What Art Can Do for Democracy
We host legendary artist Brian Eno and his co-author Bette Adriaanse to explore the ideas in their book, What Art Does. Feelings are not luxuries, they're powerful forces that can nurture democracy or, in the wrong hands, unmake it entirely. Even at its most intimate and personal level, art invites us to imagine alternatives, experiment, and find grounding, a sense of stability, and forward momentum in a world of increasing uncertainty.
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Transcript
Welcome to How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy and really don't love dictatorship, but who also know that democracy needs to change fundamentally if it's going to survive. I am Omezhin Khalifa. And I'm John Alexander.
This time, we're looking into the relationship between art and democracy right now. Challenging legendary artist Brian Eno and Better Adrianse, Brian's co author in his new book, What Art Does, an Unfinished Theory, as to whether art really matters now in these urgent times. And if so, why? I started by asking them to define art and to reflect a little on the times we're living in.
It's such a big question. What does art mean? And there's been so many books written about it, and we realized we don't want this book to be about the definition of art, but we definitely need to address it in the beginning. When we use the word art, what do we mean? And in the book, we say art is a way of making feelings happen. Art is everything we don't have to do. And when I was in art school, I made a drawing of a fly in an airplane, and I handed it to my teacher for feedback. And he looked at it, and he said, this is not art. And I was very taken aback because I was really invested in making art because I was in art school. I've been making art all my life, I thought. And then he informed me, this is not art. This is something else. Perhaps it's culture or a hobby or something, but it's not art. And we had philosophy classes where we read books about art. What is art? You read Kant and Hume and all the big thinkers, and they describe art as as something rather complicated, very lofty, something that is often transgressive or spiritual, almost, something that has really heightened qualities. And I didn't recognize myself in this description being this divine apparatus, but I didn't really have the words to counter it. And I read loads of these books because I was trying to understand how can I and my fellow students all feel like artists, make art, but we don't fit the definition, and sometimes we don't even get it? What is happening here? And it was striking to me that there is very often this hierarchy in art. Even when, thinkers include different forms of art in art, when it isn't just paintings and operas, When they include other forms of art, they make kind of a ladder. So here you have operas and conceptual art and performances, and then in the middle, you have maybe architecture and design. And then at the bottom, you have things like this shirt that Brian painted, you know, painting shirts, nail polish, knitting. And I objected to that latter. I started teaching at art school. I met Brian, and he had thought about this question for, I don't know, forty years, something like this. And his definition was in accordance with what I was feeling. We are all doing art all the time. There's no difference between Kafka writing a book where somebody wakes up as an insect and my grandma embroidering a pillow. It's the same activity. Different skill levels, different value, but it's the same activity. It comes from the same source. So in the book, we say art is a way of making feelings happen. That's what we do it for, to make feelings happen. And, what art is is everything we don't have to do.
By art is everything we don't have to do. What I meant was there are some things you have to do, like you have to eat, but you don't have to invent complex cuisines with melted gold leaf on them and things like that. You have to wear clothes, but you don't have to have fashions and styles and so on. You could do it with animal skins or with just Hessian rags or uniforms. So it's it seems to be an inevitable predisposition in all humans to decorate and to elaborate and to have very strong feelings about those decorations and elaborations. I mean, the most obvious example is an artwork that nearly everyone in this room except me has, which is a haircut. People have strong feelings about their how their hair is arranged. And people will say to you, I wouldn't be seen dead looking like that, pointing at another hairstyle. So we have very strong feelings about the things that we make that I would call art. I mean, I include haircuts and chewing gum wrappers and different ways of walking and all of the things humans do as stylistic exuberance, if you like. So the question is what what are we doing when we do that? But perhaps I'll leave that part of the question. Why are we expending all that energy that could be doing something presumably useful in economical terms, but in fact, very often is doing nothing particularly useful in functional terms. So what is it we're doing? Humans and other creatures don't tend to do useless things. The things that look exuberant and wasteful are actually serving some purpose. What is the character of now? What's the nature of now? So it's both thrilling and terrifying in the sense that the structures that we thought existed and were reliable turn out to be completely unreliable. And it turns out that nobody knows understands the situation better than you or I do. We used to think even in fact, it's Liberals who let go of this idea last that governments kind of knew what they were doing. And that in the end, things would get sorted out by governments. So we're in a situation now where the traditional layers of expertise that we thought were deeply embedded in the society turn out to be not very deeply embedded and turn out in the end to not be particularly wise either. So that's the terrifying part. The thrilling part is it means it's ours to reinvent. And that's where I think we are now. More and more people are thinking, we've got to think it out for ourselves. It's down to us. And that means we've gotta get off our asses a little bit. There's a great book by a Russian writer called Sergei Yurchak, and he was writing about the last generation of the Soviet Union. And book has a beautiful title. It's called Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More. And that sort of captures the fact that communism dissolved overnight. It evaporated over one night. It was no longer an empire. And so it's about the idea that change when it happens can happen very, very suddenly, very quickly indeed. He says revolutions happen in two phases. The first phase is where everybody realizes that things have gone completely wrong. The second phase, and the important one, is where everybody realizes that everybody else has realized it as well. And at that point, that's when you get a big change when you look around and you think we're all in the same mind. We all know it. We're in a revolution now. Trouble is we didn't recognize it because we didn't start it. You know, we expected the revolution to come from the left, but, actually, it came from the right. And it's the wrong revolution, unfortunately.
