What are humans good for, anyway?
"Our knowledge has made us cynical."
Good morning!
Before I left my role at Forum I wrote an editor’s note for the February issue, which I am sharing with you here today. Since then, I’ve spent even more time thinking about the seismic shifts in our country and how it impacts my family, my community, and beyond. I’ve spent time considering how I will choose to interpret, respond, and engage. Some days I have more questions than answers. Other days I feel the “fierce urgency of now” in my bones.
And over the course of this administration’s first 100 days I’ve been working on In the Presence of an Absence, my latest art installation that opens this Friday. In the midst of so many challenges, threats, and anxieties, why art? Good question. It’s one I keep asking. And it’s one I keep answering with art.
I recently rewatched Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film The Great Dictator, a satirical take on the rise of Nazi Germany as well as the first Chaplin film to include dialogue. Chaplin plays a barber from a Jewish ghetto whose identity gets mistaken for the aspiring dictator. Toward the film’s end, the hapless barber wears the dictator’s uniform and mustache, and is forced to make a speech in front of a huge crowd of soldiers and sycophants. He sheepishly approaches the podium and begins speaking. But instead of remaining incognito and faking a dictator’s speech, he seizes the chance to upend the regime’s aims. He passionately appeals to the crowd, hoping they will reject the dictator’s tightening grip. Watching this final scene, I found myself drawn to this passage in particular:
“We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity.”
More than machinery, we need humanity. Hearing this, I can’t help but think of John Henry and his hammer. When the steam-powered drill arrived in town, many citizens praised the technology as something more powerful than humans, something that would prove itself superior to human strength and imagination. The kind of machine that could put people out of work. The kind of machine that might make us ask: What are humans good for, anyway?
The barber offers us one among many possible answers to that question when he says, “You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.“
A machine can’t do that. Neither can its peddlers. But I insist there are many ways for us to make life more free and beautiful for all, and with the urgency this moment requires. And art is among the greatest.
If you’re free this Friday night, please drop by Vulpes Bastille in the Crossroads between 5:00 and 8:00 for the opening reception of In the Presence of an Absence.
