS American Experience series.

During May 31 and June 1 of 1921, white mobs attacked Black residents and demolished almost all of the homes and businesses in the Greenwood District of Tulsa. Greenwood, also known as “Black Wall Street,” was the wealthiest Black community in the United States at that time.  “Goin’ Back to T-Town” documents how the residents of Greenwood rebuilt their community in all its vitality after the riot, never ceasing to identify themselves with Greenwood and with one another. But the video also documents how Greenwood eventually succumbed to a radical erosion of that community, an erosion occasioned by integration itself, most especially as it was accompanied by corporate capitalist development of the whole of Tulsa, pointedly including Greenwood, beginning in the Eisenhauer era. 

It was especially the construction of an Interstate highway right through the heart of the once vital, vibrant Black community that finally tore Greenwood apart. That scar through the center of Greenwood divided the district, separating erstwhile neighbors from one another and sending each alone into the wasteland of expanding U.S. consumer capitalist society. There, each one of us — including the relatively few token Blacks, women, and members of other disadvantaged segments of the general population who are allowed to rise up the social ladder, in order to create the illusion of equal opportunity for all — is left to sink or swim all by oneself. 

Paradoxically, then, the eventual dissolution, through integration itself, of the once vibrant and vital community of Greenwood demonstrated that it was precisely the preceding segregation — the exclusion of Blacks from full participation in the society of Tulsa — that had earlier forced the same Blacks to come together in and asa genuine community on their own. In contrast, once integration began the heirs of the Greenwood community legacy began to drift away, not only from that particular section of Tulsa, but also, and far more significantly, from all real connection with one another. They ceased any longer to form a genuine community at all, and just joined the general mass of isolated individuals that makes up modern consumer society.

Near the end of “Goin’ Back to T-Town,” the narrator neatly articulates that truth by saying, “Ironically, Greenwood, which had been built in the face of racial hatred, which had survived total destruction, would not survive integration.”

The remains of Greenwood after the white race riot of 1921

*     *     *

Nor were the Blacks of Tulsa—or Blacks in general—the only people who were brought together by their very exclusion from the dominant society. They were not the only people who underwent the “Inclusive Exclusion” I refer to in my title for today’s post, in contrast to “Exclusive Inclusion” I refer to in the title of my last post before this one. I will mention just two examples. 

Jews, even for a much longer period than Black Africans, also experienced such inclusive exclusion. For a shorter, but still prolonged period than Blacks, the indigenous peoples of the Americas did, too. In this post I will confine myself to citing just two passages concerning those two cases.  

The first is from Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation (New York: Other Press, 2021), a recent book by Claudio Lomnitz. Published earlier this year, in  the same month PBS rebroadcast “Goin’ Back to T-Town,” Lomnitz’s book tells the story of how his ancestors, driven to flee central Europe to escape murderous antisemitism, moved to the western hemishpere, where they found and helped to build an international community among other displaced Jews from various places of origin and living in various places across South America. The following paragraph comes from a portion of the book in which Lomnitz explicitly addresses the intersection between such uprooted Jews, who send down new roots into such new, broader, no longer geographically confined community, on the one hand, and the similar situation of indigenous peoples after the European conquest of the Americas, on the other. 

Beyond the question of a shared penchant for irony, the fact of their anteriority and independence prior to having been brutally (but always only partially) subjugated made it so that Amerindians and their Jewish counterparts could each draw on a cultural repertoire that reached back before Christianity, from which they could imagine a different world. For them revolution meant recovering a voice that had been lost to the “civilized” world. It was for this reason that the rescue of Hebrew, the rescue of the sacred places of Jewish antiquity, the aesthetic discovery of the indigenous world, the exultation of its languages, and the recovery of its ruins were taken in like fresh air from a new world. It was the breath of a revolution.

The second passage I will cite is even more recent. It comes from a newspaper article by Richard Read with the content-descriptive headline, “Despite obstacles, Native Americans have the nation’s highest COVID-19 vaccination rate.” The article was published in the Los Angeles Times on August 12, 2021. In the passage below Read speaks to how Native American tribal communities came eventually to respond with one harmonious collective voice to the current pandemic, in sharp contrast to the response of the dominant society in the United States, which has been cacophonous.    

In a survey last fall — before clinical trial results came out showing vaccines to be safe and effective — only 35% of Indian Health Service field workers said they would "definitely" or "probably" get shots.

But tribal leaders understood that vaccines were the clearest way out of the pandemic. They took to the radio and social media to promote them, warning that elders faced the greatest danger in communities vulnerable due to high rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity. 

