Alternatives
Art can help us build a culture of care by ____________________________________ [fill this in yourself].
How do we measure culture? “By how much spiritual substance there is in its everyday existence....We gauge culture by the extent to which a whole people, not only individuals, live in accordance with the dictates of an eternal doctrine or strive for spiritual integrity; the extent to which inwardness, compassion, justice and holiness are to be found in the daily life of the masses.”
Abraham Heschel
“A good Booke is the pretious life blood of a master spirit, imbalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.“
Sign over the entrance of the New York Public Library reading room
Beautiful Books Week
An alternative (and complement) to Banned Books Week, this is a way to compensate for the harmful effects of excessive tolerance and open-mindedness to what is degraded. Beautiful Books will highlight artistic works that are meaningful, elevating, or profound, and it will criticize works that are degrading, perverse, or injurious.
We don’t support the censorship of ideas. Government should protect the free expression of ideas. But some forms of expression should be restricted. We do not call for government action. Our most effective tool is moral confrontation: rebuking or applauding those who stock our libraries and theaters with vile or valuable material.
During preliminary meetings to prepare for this badly needed new event we will explore opportunities for ‘spiritual activism,’ and examine which kinds of works are degraded, and which are ennobling.
For more information and to express your interest, go to humanitynews.net (click on ‘Spiritual direct action’).
Examples of life in a culture of care
-- Free readings of beautiful works in public spaces and other unexpected places.
-- Expand the human touch. For instance, loudspeakers that announce the closing time of a library or other public or quasi-public spaces are vaguely dehumanizing. Instead, the librarian simply walks around, informing readers in a quiet, gentle voice.
-- How can care be brought to institutions? This is a mystery, but the result that we want to envision is that at every stage of interaction in a bureaucracy, officials would recognize the person and establish a human relationship.
Submit ideas for living a culture of care into being at humanitynews.net
The Moral Commons
A fundamental human right is seldom recognized, and never included in human rights declarations: the right to whatever is essential for self-knowledge and spiritual vitality.
We are so inactive, and so ineffective in standing up against popular culture and for sacred culture. The only reason we feel powerless is that we won’t put our lives on the line. We want to prepare to do this.
We have the right to protect and nurture the moral commons. The Moral Commons is a project to promote authenticity, understanding, and care through direct spiritual action: challenging aggression, superficiality, and degradation.
The culture that we inhabit is a regime of the crude. We can protect ourselves from the assault of culture, which produces physical, psychic, moral, and spiritual numbness. We need not tolerate this assault on what is most important.
At the meeting:
Understanding degradation, superficiality, and manipulation.
Meditation and discussion: What is harmful?
Planning for action: Discussion of various possibilities for Spiritual Direct Action.
For more information and to express your interest,
go to humanitynews.net (click on ‘Spiritual direct action’).
“When virtue is in presence, all subordinate powers sleep....Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money….And why not? For they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them, and they shall quit the false good and leap to the true….This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Modern knowledge is departmentalized, while the essence of culture is initiation into wholeness, so that all the divisions of knowledge are considered as the branches of one tree, the Tree of Life whose roots went deep into the earth and whose top was in heaven.”
H.J. Massingham
“If you can fix some conception of a true human state of life to be striven for…all your art, your literature, your daily labours, your domestic affection, and citizen’s duty, will join and increase into one magnificent harmony. You will know then how to build, well enough; you will build with stone well, but with flesh better; temples not made with hands, but riveted of hearts; and that kind of marble, crimson-veined, is indeed eternal.
“Art is the instinctive and necessary result of power, which can only be developed through the mind of successive generations, and which finally burst into life under social conditions as slow of growth as the faculties they regulate. Whole eras of mighty history are summed, and the passions of dead myriads are concentrated, in the existence of a noble art; and if that noble art were among us, we should feel it and rejoice; not caring in the least to [hear] lectures on it; and since it is not among us, be assured we have to go back to the root of it, or, at least, to the place where the stock of it is yet alive, and the branches began to die.”
John Ruskin
“There can be no neutrality. Either we are ministers of the sacred or slaves of evil. Let the blasphemy of our time not become an eternal scandal. Let future generations not loathe us for having failed to preserve what prophets and saints, martyrs and scholars have created in thousands of years.
“Not the individual man, nor a single generation by its own power, can erect the bridge that leads to God. Faith is the achievement of ages, an effort accumulated over centuries. Many of its ideas are as the light of a star that left its source centuries ago. Many songs, unfathomable today, are the resonance of voices of bygone times. There is a collective memory of God in the human spirit.”
Abraham Heschel