Expanding the Sense of the Possible

I always find it difficult to focus on music during election season. The collective noise of our society seems to go up a notch as different ideologies battle for our allegiance and every issue is turned into a line in the sand to divide us. In the face of all the politics, there seems to be little room for art. I find myself wondering how the work that I do as an artist and creative actually matters, when there is so much suffering in the world. This year is no different as we approach an election after a summer filled with outbreaks in gun violence across the county, the January 6 hearings, and the repeal of Roe vs. Wade. I consider myself lucky to work with students and community artists who are making significant social impact in their communities through teaching and performance everyday. Yet, I still find myself wondering what we actually can do, when the disagreements and hurt around us seem too significant for a music lesson, artistic collaboration, or performance to address. What role do artists have to play in a community that seemingly has lost all ability to collaborate?

I’ve written before about how isolation and loneliness in our society contributes to an inability to come together and enact the social, cultural, and political changes necessary to address the challenges facing our society. I also argued in that piece that musicians and artists have a role to play in reconnecting us to our sense of shared humanity, contributing to our ability to make collective change. I still believe in this role for artists and it is a core part of my work everyday, and yet during election season I still find myself wondering how effective this practice actually can be. It can be hard to believe that community transformation is possible through artistic work when political designs and entrenched power structures that disenfranchise so many resist the change we want to see in the world.

In his book I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean it Up, Canadian author and public relations executive James Hogan’s details the pollution of the public square, which he defines as our ability to collaborate, have dialogue, and solve problems together. He argues that our collective communication methods have become so polluted by special interests that we are incapable of solving the challenges confronting our society today. He uses diligent research and interviews with experts to describe how this pollution of the public square is manufactured, politically motivated, and designed in order to get easy wins for one ideology or another. My own doubts about the possibility for art to create community change is a version of a key observation from Hoggan’s book: due to pollution of the public square by ideological interests, not only do we doubt that change is possible, we lack the imagination to envision a different world that we want to live in.

“not only do we doubt that change is possible, we lack the imagination to envision a different world that we want to live in.”

Hoggan writes that our style of political debate is one of the reasons why we struggle to get anything done, because we are so concerned with the easiest way to win: making sure the debate can’t even happen in the first place. We do this by “limiting the public’s capacity and will” to do the hard work of having dialogue and engaging with effective dissent (where we are able to disagree and it doesn’t cost us our seat at the table, thereby leading to a commitment to work together). Spoiling the debate often takes the form of ad hominem attacks and gaslighting, sewing doubt about the intentions of actors and advocates on the other side and limiting the public’s sense of what’s possible. This isn’t a phenomenon limited to one side of the aisle either, both have become very good at this style of politics, winning the argument by not letting it start, and stymying any ability we have as a society to make actual progress.

So not only have our communities become more separate and lonely than ever before, but our ability to bring people together to solve these problems is being actively harmed by our politics. I imagine many of us have felt the same sense of alienation I notice when I listen to someone share their beliefs and I cannot understand their reasoning or it seems as though people amongst my own friends and family live in a different reality from my own. That sense of alienation is the spoiling of the public square at work in our own lives. So how then are we supposed to see change for the better on gun rights or abortion access, when both sides of the issue are actively trying to discredit the other side, prevent any discussion from happening, and win the argument at the expense of people who believe differently? How do artists fit into this picture and what can we do to bring people together?

Luckily, Hogan’s book didn’t stop at just describing the toxic state of public discourse in our society, it also looked at ways to clean it up. Years of sowing doubt and limiting public debate have left most of us with bleak visions for the future. The first step toward healing the public square is learning to create a compelling narrative that helps us imagine different possible futures. These narratives are rooted not in facts, but in emotion and values, which are much more effective at helping us envision and live into change. Right now, we are facing “unprecedented collective challenges and our toolkit to address them is wholly inadequate.”

The most important tool that musicians, artists, and other creatives can add to this toolkit is what sociologist C. Wright Mills calls sociological imagination or the ability to “link private troubles with public issues.” The word imagination here is key. If we are going to bring people of all backgrounds into spaces of collective imagination and together expand our sense of what’s possible, then art fills a natural role. Art at its best expands our sense of self to something larger than we currently know; it allows us to experience stories other than our own. As artists, if we can create experiences focused on imagination and possibility where people feel safe enough to show up, even in dissent, and envision new ways of being together with people different from ourselves, then we begin to offer plausible, feasible alternatives to the status quo. We can begin to reconstitute the public square in small instances, restore our sense of common good, and begin the work of creating incremental change. 

“Art at its best expands our sense of self to something larger than we currently know; it allows us to experience stories other than our own.”

It’s important to recognize that our work as musicians is not to change minds by presenting facts and enacting an agenda. Our job lies in restoring confidence in the process of creating change communally. Peter Block writes in his book Community the Structure of Belonging that “whatever the world demands of us, the people most involved have the collective wisdom to meet the requirements of that demand…the wisdom to create a future or solve a problem is almost always in the room.” Stated another way, community improvements happen when ordinary citizens claim their power to act. Our work as artists lies in accessing that collective wisdom in the room, envisioning the possible futures, and then helping to make those futures with the community. In this way there is no separation between our identity as artists and our work as engaged citizens.

This understanding of art as possibility feels resonant as a response to my doubts about the role of artists that have come up again during this election season. The work of musicians and other creatives is to create experiences that engage communities in the process of imagination and possibility, reconnecting us to each other so that we can communally enact change. With all the suffering and challenges that we see in the world around us everyday, it can seem like a fruitless task to make music. How will our time spent making art actually make a difference? At its core, art is about hope and the ability to imagine the world differently, and our future capacity for hope is directly linked to our current capacity for creativity. The world needs artists to step up and we can do a better job with how we answer that call, elevating our work to serve a more impactful artistic and social purpose.

“Our work as artists lies in accessing that collective wisdom in the room, helping to envision the possible futures we can make together, and then helping to make those futures with the community. In this way there is no separation between our identity as artists and our work as engaged citizens.”

But how do we actually do this work and what does it look like? It’s one thing to identify that we can reach places of collective imagination and possibility through creative experiences and name what is standing in the way, but it’s another to put it into practice and understand what this process actually looks like. I’m looking forward to unpacking some ideas related to that tangible practice in my writing over the next few weeks and want to hear from all of you too if you have your own practices you’d like to share. See you all then!