The result is captured in the article’s headline.

Claudio Lomnitz

*     *     *

By whatever means and by whomever people get uprooted and excluded, that very exclusion can and often actually does deepen the roots of their genuine inclusion in their own native communities. The story of Greenwood and the passages from both Lomnitz and Read attest to that, as do many other stories and passages throughout history. 

In the final analysis, it is always the excluders who are most truly excluded. By excluding others, they lock themselves out of all human community.

Embracing Pariah

(NOTE: This is a special, out-of-sequence post in honor of the premier, on October 1, of my daughter Cellista’s new multi-media, multi-art production “Pariah,” for which visit this link:  https://www.facebook.com/cellista.music/posts/717677665831882.) 

Whenever we encounter a pariah, conscience calls us to embrace them. In turn, the more tightly we embrace the pariah, the more the call of our conscience to do just that is clarified, resounding ever more loudly. 

What is more, pariahs themselves are like cold mountain air. Embracing them is just as bracing as climbing with Nietzsche three-thousand feet beyond humanity and time to breathe crystal-clear air. Embracing the pariah is just as rejuvenating, enlivening, and emboldening.  

It is thus no less for our own good than for theirs that we must embrace the pariah. In demanding that we embrace the pariah, our conscience calls upon us to step up at last and become who we are. 

Let us listen, hear, and obey that loud call of conscience.

*     *     *

A pariah is an outcast, someone who has been banished from the community into which they were once born or otherwise admitted as full-fledged participants. A pariah is someone who has been cast out of their community—cast out by the decree of who or whatever has succeeded in laying claim to the power to say who belongs to the community and who does not. 

The reason we call someone who has been cast out by such decree a pariah should itself awaken the shame of all those of us who have not been cast out of our communities in such a way, all of us who have not (at least not yet) become pariahs ourselves. 

We owe the word to the Portuguese imperialists who invaded the region of India known as Goa after Vasco de Gama first landed there in 1498. Pariah derives from Portuguese paria, itself coming from the Indian Tamil/Dravidian word paraiyar, the plural of paraiyan "drummer." At community festival celebrations, it was the hereditary duty of members of the largest of the lower castes of Tamil/Dravidian societies to do just that, play the drums. Parai meant a "large festival drum," and that once descriptive name stuck for the whole caste once simply known as “Untouchables” but now called “Dalits.”    

How appropriate, even to this day! After all, musicians are hardly less valued today—at least by the standard standards of value in our contemporary globalized capitalist pseudo-world—than they were in the sixteenth century when the Portuguese and other European imperialists first invaded and occupied India. Why, drummers and other musicians are as worthless as poets and thinkers—pace Germany, which at least used to be known as “the land of poets and thinkers”—by today’s global-market, purely monetary standards of worth!

*     *     *

It is in the interests of coercive power to keep those of us who are not (yet) outcasts, not yet pariahs, in the dark about our own complicity in casting out all those “others” who are not part of “us.” The powers that be would have us always join them in casting some of us out of community with the rest of us.

If we would come out of the darkness into which we have all been hurled, we have no choice but to cast our own lot with those who are excluded, rather than with those who are doing—or blindly cheering on—the excluding. For the sake of us all, we must embrace the pariahs among us.

Only by embracing our own pariah can we be braced to become ourselves.         

Exclusive Inclusion

In those who are above, alienation is always expressed in a subtle, disguised, and ambiguous manner, while in those who are below it is expressed in a coarse, direct, and frank manner.

— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844   

Which alienation is worse? That of those who are above? Or that of those who are below? 

In the final assessment, the alienation of the former is far worse than that of the latter. At least that is so, if the standard by which one measures is the possibility of overcoming alienation, as it should be overcome. That is because it is far harder for those atop the economic ladder even to recognize their alienation, let alone to dispel it. On the other hand, those who are at the very bottom of that same ladder, just because they are at the very bottom, are less easily deluded about being alienated. 

It is for that very reason that Marx attributed to the proletariat — those in capitalist society whose labor produces the wealth of that society but who are denied all access to that wealth beyond what is required to keep reproducing themselves — the real possibility, for the first time in history, of fully realizing their alienation and therefore uniting with one another in order to free themselves from it. In so freeing themselves, furthermore, “those who are below” would also free “those who are above” and who remain, by that very position of superiority, willfully ignorant of their own alienation. In short, in capitalist society, Marx saw, everyone is alienated; but because of the “coarse, direct, and frank manner” in which the lowest class suffers that alienation, that class at last has the potential clearly to see and then to overcome the common alienation of all, from the richest capitalist to the most deprived social outcast.