So it's time to start another one, my friends. So what's standing out for you?
Pretty liberating thought that better started to to to talk about. Right? Make feelings happen. Artist making feelings happen and anything and everything that we don't have to do, which means that you have all the basic needs of human beings to be able to just thrive and not care about providing for yourself and just do things that really you just feel the urge to express yourself and you do it. And it feels that with fascism, it's exactly the opposite of the environment that art needs to thrive.
It's such a democratizing concept of art. It's it's it makes it something we all do every day. And then to put that together with this with this understanding of the moment in time we're living in, to put the idea that we are all if we recognize that we are all expressing ourselves all of the time, and then we recognize that this is a moment that demands reinvention, that demands creativity.
The definition of art as I knew it and as also was taught to Betty, is that art is has some specific rules. And if you don't follow those rules, you're not an artist. And it's an elitist system. Like, an elite gets to decide who is an artist and who's not. But in democracy, the the basic principle is everyone has a right to vote, to participate, a say in collective decision making. We're already doing art every day, and everyone can do it actually. And there is no elite that can decide for us what is art or not. But what is really art in that space where anyone can express anything? That's the question I think that this conversation doesn't answer. And then if related to institutions, then we're saying that institutions don't have the answer. But who who gives the answer? Is is do we need to have someone give the answer?
And the answer has always been the market has the answer, like the art market. Right. And I think also the the political market. Right? I think really when I when I listen to this opening to the conversation, what I what I take from it is that we have been through this period of time where there was a sort of sense that if we just stuck to our little lives, and chose between the options that were offered to us and kinda carried on, that that the adults in in government would fix everything for us, and the artists with a capital a would make the art, and the politicians with a capital p would do the politics. And we'd all just get on with our lives in that in that context. And what they're calling out and what they're offering at the same time is, like, this moment is one where that has broken. We can't just carry on in that belief that things will be done for us anymore. And they're also saying, that's not what we do anyway, actually. Like, we're all making and remaking the world all of the time, creating our identities and our communities and our spaces, whether we are conscious that we're doing it or not. And so when you put together this sort of very democratic conception of art as something that we're all doing all of the time, and this understanding of this moment in time is one when there's a fundamental reinvention needed, then you go you both go, oh, wow. We need to step up. And you go, we can do this. And that's why I think this conversation about art and democracy is so important.
Yeah. I think I understand it the way where we need more than ever creativity and art and our artistic mindset in these times of closure, of fascism, of top down rules. And if you're not with us, you're against us to try to not only survive this moment, but reinvent a new way that is not the consumer democracy we've been living through where, as you said, hush-hush little people, we know what to do. You just live your own life, and we decide for you what's best for you. But the citizen democracy, we're we're all in this together, and we all have a responsibility to create a new system where we can all thrive. Right?
The beautiful thing about this opening is that they're kind of they're they're making it so, small and humble. Like, it's about haircuts and yet so massive. Like, the in this time, in these revolutionary times, attention to our own creativity, attention to to how we show up every day and all the small things that we do becomes vital. So from here, what I wanted to do was dig a bit more into this idea of feelings, and really challenge that a bit because we tend to think of feelings as something soft and not that important, and thinking and ideas as much more important. And so I I pulled out this sentence from the book or this little phrase that said, feelings are our antennae. They are what guides us into the future. And I challenged Better First to say, aren't feelings a little bit soft?
It's, it's a good question. I I don't know why feelings have such a bad reputation. I really don't, how know how this happened. I think it has something to do with the fact that we can't measure them, so they they haven't really firmly landed in, science. But if you think about your life the past, ten years, Maybe you picked somebody to have a baby with, or you bought a house, or maybe you didn't like your career and you changed it, or you had an existential crisis and you decided to be, a different kind of person who treated others differently. Those were big moments, and they were all feelings based. All the decisions you made were probably, at least for a big part, feelings based. Most people when they choose somebody to, sleep with are not going down a list of, you know, I need this person to be like this and that and have that kind of height and that kind of income because it's attraction and it's feelings based. And the same with your friendships, the kind of neighborhood that you feel comfortable in, the kind of, workplace that you feel comfortable in. So feelings guide our everyday life all the time. And when you talk about denial and politics, it's all feelings. There's a lot of feelings of fear happening. There's some feelings of anger, which might also be, fear, and the politicians are, tapping into those feelings. So, yeah, feelings now, lots of feelings all the time everywhere, And art is a way is our way to recognize feelings, process feelings, change feelings, celebrate feelings, suppress feelings, remember feelings. It's really our, method to become more sophisticated towards our feelings. And in the book, we say art is fictional, art is safe. So art is a place where you can address certain feelings without it having any direct consequences. And the first time we talked about this, I immediately thought, but art is also really dangerous and dictators always wanna lock up the artist. That is true. Art is also dangerous, but it's in a fictional place. You can close the book. You can leave the gallery. You can take off the dress. You can stop dancing. It's not like when your house is on fire and it's escapable. Art is escapable. And that's why it's such a great place for us to practice our feelings. If you read a book about a zombie apocalypse, you can have all the feelings, but you don't have to deal with the zombies. You know? It's a way to go through the feelings or you read a book about two people going through a divorce and being really sad and complicated. You can test out what that's like before you perhaps have a divorce. It's the place where you can if you dance the tango, you can have a little bit of an, an affair of sorts, a passionate affair without having a passionate affair. So it's our place to explore our feelings. So that's why it's important. And also in relation to the now, we need this now.
