[lit-ideas] Miller and culture
- From: "Steven G. Cameron" <stevecam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 12:50:55 -0500
**We've previously discussed the unfortunate dumbing down of current
culture. Bob Herbert, in the following _NY Times_ op-ed piece,
eloquently considers the problem while mourning the passing of the fine
thinker and playwright, Arthur Miller. A question Herbert doesn't
(sufficiently) raise is how might it be possible to reverse this trend
-- is anyone listening -- does anyone care enough??
TC,
/Steve Cameron, NJ
------
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Public Thinker
By BOB HERBERT
Published: February 14, 2005
Arthur Miller, in his autobiography, "Timebends," quoted the great
physicist Hans Bethe as saying, "Well, I come down in the morning and I
take up a pencil and I try to think. ..."
It's a notion that appears to have gone the way of the rotary phone.
Americans not only seem to be doing less serious thinking lately, they
seem to have less and less tolerance for those who spend their time
wrestling with important and complex matters.
If you can't say it in 30 seconds, you have to move on. God made man and
the godless evolutionists are on the run. Donald Trump ("You're fired!")
and Paris Hilton ("That's hot!") are cultural icons. Ignorance is in.
The nation is at war and its appetite for torture may be undermining the
very essence of the American character, but the public at large seems
much more interested in what Martha will do when she gets out of prison
and what Jacko will do if he has to go in.
Mr. Miller's death last week meant more than the loss of an outstanding
playwright. It was the loss of a great public thinker who believed
strongly, as Archibald MacLeish had written, that the essence of America
- its greatness - was in its promises. Mr. Miller knew what ignorance
and fear and the madness of crowds, especially when exploited by
sinister leadership, could do to those promises.
His greatest concerns, as Charles Isherwood wrote in Saturday's Times,
"were with the moral corruption brought on by bending one's ideals to
society's dictates, buying into the values of a group when they conflict
with the voice of personal conscience."
The individual, in Mr. Miller's view, had an abiding moral
responsibility for his or her own behavior, and for the behavior of
society as a whole. He said that while writing "The Crucible," "The
longer I worked the more certain I felt that as improbable as it might
seem, there were moments when an individual conscience was all that
could keep a world from falling."
For the United States, which launched a misguided, pre-emptive war in
Iraq, is shipping prisoners off to foreign countries to be tortured and
has pressed the rewind button on matters of social progress, this may be
one of those moments.
Reading Miller again, and looking back on his life, it's interesting to
see some of the differences he has spotlighted in two sharply defined
eras: the Depression-wracked 1930's and the prosperous, postwar 1950's.
"It was not that people were more altruistic," he wrote in "Timebends,"
"but that a point arrived - perhaps around 1936 - when for the first
time unpolitical people began thinking of common action as a way out of
their impossible conditions. Out of dire necessity came the surge of
mass trade unionism and the federal government's first systematic relief
programs, the resurgent farm cooperative movement, the TVA and other
public projects that put people to work and brought electricity to vast
new areas, repaired and built new bridges and aqueducts, carried out
vast reforestation projects, funded student loans and research into the
country's folk history - its songs and tales collected and published for
the first time - and this burst of imaginative action created the sense
of a government that for all its blunders and waste was on the side of
the people."
By the early 50's the agony of the Depression was gone. McCarthyism was
in flower and the dean of Mr. Miller's alma mater, the University of
Michigan, was complaining that his students' highest goal was to fit in
with corporate America rather than separating truth from falsehood.
The dean, Erich Walter, said, "They become experts at grade-getting, but
there's less hanging round the lamppost now, no more chewing the fat,"
or, as Mr. Miller put it, "speculating about the wrongs of the world and
ideal solutions, something no employer was interested in, and might even
suspect."
Mr. Miller understood early that keeping the population entertained was
becoming the paramount imperative of the U.S. We're now all but buried
in entertainment and the republic is running amok. Mr. Miller is gone,
and if we're not wise enough to pay attention, his uncomfortable truths
will die with him. (He felt, among other things, that most men and women
knew "little or nothing" about the forces manipulating their lives.)
Anyway, the Grammys were last night and Michael Jackson's trial resumes
today.
Arthur Miller? Broadway dimmed its lights Friday night. His country may
decide that's enough of a tribute and it's time to move on.
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