Karl Marx (1818-1883)—photograph taken by John Wayall in 1875

*     *     * 

The situation has worsened significantly since Marx’s day. Alienation has become even deeper, and most especially even more hidden, since then. 

Above all, that is owing to the success of such things as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which self-styled “Conservatives” have always detested, but which in fact saved the capitalist system in the United States from the collapse with which the Great Depression threatened it. The emergence in Europe, and eventual spread across much of the globe, of State-created and State-supported welfare systems travelled down the same capitalism-saving road, a road down which so-called Democratic Socialism still travels today. 

At the same time, the very progress of the so-called integration into capitalist society of formerly segregated segments of the population — from people of color to women to differently sexed and differently abled individuals — has itself also contributed to the universally shared alienation of humanity from itself. Precisely by integration’s “tokenism” — allowing some individual members of such segments entry into the higher strata of the capitalist system — the system holds a carrot on a long stick in front of those who belong to those same segments, keeping almost all of them, and the system that their own efforts sustain even despite their own interests, running together along the same old capitalist road of universal alienation. 

Through the combination of those two factors, the rise of the “welfare State” and the progress of “integration,” no clear end to that road remains in sight any longer today, this day more than two centuries after Marx was born. All hope of uniting and throwing off our collective chains has either vanished or become yet one more system-sustaining illusion.

Not even Christ — at least as that figure is ordinarily understood in Christendom — can any longer save us from what Paul in Christian scripture aptly calls “this body of death.”         

*     *     *

NOTE: This post addresses how the inclusion granted by so-called integration is actually a deepening of alienation, a way of worsening the universally human exclusion on which the long-current social system is based, and which that system always fosters. In my next post, I will examine how the earlier form of exclusion called segregation actually fostered — despite itself as it were — the creation of genuinely embracing communities of those very people who were kept segregated at the very bottom of the social system. Accordingly, I have entitled that coming post “Inclusive Exclusion,” in contrast to today’s post, entitled “Exclusive Inclusion.”    

Blindness Reinforced: Our Missed Opportunity of 9/11/01

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I had an 8:00 a.m. class to teach in an auditorium classroom at the University of Denver, where I’d been a faculty member of the philosophy department for nineteen years by then. As had by then long been my wont, to avoid the worst of rush-hour traffic from my home in Longmont through the heart of Denver to my office at D.U., I left to drive the forty miles to my office before 6:00 that morning. As was also my long-standing habit by then, I drove in silence, with no radio, and most especially with no “news” blaring from that source. Then when I arrived at my office, I used the time till my first class to do final preparation and attend to other class-related matters.

Accordingly, I did not have any idea about what had happened to the Twin Towers until I walked into the classroom for my class, only to encounter the stunned silence of my students. Having no idea what was going on, I asked the class what was the matter, and one of them—one sitting in the back of the auditorium, where he usually sat—said “Both Towers are down!” I had to ask him what he meant, and it was only when he explained that I learned of what had happened earlier that morning.

My own immediate affective response to hearing about the attacks came to me in a flash in all its complexity—as such responses to momentous events typically do, calling us to attend to them with care.  

*     *     *

First and above all, I felt the shock of a sudden recognition, which immediately engendered a deep sense of shame. The shocking recognition was that for all the many years by then that I had been protesting against the idea of American exceptionalism, at a deep level I had been relying upon this country’s being somehow exempted from having to undergo the very sort of violent attacks as the one that had just taken place in New York.

I’d been to such places outside the U.S. as Munich, Germany, to give one prime example. “Terrorist” attacks had occurred there at the 1972 Olympic Games, and from then on there has been heavy surveillance at the Munich airport, replete with plenty of police armed with semi-automatic weapons. I’d even been stopped and frisked at Munich once, when leaving from there to fly back to Denver. So, I knew what such pervasive suspiciousness and hyper-surveillance looked and felt like. 

However, the news my students brought me of the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11/01 brought home to me how deeply I had experienced this country, and myself as one of its citizens, as somehow protected against the same thing ever happening here. Thus, I suddenly realized that I had been counting on the very “specialness” of this country the whole time I criticized that very thing! 

That realization shamed me.

