I rarely agree with David Brooks, not because he’s a conservative, but because he tends to hedge on the side of the GOP when today’s party and its supporters are dangerously out of step with the needs and priorities of most Americans. That said, it was refreshing to read a recent column of his in which he trumpeted the role that the arts might play in bridging our partisan divide.
Art, he notes, can take us to deeper, emotional and moral places, “that hidden, semiconscious kingdom within us from which emotions emerge, where our moral sentiments are found — those instant, esthetic-like reactions that cause us to feel disgust in the presence of cruelty and admiration in the presence of generosity.”
Further, art does three things for us:
- First, the beauty created by art makes us stop and pay attention
- Second, it gives us an experience that broadens the range of emotions beyond what we’re regularly used to
- Finally, it forces us to see the world from another person’s point of view, something we seem less able to do these days.
While none of this is new to anyone who’s familiar with the use of art to spark civic dialogue, it is great to see Brooks use his platform in the New York Times to put art forth as a way to bring people together. After all, art often does that through shared experiences in shared spaces, and speaks to us in ways that facts, data, and logic regularly fail to.
While I don’t want to read more into it than is there, I remain hopeful that more than a few of our elected leaders will take this to heart and look at ways to increase support for the arts on a local, regional, and national level. We already know that the arts account well greater levels of well-being at the community level and that they are drivers of the economy (New York State is a great example).
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