Fifteen Paths

David Weitzner

Description

Prescriptions for imaginative living in today s noisy and ever-narrowing world Our social conversation has gone awry. We have allowed the wrong people to lay claim to substantial amounts of social, political and economic power, leaving many of us to feel left out, left behind or left alone. We need to rethink what it means to listen, to think, to create and to be democratically engaged citizens. But how? Fifteen Paths is a book of hope. Documenting a year of searching, a disillusioned business professor gave up on old arguments and set out to learn about the power of imagination with iconoclastic visionaries of dissonant rock, punk shamanism, ecstatic dance, poetic rap, fantastical comics, magical clowning and mystical channeling. The men and women David Weitzner sought out shared life-altering thoughts. Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth): a romantic spirit bolsters focus and spurs the quest for ideas; Nels Cline (Wilco): the trust of a wordl

Sujets

• Self-help

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 05 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773053325
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Fifteen Paths
How to Tune Out Noise, Turn On Imagination and Find Wisdom
DAVID WEITZNER



To the memory of my grandfather Moshe Yechiel Rosen, who saw the worst of humanity but emerged from the dissonance as an exemplar of dignity and love.




Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Be Brave and Romantic
Chapter 2
Reach a Wordless Consensus
Chapter 3
Break Rules Out of Respect
Chapter 4
Change the Way You Listen
Chapter 5
Trade Fairly
Chapter 6
Educate for the Future
Chapter 7
Eat at a Table
Chapter 8
Laugh at Yourself and Everything that Seems Important
Chapter 9
Be Curious
Chapter 10
Try Fairy-Tale Logic
Chapter 11
Play the Spaces
Chapter 12
Surprise Yourself — and Your God
Chapter 13
Seek Out Elders
Chapter 14
Re-create Yourself
Afterword
Don’t Be a Detached Observer
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright


Introduction
At least one thing is becoming clearer as we round out the second decade of the third millennium: well-meaning societies have allowed the wrong people to lay claim to substantial amounts of power. You want proof? In the last few political cycles, how many populist and nationalist leaders comfortable using strategies that exploit bigotry and prejudice to advance themselves have been elected? How many entertainment industry stewards have finally been exposed by the #MeToo campaign, after decades of engaging in horrific abuse? How many senior executives at tech companies that dominate both the stock market and much of our lives harbor unabashedly monopolistic ambitions and a complete disregard for privacy rights? And let’s not even start counting the molestation scandals at religious institutions or abuses of power at the hands of police. The fact that these bad behaviors are coming to light with greater frequency offers a beacon of hope that things will get better. But the more immediate takeaway is that even in an age of information, good people who should know better have been complicit in ceding excessive amounts of social, political and economic power to bad ones.
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how this happened. I’m less curious about why those who acquire power tend to be horrible (research in psychology has found that at a certain point, the acquisition of power leads to empirically verifiable brain damage 1 ), and more curious about the good folks who fail to resist. Is it because people are struggling to make sense of the contemporary world, perhaps more so than in decades past? Is it because so many of us just don’t understand how societies and cultures with so much promise have come to such a demoralizing social place? Isn’t it weird that “citizen” has become a dirty word in some segments of society, and that while our social networks may be vast, our circles of trust are ever shrinking?
I believe that the antidote to crippling uncertainty and confusion is wisdom. One important source of wisdom is the ability to keep a conversation going, but conversation is in a state of decline, supplanted by online diatribes. When honest folks lose the ability to understand and respect intellectual differences, they are unlikely to be able to make sense of a complicated world. So how can we tune out the noise that prevents us from staying in dialogue with each other, particularly when we have opposing world-views? The short answer is to turn on our imaginative faculties and turn off, or at least temporarily mute, our argumentative ones. Moral progress is driven by imagination — hearing and telling stories that increase our sensitivity not winning rational arguments. As a culture, we have historically put our trust in the imaginative expressions of artists to offer leadership in the task of extending societal sympathies. Art offers paths of transcendence and hope, a filling of the gaps in moral progress that allows our political class to follow.
The long answer to the question is the point of this book. I wanted to talk directly with the people who give me hope. I set out to spend a full year seeking the counsel of my heroes, appreciating their art, engaging them in conversation and working with them to chart some useful paths forward. The fruits of our exchanges are shared here so that others can pick up our conversations and move them forward. Tackling such an important topic with any degree of competence could not possibly be a solo journey — it requires the thinking of a wide and diverse assortment of imaginative participants. I needed the artists to start the conversations, and I need the readers to keep it going.
A few major themes emerge from this year of conversation: As dialogue across political, social, economic, religious or ideological divides become mired in identity politics and fake news, we need to rethink what it means to listen. As corporate scandal after scandal goes unanswered, with fewer people benefiting from our economic system, we need to reevaluate the predatory form of capitalism that dominates our markets. As monopolistic tech companies try to position themselves as the new gatekeepers to social meaning, and screens become our mystical pathways, even those without mystical inclinations need to rethink spirituality. The artists that I was lucky enough to sit down with have much to offer on these topics, and many of these conversations challenged my own worldviews and assumptions. Even if you are not familiar with any individual artist or their work, even if you are not interested in the genres they create in, even if you don’t care for rock or rap or comics, I am confident that you can still learn a lot from their words. Let them help you tune out the noise that is preventing you from turning on the full potential of your imagination.
Most of us, most of the time, do our best to use our physical, mental and emotional tools to craft purposeful lives. When things go right, we confidently find harmony between what we think and hope should be and what actually is. We observe, we imagine, we aspire and, most importantly, we carry on.
Until something cracks. In the aftershocks of those moments, the “is” of our observations and the “ought” of our imagination no longer coalesce. We stumble to make sense of our lived experiences. We are thrown off by the sudden disappearance of the stability, born of a coherent sense of self and a seeming alignment in our internal assessment of the relationship between purpose and possibility, which had enabled us to find meaning up until the rupture. When we encounter a disruptive experience in our emerging narrative of sense-making, many of us withdraw from the uncertain outside world into the familiar confines of our inner mental space, where we can control our own reality. And in the technological age, we have tools of social media that allow us to withdraw from the reality of a social world without even realizing that we have done so.
Disruption does not need to be catastrophic for us to justify a social withdrawal. Even when we imagine a future that looks welcomingly bright, conflict can arise in our mental models, causing a halt in our forward progress. When we find a disagreement between the mind and the heart, for example, we may feel unbalanced and immobilized. Eventually, though, we make a choice. Living means taking action — even when we need more time to think, or wish we had more options. Living means finding a way to accept the bumps of conflict and move on.
Far more unsettling, however, and difficult to overcome, are those history-making events that leave a wake of disruptive instability in the social narratives of a diverse group of folks. As 2016 drew to a close, I happened to be in New York City on election night, having made a pilgrimage with other nerds eager to witness the local live debut of the somewhat mythical alternative rock band Temple of the Dog. This night would tragically take on even more significance in light of lead singer Chris Cornell’s untimely passing a few months later. There will have been only eight live shows in the history of this tremendous band. While their music brought so much light to their audiences, Cornell sadly could not shake off the darkness.
Many of the fans gathered that night at Madison Square Garden came of age during the grunge era of the early 1990s. We had traveled from all over to come together and honor a time when popular culture was dominated by alternative rock, Hilary Clinton was living in the White House and Donald Trump was the Howard Stern regular who never seemed to be in on the joke. Despite being older, grayer and preferring the comfort of seats over the tumult of a mosh pit, the observers were aging better than the culture itself. Nostalgia had never seemed so understandable . . .
Our hotel, as chance would have it, was directly next door to Trump HQ, and we found ourselves trapped in the security perimeter, making the familiar streets of NYC seem a strange fortress of exclusion. It was an appropriate place to take in the unfolding political reality. Illiberal citizens will talk of alternative facts (on the right) or intersectional power (on the left) in closed echo chambers. Opposing sides no longer make sense to the other. One side demands intellect and expertise be rejected as products of fake news, while the other insists that personal privilege be checked at the altar of identity politics. In the face of such impossible rules of engagement, curiosity is stunted. Formerly open spaces are now made “safe,” but at what cost?
Can we still hope for the free expression necessary for learning, intellectual growth and human enlightenment when both the right and the left seek to censor and silence voices that make them uncomfo