And maybe more than ever, maybe we all always needed it. I don't know. It makes me think, and Brian, you might wanna comment briefly on this of Ece Temelkuran, the the Turkish writer who's who's written a lot about the the politics of emotion and how that's been understood and embraced by the far right and the rising fascism and not understood by the sort of politics of rationality with which which has responded. So so this so having sort of postured my kind of feelings, aren't they a bit soft? I think actually understanding the role of feelings in this moment in in relation to democracy is arguably critical.
Well, what Ed Shey wrote about in her beautiful book is a process where the left very assiduously kind of suppressed feelings. Feelings were not supposed to be part of the equation. Marxism and what followed was supposed to be a sort of rational processing of society, and it was a very good attempt, actually. I'd I'm not I'm not anti Marxist. But the idea was that we should take all of that feeling stuff out of the equation a bit like we were constructing science. You know, science works by removing the feeling from situations. You should be able to design an experiment so it should come out the same way whether you've got a cold or you're a Catholic or you're a drama queen. You know, that shouldn't make any difference to your results. So science is the process of trying to remove all of those incidental, ephemeral circumstances and trying to isolate a situation and to defend it from those so you can see how something behaves. I think art is almost exactly the opposite. It's an attempt to say, this is complicated and messy. How do I feel about it? You know, literature is easy to see how that works in films and any narrative form. But I think it's true of jewelry or earrings or makeup or anything else. They're all ways of putting yourself into another world and seeing what that feels like.
I think the core thing that we're discussing here is this idea of a politics of emotion and feeling. The way that arguably the the right, the rising fascism have played into feelings and emotions while perhaps any kind of centrism or left or any opposition to fascism actually from wherever has tended big generalization, but not an inaccurate one, I think, has tended to try and come from a place of reason of but this isn't in your economic self interest. Why would you vote for these people? And I think what these guys are saying really in that context with this language of feelings, feelings are our antennae is to acknowledge that humans are driven by feelings. And and when we pretend not to be, we're not actually calling for some sort of higher rationality. We're just abandoning the argument and letting those who would exploit and manipulate society have a free run because they're the only ones talking about feelings and emotions. Yeah. I think it's totally right.
And it makes me think about two things. First of all, who talks about feeling in our societies? Who are embracing their feelings and have been always been perceived or accused to be weak by having this conversation and fully feeling their emotions. Women, obviously, or anyone who is embracing their femininity, whatever gender they have, always associate feelings with weakness. And artists as well, whether men or women or anything else, they are also not seen as strong. Right? And for me, it makes me think about the second thing, which is the. Right? I think, therefore, I am. I think it's the fundamental of of how we define the what is accepted as rational as As what matters. As what matters is only reason. He didn't say, I feel, therefore I am. He said, I think, therefore I am, and it's a man. And it's I think it's a total different way of seeing the world where you only think about when you only value rational thinking and exclude completely that part of us that we don't really control, which is the feelings that are can be triggered, that can arise when we expect them the least. And I think men and masculine behaviors are the one who are in direct opposition to feeling the feelings in that aspect.
It's interesting, isn't it? I I hadn't thought of it like that. But where you're taking me is that because we haven't let ourselves collectively, publicly feel emotions like sadness and grief and concern for one another in the face of climate and inequality and so on. We've instead had this kind of pretense of rationality, and there will be decisions made to fix those things. And that has left the way open for a particular form of emotion and feeling, which is anger and rage rather than any kind of vulnerability. And I think that that has created a very fertile territory for a for a for a politics of fear and anger.
Yeah. And it's interesting that anger is accepted in men and not in women. Can you think of it? It's probably the only feeling that is accepted in men, that they are angry and can therefore even become violent because of it. And I may be doing a shortcut right here, but a woman who's angry, it like, she she becomes immediately the menace. But Or ignorable. Or or ignorable or, like, too emotional. But a man who's angry, he he's probably in a society only allowed to be angry and not sad and not scared. Not no. Never scared. They they have to own everything and, like, be composed. And so I cannot just have this conversation about feeding without thinking about the patriarchal society and how what is reasonable and what is accepted and what is something that we can use as a as a society and what we cannot. And so, definitely, it's it's linked to masculinity and how it's and rationality. And it it's it's unfortunate because we definitely need both. Right? And it's also all, you know, theory about who is a healthy human being. It's the the human being who has integrated both its his or hers masculine and feminine part. It's the balance between both in in psychoanalysis and psychology. And so as a society, when you exclude one against the other, you're definitely unhealthy or at least if you were a human being, you would be unhealthy, and you we go into therapy if you didn't if you're excluding one or the other. And what they're saying is that art,
when we appreciate the role of art in society, when we give art its space to breathe and support it, then that becomes a space where these feelings can be expressed and rehearsed, and not to sort of quote Better's list, suppressed and and and left without any processing. So I think with that, and and I really love the way Brian brought that phase of the conversation to an end by describing art and literature and jewelry and earrings and makeup as ways of putting yourself into another world and seeing what that feels like. Maybe we can go on into the second of the soundbites that I shared, which was play is how children learn, and art is how adults play.