*     *     *

Yet simultaneously with my unexpected, shameful realization came a sense of even less expected, uplifting hope. It was the hope that the shattering impact of the fall of the Twin Towers would call forth at long last some genuine national leadership—a leadership that would call upon our nation finally to face itself and accept responsibility for its standing in the world. Such true leadership would call upon us as a nation to ask ourselves openly just what we had done to bring on such hatred. What had we become to engender such reactions? Even more importantly, such authentic leaders would call upon us to ask what we needed to do to make amends for that harm we had done, and to re-establish fellowship with those we had so deeply harmed and offended that they would even kill themselves in their endeavor to express their hatred for us. 

I had never felt such hope for us as a nation before. That hope suddenly replaced the deep despair I had felt about my country since my teens. I dreamt at last that we might still redeem ourselves.

That shining hope was quickly extinguished. That light went out as I witnessed our nation’s so-called leaders do the very opposite to what I’d been surprised into hoping they might do. Instead of calling upon us honestly to take stock of ourselves, as we should have done, our presumptuous presumed “leaders” proceeded immediately to lead us even further and faster down the same old path of imperialist conquest and intervention in the affairs of other nations that had engendered such deep and globe-wide hatred for us in the first place. Hence, we immediately used “Never Forget!” as a slogan to reinforce our self-serving, willful blindness to what we really are and have done. We happily used the attacks that brought down the Twin Towers as a convenient excuse to invade first Afghanistan and then Iraq, and to interfere elsewhere—in Libya, for example--as our pseudo-leaders’ whims and our capitalistic corporations’ interests dictated. 

We should be ashamed!

*     *     *

What we call historical memory is a creature of time and space. Emotional and political needs of the present intersect with past events. For memory, like perception, can never be simply factual. All are memories are reconstructions. Someone is doing the remembering and brings his or her personal history to the reconstructed event. The same is true of group memory, where collective struggles for meaning influence whether and how a particular event is remembered. 

—Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial

What we as a nation remember and what we as a nation forget shames us as a nation. Our memory does us no credit. 

One example of what we have never faced about ourselves: Hiroshima after we dropped an atom bomb on that Japanese city on August 6, 1945, killing approximately 66,000 people

Resorting to Resources

When nature becomes no more than a stockpile of natural resources, people become no more than a stockpile of human resources. Mother Earth and Father Sky part ways, divinity flees elsewhere, and mortals are replaced by fleshy robots. Things become mere rubbish, actual or potential; and no world without end remains, having been replaced by an endless warehouse where only vacuity reigns.

I well remember when the “Personnel Department” at the university where I spent forty-two years on the faculty became instead “Human Resources.” No one made so much as a murmur. After all, at our place of employment — a telling expression, place of employment: the place where we are used as our user sees fit! — we had all long before become no more than reserves to be exploited as the needs of the system dictated. Resources have no voice. To have a voice requires that one be a person, a living, breathing human being. So far as our employer was concerned, we were no such beings. We were no more than one kind of resource. So why bother to say anything?

Now that I’m retired from my job at that employer’s place, I have been given back my voice, as it were. I hereby use that voice to protest the reduction of personnel to no more than human resources. 

In the same breath where breathes that protest against degrading people to mere human resources, I also protest the corresponding degradation of Earth to no more than the third planet from the sun, just another store of resources to be exploited until they have been exhausted — at which point we can go with Elon Musk to Mars to exploit that fourth planet in turn.  I protest such endless exploitation of the soil, wherever we may still find some. 

Human resources: Ford assembly line in Detroit, 1913

*     *     *

[W]e have to consider whether land is just another commercial commodity, or something which we can hold but over which we cannot claim rights or ownership. [. . .] Put another way, is land simply a material substance definable by geographic boundaries, such as a building lot, a ‘natural resource’ waiting for human exploitation like Amazon forest or Alberta tar sands? Or can we think of land as Mother Earth, Pachamama? What can we say of rights to land if she is respected as our mother?

                                    — Brewster Kneen, The Tyranny of Rights

In a couple of lines of his poem “The Death of the Hired Hand,” which takes the form of a dialogue between two friends about a recently dead third, Robert Frost gives what have become two famous definitions of “home.” First, one of the two says: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there/They have to let you in.” Then the other replies: “I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” Perhaps the two definitions can be combined into one, shorter than either of them: “Home is the place you belong.”

However, it is easy to lose our way and go wandering in the wilderness, no longer able to find our way back home. Resorting to resources, whether “natural” or “human,” is losing our way. What is more, in that very lostness and wandering, and altogether independent of any conscious intentions on our part, we actually end up trashing our home, the place we truly belong. We end up treating home as though it were just a place we can make use of as we see fit, a sterile storehouse of material just waiting around for us to employ as we wish (maybe to procure ourselves a bunch of Mercedes Benzes we can use to pollute the air globally, or Teslas to help Musk exploit Mars).

