ABSTRACT
Creative artists and intellectuals are always navigating around a paradox. It is essential that culture be invisible, so that people can believe their reality and morality are grounded, objective, and absolute. It is also essential that culture be visible, so that people can recognize and repair its malfunction when it leads us astray from our interests. The division of labor between those who primarily defend cultural norms and conventional beliefs, and those who primarily critique them, reflects the inward struggle of most human individuals between a valuable exclusion of the world’s complexity and mutability, and a valuable acknowledgment of those same things. When the United States launched its war on Iraq, the lead story in UCLA’s right-wing newspaper condemned the faculty as obviously a left-wing cabal. Bookishness has always provoked charges of myopic blindness to common sense, even when it offered illuminations. The arts and humanities matter because that psychic territory is no less worth exploring than its physical counterpart.