So we all understand, at least since the end of the Victorian times, that playing for children is not surplus, pointless activity. Playing is their primary way of understanding the world, of understanding what materials can do, what you need, what you like, what you don't like, how that person feels about this person, empathy, or all of the social structures. Everything we learn about it in play. And children do that with absolutely no encouragement and incessantly. And then when they're aged about 11, we suddenly tell them that they ought to get serious and stop playing around, and we start teaching them really important things, like how to fill in a tax form. And but, of course, my sort of realization was, of course, those things don't just suddenly end in you. That's the primary human driver that. So I thought, so what where does it go? What happens to it? And then I thought, oh, of course. That's what art is. Art is us continuing to play and continuing to explore the things that we have explored as children, social relationships, materials, tastes, feelings, all of the things that kids do, but we now call it art. And having reached that point, I thought, so art is actually a very, very broad activity, from cardigans to Cezanne. You know? Every everything in between is all part of it. And, of course, this is sort of controversial in the art world, which likes to think that it has a sort of special claim to divinity and that what artists do is some sort of rather refined and rare thing. I I don't think it's that rare at all. I think we all do it. I mean, we're all we've all made a lot of aesthetic choices tonight, including this one. And all of you have have been you've spent your whole day looking at and responding to art without possibly giving giving it that kind of name. But in fact, a lot of the choices we make are exhibited on us. We walk around as self made, you know, this is what I this is who I am sort of thing. So if you take a very small object like an earring, what how can you call that an artwork? You might say or is it serious as an artwork? And I think what happens when you look at an earring, you look at something for which you already know you have a lot of vocabulary for. You've seen earrings all your life. You've seen big bulbous ones, and you've seen little brilliant, very valuable ones, and you've seen ones made out of elastic bands and lollipop sticks. You've got a whole sort of canon of earring design in your mind just as you do with paintings. If you look at paintings or listen to symphonies, you already have a history of these things. So what you're seeing is the difference between this particular instance and all the other ones you've seen. And it might be, oh, this is more brittle, or this is less tidy than any earring I've ever seen. That's an interesting message. You know? That's different. And so I think we respond not to any sort of intrinsic quality of things, an absolute quality. We respond to their difference from other things we've seen in that language, if you like. So a little thing like an earring is really a fragment of a possible other world. Imagine a world as messy as that. Yeah. Imagine a world made of things that were both incredibly valuable like diamonds and things that were incredibly valueless like pieces of chewing gum paper. That's an interesting world.
So I had this really profound kind of moment of realization at this point in the conversation. As you know, one of my favorite stories, and we we've had an episode with Audrey Tong on, the transformation of Taiwanese politics. And and the story there, was about, an organization, a a a gathering, a movement of hackers who called themselves GovZero and started what they did by creating websites that were parallel to to the Taiwanese government websites, all with URLs that ended g0v.tw. And that became the sort of seeds of a of a transformation over time. The Taiwanese government sort of adopted their ways of working. But the thing that I had listening to this this phrase this this phrase, an earring is really a fragment of a possible other world. I just sat there. I had this moment of going, oh my god. Like, that is the the this critical role. Like, we are when we do art. And and I remembered in that moment that that when I'd interviewed people around Gov Zero in Taiwan, they'd said that it it essentially started as a kind of art project. And the the first website they created was a was a fragment of a possible other world, a possible other way of doing government. And I think that that insistence this this was a really powerful thing for me. This this insistence that we are and we do have the capability to invent other worlds on a day to day basis. And and in a way, like, the the I suddenly saw in my mind this idea that, like, choosing to wear an earring tomorrow, which I nearly did, would be an act of, creation, an act of of creating space for our society to move into. Just as a collective coming together to create a a website that government could start to use is as well. Like, it this this claiming of our creativity and refusing to just accept what is done for us, I think, is the heart of this notion of, like, of playing, actually, and and the importance of of play in this moment in time. And therefore, because play is how children learn and art is how adults play of art.
