A rather lengthy article entitled, How To Think, by activist, Chris Hedges, which appeared in Common Dreams yesterday.
WHY WE NEED ARTISTS
Cultures that endure carve out a protected space for those who question
and challenge national myths. Artists, writers, poets, activists,
journalists, philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors, directors and
renegades must be tolerated if a culture is to be pulled back from
disaster. Members of this intellectual and artistic class, who are
usually not welcome in the stultifying halls of academia where
mediocrity is triumphant, serve as prophets. They are dismissed, or
labeled by the power elites as subversive, because they do not embrace
collective self-worship. They force us to confront unexamined
assumptions, ones that, if not challenged, lead to destruction. They
expose the ruling elites as hollow and corrupt. They articulate the
senselessness of a system built on the ideology of endless growth,
ceaseless exploitation and constant expansion. They warn us about the
poison of careerism and the futility of the search for happiness in the
accumulation of wealth. They make us face ourselves, from the bitter
reality of slavery and Jim Crow to the genocidal slaughter of Native
Americans to the repression of working-class movements to the atrocities
carried out in imperial wars to the assault on the ecosystem. They make
us unsure of our virtue. They challenge the easy clichés we use to
describe the nation—the land of the free, the greatest country on earth,
the beacon of liberty—to expose our darkness, crimes and ignorance.
They offer the possibility of a life of meaning and the capacity for
transformation.
.http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/07/09-8
