Bold imagination should drive America, not paralyzing fear, says cultural observer Curtis White. He is highly critical of what he calls America’s "middle mind." What's that? It's the market-driven media and institutions now defining what's serious in America -- movies that do not confess their politics; revolutionary images trivialized on umbrellas; art museums and concert halls where the radical is entombed instead of experienced; universities substituting problem solving for critical thinking; and pseudo-serious broadcast programs which consistently fail to distinguish the distinguished from the hack.
Americans have yielded to the driving force of managed entertainment, Dr. White says, accept the packaged instead of demanding the authentic. The "middle mind" -- on the airwaves and the newsstand, in universities, concert halls, museums -- is a fraud, Curtis White says. In fact, he believes, the society's ubiquitous "middle mind" is why Americans no longer think for themselves.
How did this "middle mind" get its grip? Dr. White believes it filled a vacuum created while the Left and Right were consumed by their "culture wars," fighting over what got into and was left out of the academic canon. The middle was empty, he says, so the "middle mind" flooded in to fill the gap. It did it with entertainment that turned the arts and the imagination into products, displaced individual critical thinking and discrimination with commodities. We were busy. And yielded to the temptation to be passive, he says.
Curtis White targets all of today's institutions -- educational, social and cultural -- for being painfully successful in taming our social, technological and artistic imaginations, defending the status quo at the expense of change. That's a problem, says Dr. White: When we stop changing, we're dead, he says, speaking both for individuals and for cultures. He wants us to start over. Refuse to yield to anyone, Left, Right or Middle. It's time to think hard about exactly what it is that American culture needs in order to do it's most serious thinking, he says. Reclaim our imaginations. Reclaim the sense that the future is open to possibility and that we are all welcome participants in that future. We’ve done it before, he says. It was called "The Sixties."
To be alive, Dr. White maintains, we must engage with every aspect of the culture, "read" all media critically. He's convinced that today's "middle mind" leaves us empty, distracted by distractions, spectators to a static, frightened, unhealthy culture whose differences are papered over. America is not one culture, Curtis White insists, it is many cultures and the differences are America's strengths.
How much better, Dr. White urges, to be active participants in creation. Slough off the role of spectator. Re-engage. "Read" what is really being said. Be discriminating. Don’t take someone's word for what is "beautiful," or "good" or "worthy." Sort things out so you know where you are in the culture. Curtis White's prescription for the antidote to the "middle mind"? Make something beautiful; misbehave; and try to win. Then see what happens.