I think, for me, it's just an moment. It's like, wow. Okay. That's why that's why I'm excited by some art. I wasn't aware of it, but it's showing me another possible world. And I think it's incredible that you can make this link with, you know, the revolution in in Taiwan. For me, I'm just trying to think of all the times where, I guess, I wasn't able to put words on art that meant liberation, that meant resistance, that meant another reality that we could embrace or go to or build without even knowing it. So, subconsciously, it was nourishing me without, you know, probably for waiting for the right moment to emerge again. Is it possible to mix, you know, this game and but make it in more into our reality? So adulthood and taking responsibility in the political arena is not only about being serious and boring, and we need to make rational decisions. And if that does harm to others, we don't care because we care only about our people. Actually, just take it in in in the beautiful way that art embraces the reality and shapes a new world with embracing, yeah, the differences and trying to build something that is with all of us. Right? Not excluding, but because I believe art is a way where any anyone could feel or not feel anything, but it's accessible. Like, a piece of art is something that we all can interact with. And sometimes politics or sometimes most of the times, we see it as very complex and very unaccessible and very reserved for a few people. While the definition of Beata and Brian is that art is accessible, and I think
politics should be as well. I'm gonna move us on into my, the third of the sound bites that I chose, which was and I love this, the language of this one. Art is a reservoir of shared experiences, the circulatory system of community. Art makes communities. And for this one, I asked Better to start with a story that she told me the night before.
I used to deliver the post in Amsterdam. It's a great job, especially if you're a writer. So you, you know, you move a bit. You get out of your house. I wasn't very well paid, and it was during a time when, there was a lot of layoffs at the post. People who had worked there for decades were getting fired, so there was a lot of tension. And we would go in, and we would have to sort the mail, and then we would go out and deliver it. And while we were sorting the mail, there was always a radio channel playing with Dutch music. And there was this one song, and when it came on, everybody sang it. Everybody just stopped what they were doing, and we sang it together. And there were people there who didn't speak Dutch so well. It was mostly men, but also women. And this song is called, and this translates as, but tonight, I'll have a headache. And it's about a woman withholding affection from her husband because he's been annoying. So everyone, including my boss, who was also very stressed out, sang the song. But tonight, I have a headache. We sang it passionately, and then we continued our day. And while we were singing, we would we had a moment of unity. We had a moment of being we, being together. We had a moment of fun, of being in the moment. I don't know how to measure, you know, the value of something like this. I had no idea how you can measure it, but I think it was valuable. And that ties in what I said before and without play about play. It's very hard to plan this, to structure this, and that's why it's so scary to do art because you can spend an hour working in the soup kitchen, super useful. You're an engaged citizen. You know if I do this, it's useful. Or you can write a weird poem, which is maybe not useful, like a poem about a pineapple or something. So that choice is very hard, and that's why I think a lot of artists get a little bit I know I got a little bit, stressed about having to make art that was useful, and horrible art comes out of it. So you have to have a level of trust that some of your ideas will seep into your feelings and that it doesn't all have to be rational.
The only thing we have actually, since we're not billionaires, is solidarity in numbers. That's all we've got going for us, really. They've got all the money. And the question becomes, how do you create solidarity? And I would say almost the primary way we do that is through art in in the sense of songs we sing together, films we all enjoy together, books we all know about and share. So art is a very big part of creating coherence in a society, cohesion. And, the word I like is coalesces. It's the way in which people start to recognize each other. Oh, you like the same things as I do. Okay. That might be a completely apolitical thing that we both like. You know, it might be that song you were saying, but it gives us something around which we can agree. And somebody said we were talking about this, the question you raised in in hard art about activism versus, I'll call it demonstrationism. And, Liz Slade, who's the head of the Unitarian church, who's one of our members said, well, it's funny. When people talk about things a lot, it takes them a long time to reach agreement. When they do something together, it happens almost immediately. And so I think sort of taking the taking out of the sphere of language and argument and definition and cutting things up and putting it into the language of let's do something together. And, you know, as soon as you work with somebody, you start to respect them, actually. You can't help it. It doesn't matter whether you agree with them or not. And so it's sort of transcending the fix that, again, the left especially gets itself into about language.
