Recently, I began reading a book well known in academia—Alan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind.” One of his central premises is that modern American students are indoctrinated with a single virtue—“openness.”
Nothing seemed more pertinent to my experience this summer.
I interned at a well-established non-profit theater company in Los Angeles, known for its “relevant” work. In many ways it was the ideal internship. Hopping on the metro each morning, I would head downtown to the heart of the Los Angeles Arts district. I was paid, received complimentary tickets and my supervisor took her role seriously, helping me hone my writing skills and professionalism.
Despite this peachy setup, it became increasingly clear to me that the world of arts administration is based on poorly defined and contradictory principles.
As part of my internship, I got to attend an arts summit day with more that 70 interns at which, city representatives and arts professionals encouraged us to be “Arts Advocates!”
Advocates of what? I thought. What was their definition of art? What was I advocating?
People encouraged me to be passionate about the arts, but withheld from me the intellectual liberty to make a claim about why art exists or what its purpose is.
One day I decided to make a door plate for our intern workroom, which had affectionately been dubbed by our department “The Alamo” for its small, windowless nature. I searched online for a picture of the Alamo and carefully inscribed my own name and that of my fellow interns underneath the words “Remember the Alamo,” thinking it would be a good laugh for the department. It was not until two weeks later that I noticed something in my mailbox as I was leaving for the day. Inside was an unsigned note.
“Just to let you know,” it said. “‘Remember the Alamo’ is the cry of white racists who didn’t belong in Texas to begin with. To see it displayed is offensive. The U.S. invasion of Mexico is nothing to jest about.”
Was this warranted?
To find offense in a silly sign created for no other purpose than an inside joke between interns and bosses shows a propensity for digging up points of animosity, instilling guilt in those who make common sense moral judgments, and using a victim mentality as license to guilt-trip those who clearly state and stand by their moral judgments.
There was a crippling obsession with tolerance that restrained people from making simple moral judgments based on common sense out of a fear of being insensitive. It was supposed to be an open, artistic environment, but I felt philosophically closed and inhibited.
At Hillsdale, we learn to be students of classical perspectives who classify things based on their quality and type when compared with an ideal, exalted standard. Here, we have a haven where we are able to test what art is and what it is not. We can strive to answer these questions without fear of being called “close-minded.”
As most students head from high school to college and from college into the workforce, they become increasingly captive to the authoritative rule of tolerance, claiming to make heard the voices of the less fortunate and oppressed, while their own reasoning capabilities are snuffed-out. The arts culture of Los Angeles has learned to economize on this death of freethinking so that they have an avid body of mindless, passionate advocates for an ill-defined art.
I don’t want my reason to meet the same fate. I don’t want to be chastised for my common-sense judgments about the nature of things. If I sacrifice my standards for good art to the altar of tolerance and political correctness, how can I possibly be an art advocate?
I want art to be my life, but I cannot sacrifice its meaning in the interest of being socially acceptable.
