We live in a world of dichotomies. Rich, poor. Successful, defeated. Logical, confused. Hard working, playful. Of course, in the public mind, it makes sense to be rich, successful, logical, and to work hard. There is little place in the social consciousness for non-sense. The first half of each pair can be grouped as good, and the second half as wasted effort. From childhood we are directed along a fizzy path toward the accepted, socially good life by parents who see themselves as responsible.
As much as humanly possible and finances allow, parents fill their children’s off-school hours with activities. Karate class, ballet, soccer, volleyball, and tutoring in important academic subjects — reading, math, and science. Many public schools have joined in the frenzy, paring down the curriculum to areas whose success is quantifiable. Programs now seen as non-essential, like band and art, have been dropped. Many grammar schools have gone so far as to eliminate recess as a waste of children’s time. What about sports? Keep sports. They bring money into the system. Quantifiable.
Is there another way to look at our society, to evaluate individual growth aside from how well one, literally, measures up to social standards of success? And if so, is there value in such a judgment? To answer that we need a larger picture of what makes a nation great. We need to talk about its culture. This takes us out of the quantifiable and into the qualifiable, to look at what cannot be measured, to step off the road with its mile markers and walk into the glorious and utterly chaotic wilderness of ideas, unconstrained by the rules that govern a capitalistic society. In short, unmonetized and lacking any immediate value.
A society’s culture is organic. It grows from ideas pursued in the minds of people thinking creatively. As new ideas gain prominence, the public’s tolerance for both originality and change increases along with the willingness of a government to enact policies which reflect the public consensus. This is evident in America today as corporate interests come into direct conflict with a rising populism and the public imagination. Much of the public outcry of the last few years goes deeper than jobs and income inequality; there exists an unfulfilled need for self-expression, for expanding ideas in all facets of a person’s life. But, in a country where its citizens work more hours per day and more days per year, face an increasingly distant retirement age, and take shorter vacations than any other industrialized nation aside from Korea and Mexico, notions of self-fulfillment become secondary to survival.
And where does this leave the best historical indicator of a nation’s greatness, culture? It is crippled to the degree that we focus on the commonly accepted measure of worth — income. Social development is eliminated by default. By ignoring the need for independent thought, we eliminate that possibility. When schools restrict student activity to whatever can be measured by testing, we not only short change them, we forego our own future. Eliminating arts programs from the curriculum cuts off an important mode of self expression. At the elementary school level, recess is not simply a gap and education, it’s an open invitation to original thought. Games, self-created sports like kickball or snowball fights, conversations with non-classmates, and varieties of social interaction allow a fundamental learning to occur, learning the measure of which cannot be stuffed into a bell curve. Play, the common ingredient of all creative activities, draws the human mind away from the rigors of social dictation and toward possibility.
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Prequel
I’m sitting on a patio before large cage holding three baby raccoons that fell from a tree nearby. They are about six weeks old, now. Watching them play, I wonder where the idea of playing developed. How looking for a way out of the cage, walking around and bumping into each other, became an act of playing, a behavior seemingly without purpose.
I try to make sense of it. First comes rolling onto one another randomly and then maybe a kick, a foot in the wrong place, and a mouth to force it off. The second raccoon, feeling a mouth around its leg, grabs the other raccoon with its own mouth. This initiates tactical maneuvering wherein each tries through offense or defense to dominate the other side. When one succeeds, the second tries even harder to obtain a better position. These movements require thoughts and develop into techniques becoming more complex. But it all starts out with random movement and without the benefit of any logical foundation.
This something from seemingly nothing reminds me of the mysterious process in which a coherent canvas representation of an artist’s experience is created against the disheveled background of his studio — scattered, unusable objects, zero color coordination, crumpled fabrics, incomplete sketches, and a refrigerator that looks like an international food exhibit that has run out of funds — slices of pizza, a carton of takeout Chinese food, leftover tacos. The kind of place that Rooms To Go shows initiate sales people as a barbaric landscape to be avoided in the name of civilized tidiness. But, alas, to one side of the room next to a large window sits an easel supporting a painted surface on which is captured the soul behind a woman’s face.
All this disorder, at first glance, does not seem the way to go. We are taught from a young age to practice leading an orderly life, to develop our various interests in practical ways that will lead to visible development, like rivulets that will join to form that mighty river of success. When a child is seen to act in a way that to adult eyes is irrational, he is being silly. The word illogical is not applied because that word is reserved for the ordered world of his parents. After all, we live in a society with rules, directing our activities.