I did love the range of this conversation. But tonight, I'll have a headache. And one one of the things it made me think of, and as you know, I've I've spent a lot of time all over The UK and actually around the world with community organizations of various kinds. And and this made me think of one in particular, which is, a gang called Eastmarsh United in Grimsby, who will have to will have to get on this podcast at some point. But one of the first things they did was they started a a a six monthly arts festival called The Sun and Moon just to kinda give a platform to local creativity, not in a kind of terribly serious way. And they started a singing group as well. And and and this work of being a community organization tends to be thought of very seriously from moment one. And what Billy and Josie, who sort of the the initiators of East March United, was saying to me was, no. No. No. Like, we're gonna do serious stuff. We're gonna fix up our place. We're gonna we're gonna take ownership of our problems. But we need joy to be in this from the beginning, and we need shared joy and making that joy together to be in this from the beginning. And I think that that this sort of it's back to this idea of playfulness. Right? It's like and what you were saying about, like, when we start to talk about democracy and politics, it all becomes terribly rational and terribly serious immediately. And actually remembering that the that the core of citizening is doing life together is and finding joy together
is actually a really political act. It feels fundamental. I was I was trying to remember during the Tunisian revolution, you know, where there was no really, you know, collective organizing. It was so spontaneous and people were outside because they were fed up. And there was Emil Muthluzzi, who is this incredible artist. We had you know, the one of the things that the the Tunisian dictatorship did is really to promote artists and give them prices and help them go travel the world and to raise Tunisian bandiera. What's the word in English? The the the The banner. The banner. You know? And, like, be proud of of our artists. And you would never hear of artists who were criticizing the regime. A lot of them would live in exile. And Emile Emile was living in France, if I'm not mistaken then. And she had this incredible song that she was able to release because she was living in in France. And, the title is. So my word is free. My word is free. And I knew that song. But somehow in one of the protests, she was in Tunis when when the protest in '20, 10/2011 started. I remember that video, like, everyone sat down in the main avenue, Habib Orgiba in Tunis, and she was wearing this long coat red coat. She was having symbolically, like, the red rose on her ear. And she was the only one standing, and she started to sing my word is free. And I have the chills now to talk about this. Everyone was quiet, and she started acapella talking about my word is free. And we weren't free yet. Like, this was still protesting against the dictatorship. And I don't think anyone else was singing, But those words that were written and the the song and the melody on the dictatorship sung in that moment felt like, okay. This is happening. And these words have been written for this exact moment. Before, they didn't really make sense. My word is not free or or it's free because you're in France. Right? Like, you can you can escape the oppressive regime. But she wasn't Tunis wearing old and you nev you have to know that the Tunisian what's the word again? The banner. The banner is red and white. Yep. And so it felt like she was the incarnation of Of a new Tunisia. Of a new Tunisia, the symbol. And a few years later when Tunisian civil society quartet, now we call them, had the Nobel Prize in 2015 for avoiding a civil war literally in the streets, she was invited to sing during the Nobel Prize ceremony that and she decided she chose to sing exactly that song,
my word is free. So a song that started that was written and produced outside of the country almost as a kind of lament in some ways became, through the course of the revolution, an expression of the country that you were all building. Yes.
And there were so many other artists that I I call them alternative artists or surviving artists who weren't able to thrive because they were criticizing the regime. They were young people from working class neighborhoods who didn't have the platforms to rise, but we were all like we we knew kind of that they existed, and they all produced songs as well. But this one, Kalimtihara, is really the most powerful one, I feel. It was premonitory? What's the word? It was, it was like it it Prophetic kind of. It was really like
preparing. All good for future. It sort of set out before it happened to you. Okay. Let's go into the fourth, of the sound bites. And this one really does start to get very explicitly political. So they wrote, art is a way of surrendering. If we don't learn to make a balance between control and surrender, if we only know how to control, we end up in a world shrunken to the bits we can still control.
A long time ago, I started to realize that most of the things that happen to people that they regard as peak experiences, sex, drugs, art, religion, are not experiences of control. They're experiences of surrender. They're experiences where you let go of something. You let go of your ability to completely understand the situation, for example. So you let yourself be taken. You know, if you think of all the language that goes with that, oh, I was completely out of it.
Oh, oh, all the variance of that. Thought you might go somewhere slightly more romantic than that.
It blew my mind. Where we go? All all of those expressions are ways of saying, I lost control, and I loved it. Now it occurred to me that in our culture, of course, because we're technically so adept, we dignify we always dignify the ability to control. And indeed, it's very important to us. It's what science comes out of. It's what technology comes out of. So I'm I'm not downplaying it. But we have another ability as well, which is the ability to surrender, which is in fact the ability to become part of things, not to be separate from them anymore, to become part of them. And it occurred to me that that might be equally important, especially since we spend so much of our time trying to get that experience, either by sex, drugs, fairgrounds, sports, all the sorts of things we do where something happens to us that is beyond what we anticipated or beyond what we can control. Yeah. And so I then thought, oh, so perhaps that's that's what we're doing in art. We're trying to create situations in which we can lose ourselves, lose that part of ourselves that sort of sees our edge as being here and sees us as being separate from everything else. Again, it's not to say that you shouldn't have that other skill as well, but it's a sort of spectrum from control to surrender. And different situations require different places on that spectrum. If you're, flying a plane, you probably should be pretty close to the control end of the spectrum and not do too much surrendering. But if you're, if you're being intimate with someone, it's pretty nice to be at the other end as well, to just let something happen. Most of the time, we're uncertain about most things, and we can either fight against that and become paranoid and terrified, or we can say, I'm gonna be uncertain about most things and but I'm still gonna be able to make decisions. And the interesting thing is that the type of confidence that that gives to people is completely different from the control type of confidence, which doesn't often extend beyond the local situation. The kind of confidence you want is, I'm used to being uncertain, and I'm uncertain now. It's fine. I'll deal with it. And, again, I think this is one of the experiences of art that you, because you're surrendering, because you're entering, if it's moving you, of course not, if it doesn't. But if it's moving you, what's happening is that something quite weird is going on. Why is it that one arrangement of musical sounds makes me cry and another makes me pissed off, for example? Why why should that be? What are we sensitive to? What are we being sensitive to? And I think it's we're being sensitive to our own personal history. We've been in these situations before, and things have acquired meaning bit by bit for us and resonance. And then we become very tweakable. If you have a history of responding to things like that, you suddenly start to be noticing all the time. For instance, I'm just sitting here noticing the shadow on Better's chin there. I know I shouldn't be thinking about that now, but I am I'm sort of tuned into that. This man is the most present individual I've ever come across then.
I've got to know Brian quite well, and I I I hosted him for a conversation up in Sheffield. And his management entrusted me with looking after him for the trip. And we arrived at Sheffield Train Station, and we came out. And I thought I better get this guy to the hotel and give him a rest because, you know, And and we came out, and I started walking purposefully off towards the hotel. And Brian had spotted that there was a fountain that was very pretty. And I looked around, having stomped off and left him entirely behind while he trailed his fingers through the fountain. But I think that what that expresses is just a level of a level of presence and willingness to be present that I've I've come to really admire in him, and I think is actually very profound politically, and I think speaks to the the core idea that I wanna draw out of this section of the conversation, which is this thing about being able to accept uncertainty and make decisions in it, and not fear uncertainty and try and stamp down on it. And for me, the way I think that shows up in our politics right now or in in in the challenges to our democracy is that we do face really huge challenges that we don't have obvious solutions to. You think of the climate emergency. You think of inequality. You think of loneliness and mental health. We don't know exactly how to fix any of those things. And I think the reaction from the as we've talked about in this conversation, the reaction from the the center of the left, anyone apart from the fascists, is sort of to say, no. No. No. We're on it. We've got control of it. Don't worry about it. We'll we'll sort it to pretend that there is control when there manifestly isn't rather than to acknowledge some degree of uncertainty, to share the the acknowledge the challenges and say, we're gonna need to work through this together. We're gonna need people involved in this. And I think what that has done is left the way clear for the fascists to go, they're screwing it up. Don't trust them. Trust us. And I think of I always think of the back to the Taiwan example and the Taiwanese COVID response where the Taiwanese actually faced into COVID by saying, the president made a speech where she said, we don't know how to get through this, but we do know that we'll get through it best if we get everyone involved. That is a radically different idea of political leadership to acknowledge uncertainty and say, we will work through it together.
I think for long, certainty has meant safety. And now that fascist leaders have reached the top of our democratic institutions, certainty is not anymore an option because it means really letting them destroy everything that liberal democracies were are about and use the existing system to close them up and just oppress the ones who are not with them. I think it's it's it's just vital vital that things need to change, and so uncertainty is the new safety kind of. It or it there needs to be a shift where, okay, we need to challenge all of this. And so there needs to be uncertainty that it becomes part of our normality. And so our whole definition of what it is to be a safe citizen in your neighborhood, in your city, in your country is really to also accept that we need to figure this out together. And this is so much about surrendering to the collective, but at the same time to be part of it and to be part of initiatives that rethink and mobilize and act to find a new path, to decide of a new path, and and and and acknowledge that we are not like, there is no control anymore. At the end of the day, all that's happening is human enterprise at all levels of society. And it's not that these leaders are smarter than us. It's not that they are stronger than us. Oh, actually, they are stronger. They are more powerful, but they're definitely not smarter. Sometimes they're average people who will get to the top. It's just that they have more power. They inherited a lot of money. They have a lot of access. But I think the collective, the multitude, needs now to to step up and and show that, you know, there is power in being together and deciding together and solidarity together.
It makes me think of the quote from the musical Hamilton that you know I love. There's a line in the song, The Room Where It Happens, that goes, we want our leaders to save the day, but we don't get a say in what they trade away. And I think that speaks to this idea of control and surrender. If we if we if we expect to be in control all the time and we expect our leaders to be in control all the time, then we're gonna be giving up an awful lot and especially now. And so maybe there's a there's a burden on us to not just expect things to be sorted for us as well. And I think if I can take us into the final of the five sound bites I brought in, this is where we we really did bring it back, and it's right at the end of the book as well. Really bring bring it back to what we as individuals can do on a day to day basis. And the quote is, if we want a new world, we have to start making it right now. You have to live the world you want to exist in.
Start making the world that you want to be in. In every object that you make, every interaction, every system, every conversation, and it's made me feel like this new world that I, was longing for, that I was doing my social work for, was right around the corner. But maybe not on a big scale, but maybe in my interaction with, the person at the bakery or in in the way I hold my teacup. And I I know that sounds a little bit out there, but if you start adopting this as a a way of living, you can change every single moment into a little world that is a world that you like. You know? The government has, I don't know how to measure it, but I don't know, maybe 10% influence, on your average day or sometimes 20%, sometimes 50%. But there is chunks of your day that are not influenced by a government or political situations or rules that are completely free for you to turn around. We can now all stand on our heads, and nobody will be any able to do anything about it. You can be super nice or really mean the rest of the day. Nobody will be able to do anything about it. You know, you can start designing objects that you wish that existed in the world. Even if nobody will use them, at least they are there. So I find that a liberating notion because we experience so much powerlessness.
The one commodity we all have that everybody wants is our attention. The whole of the Internet exists to engage your attention and then to redirect it somewhere that they would rather it were, you know, buying products or following political leaders or whatever else. So your attention is incredibly valuable, and it ought to be very valuable to you as well. You know, instead of us constantly being playing with whatever is served up on our phones and computers, we should be shepherding our attention with with much more care than we do. We're still fascinated by this sweet shop that we're constantly in and new sweets keep oh, I must try that one. I must try that one. You know? And I think that is the the biggest task that all humans face if they're not starving. If you're above the starvation level, the biggest task you face now is to take care of your attention and to find out what you ought to be looking at. And I think one of the things that artists do sometimes is to keep reminding you what it is that you really like. My friend, John Hassell, the trumpeter, died a couple of years ago. He used to say, the most important question you can ask yourself is, what is it I really like? Not what should I like, what would they like me to like, but what is it I actually like? What's the thing that keeps me going? And it's so easy to lose touch with that.
When you were speaking about the Hamilton quote that you love and thinking about the political moment we are in, this week, Munich Security Conference just happened, and Rubio basically appealed to all European western Western European leaders and told them, hey. We need to bring back the ancient not ancient, not so ancient colonial times. We need to get back the glory of Western European people. We need to be strong in bringing back that glorious recent past, and he had a standing ovation for that. Lot of people also are linking his speech with white supremacy. And so think of it. This is the moment we're talking about. It's not abstract at all. This is a moment where the biggest powerful forces of the governments of the places that are supposed to uphold human rights and equality and international law that we've seen already, like, for more than two years now that these laws don't apply to everyone on this earth. Definitely not between like, there is no equality between all human beings depending on, I don't know, the shade of your skin or where you're born. And this is the scariest moment because these leaders are applauding this discourse, and the scariest thing is that maybe they're gonna do that. This is the blatant announcement that we're gonna have more wars, not less wars, that that the militarization of our societies and everything they've been preparing us in European societies to you know, the instructions that a lot of people received. I don't know here in England, but in France, we we had the instructions to prepare if anything, like a surprise attack, happened and how you need to pile up your your food and how to this is it seems like another step towards that. That's why for me, like, when we talk about surrendering to that reality but also doing something together. It's real. It's now. It's not abstract.
Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. Like, this this conversation about art and democracy can feel like it's removed from the urgent. And I think that's that itself is the problem. Like, but this is a time, I think, where I come out of this conversation as a whole is that is seeing this moment in time as one where we either reclaim our ability to create our world together,
or
we hand over that world to the fascists, to the strongman leaders who say that they will reclaim the glory of the colonial era. The choice is as stark as that. And and I think the way it manifests and why I think this conversation that we've just listened to is so important is because the alternative to that is, I think, about reclaiming our agency as creators. Be be taking a more artistic stance, actually. It's saying no. Like, we aren't going to choose between the status quo of the last twenty, thirty years that has failed and fascism. We're going to create another path. We are all going to do that in our day to day small choices, whether that's an earring that's a that's a taste of a different reality or the haircut we have. And by doing those things, we're building the muscles to actually come together and start creating something different in our communities. And part of that is the joy of community art festivals and finding one another. And all of that is also part of the work of saying, no. Politics is all of us, not accepting, as I say, the choice between the parties that we have been choosing between over recent years and fascism.
It just feels daunting, actually, to to think about the small choices that we have to do every day and these big announcement at global level with just what can I do as a normal random citizen in my neighbor neighborhood while global leaders are talking about global wars? And I think that's the that's the missing link. Right? I think we can start what we are saying is that we can start by having a contribution at our scale, but also not look away when these conversations at the global level happen and and and and connect to each other and talk about it and also organize about
the politics that needs to change. We still have free We've got big plans. If you can chip in to help us make them happen, we'd love to have you on board.
Have the space to speak about our minds and to organize and to to come together. So I think it's the time to do it and do it more. I mean, with everything that happened in Minnesota, I mean, we've all seen the livestream genocide, the revolution in Iran, the, I mean, ice shooting people in broad daylight. There is empathy, I hope, created between human beings who like, we we now share or realize that we are sharing this common vulnerability that the institution we thought would be forever there are not actually are not going to stand forever. And so, hence, we need to learn from each other and to organize together. That that's the best we can do right now. Like, use the space that we still have to not make the future that looks very scary certain and fixed. It's not fixed. It's not decided yet. We have so much to do, but we can still do something about it and avoid, you know, the gloomy that they are promising us. I like that. It's almost like
the attitude of an artist, small a, everything we do is art, artist, is that this is not inevitable. This is not how it has to be. I will claim my agency, and I will be part of making it something else.
This was How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy but know we've got serious work to do to save it. This episode was hosted by John Alexander and me, Omi Zinkliefer, and produced by Joe Barrett. The studio engineer was Christian Capwica.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Or if you want to get closer, find us online at howtosavedemocracy.co and sign up to the mailing list. How to Save Democracy is produced in partnership with The Conduits and with Urban MBA and wouldn't be possible without the kind support of our listeners. We've got big plans, so if you can chip in to help us make them happen, we'd love to have you on board.