Earth is home. It is where we all — each and every one of us without any exceptions — belong. Too bad we as a whole are so ignorant of that. 

Our ignorance is willful, since it serves our purposes as we have come to find formulated for us those purposes, in our blindness to what is. It helps us go after what we think we want, but which fails to bring us any lasting satisfaction once we attain it. (“Is that all there is?” we ask ourselves.)

We, in our willful ignorance, which is to say our utter stupidity, can no longer even see the forests of our home. We have busied ourselves with using up all such “natural resources,” of course, so that most of the great forests are no more. However, before such deforestation had even begun to pick up speed, we were blind to earth’s rich forests. We went blind just as soon as we first began to relate to those forests as resources at all, rather than as places through which we might wander, risk getting lost, or even take up residence. When forests first ceased to be for us bright darknesses and invitingly mysterious places of awe and wonder and became instead no more than resources to be harvested and used up, we were blinded and struck stupid. As they became just another natural resource, we became no more than human resources.     

That is the cost of resorting to resources.

Natural resource: coal strip mining in Wyoming

Escape and Entertainment

[M]aking films is an extraordinarily expensive pastime. At present we therefore have a situation in which the cinema-goer is at liberty to choose the director who happens to be on his wavelength, while the director is not entitled to declare frankly that he has no interest in that section of the cinema-going public that uses films as entertainment and as an escape from the sorrows, cares and deprivations of everyday life. 

                                                                       — Andrey Tarkovsky 

The title of today’s post, “Escape and Entertainment,” can be taken in two significantly different ways. The difference at issue hinges on how the first word, escape, is understood. In his lines above, the great 20th Century Russian master of cinema Andrey Tarkovsky uses that first word of my title in one common way, that way in which it points in the same direction as does the second word, entertainment. By that understanding and that common usage, what one seeks in “entertainment” is precisely escape. 

Escape from what? 

From all the sorrows, cares and deprivations of everyday life, just as Tarkovsky says. 

Entertainment by what? 

By amusements that divert one from the same sorrows, cares and deprivations of the same everyday life.

Is it any wonder that Tarkovsky has no interest in those who relate to works of art such as his own films as no more than means of such entertainment and escape? Even and especially, I will add, when what they seek to escape is care and concern for such a thing as the current Covid plague, to turn to art for such relief from everyday life itself is nothing but a degradation of all art and all artists. 

May all artists always protest, as loudly as possible, such unconscionable degradation of themselves and their art! And may none of their works ever appeal to such escapist desires for mere entertainment! 

Monument to Andrey Tarkovsky  

Outside Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography

 *     *     * 

Creating art is a radical act of resistance, one that illuminates fragmentations and allows us as witnesses to attend to our collective wounds and transfigure them. 

                                                                        — Cellista  

 There is, however, a second way of hearing the title of this post, “Escape and Entertainment.” That is a way rooted in the roots of those two words themselves. In its roots, to escape means to free oneself from confinement — to elude one’s enemies by leaving them nothing but one’s empty cape in their hands when they reach out and try to grasp one. As for entertain, by its derivation that word means to hold (from Latin tenere) amidst or in the midst of (French entre- from Latin inter-). Heard to such roots, it is not entertainment that allows us to escape so much as it is the reverse: escape from the clutches of what would divert us from where we belong allows us to retain (once again, from Latin tenere, prefixed by re- used here in its intensifying sense) our proper human place. 

The task of art is not to divert us from life, but to call us into it, to enmesh us ever more deeply in everyday life. Art performs that task most clearly not when it deals with unusual events--or at least events which we wish were less usual than they all too often are, such events as lynchings or mass murders with assault weapons. Rather, art performs its task most admirably, most remarkably, precisely when it gives us to see how extraordinary the most ordinary thing truly is — the incredible beauty of a glint of light off a pair of worn shoes, for instance, or the tinsels of ice dripping off all the trees in an ice-storm. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in the closing lines of one of her well-known poems, about which I have written before:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees takes off his shoes.

The task of art is to give us such eyes to see. 

            As I said in my own opening line for this section of today’s post, it is not art’s task to divert us from everyday life, but rather to enmesh us ever more deeply within that life. To say the same thing differently: the task of art is precisely to allow us to escape from all diversions from everyday life, and to embed us through ever more entertainment in that very life.  

That is what art is for! 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning