Q: In your recent book, Naomi, we enjoyed how you say we need to use creativity and the arts to build a counter narrative, which can help counteract this moral crisis. Can you discuss the role you see of the arts in supporting a Green New Deal?
Naomi Klein: One of the most powerful forces that we are up against when it comes to just activating our basic survival instinct is a really profound sense that we are incapable of anything but the most hackneyed cli-fi script that we’ve all seen in various apocalyptic dramas on Netflix or the big screen – that have told us again and again variations of the same story. That the future unfolds against a backdrop of scarcity and ecological poisoning, and that there will be a small group of people that will hoard all of the resources and everybody else will be locked out, animalized and excluded.
And because we’ve been told that story alongside the story that we’ve heard from neoliberal economists for so long – which is that all we are is a collection of our basest wants, we are only about personal gratification, democracy is equated with shopping, etc. All of that has made us believe that we are not capable of collective action, and more than that, when we try to do anything collectively, terrible things happen. It is true that there are harrowing examples of collectivism gone awry in our history. But there are also examples when people come together and accomplish amazing things.
So I think in the face of the message that people are relentlessly getting – that apocalypse is a foregone conclusion and that we are set on this course where all we can become are worse versions of ourselves – we need different stories of the future that wake up the possibility that there are other possible outcomes, that there are other ways we can go. There is only so much that rhetoric can do in convincing people of that.
When we made the short film with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, A Message from the Future, which told the story of the decade of the Green New Deal and this period of rapid transformation when people came together instead of apart; when they didn’t have to fear the other because there were so many jobs they didn’t have enough workers; when care work was recognized as part of the green economy and paid accordingly. When we put that out with the beautiful artwork of Molly Crabapple, the response was unlike anything any of us had seen before. We had ten million views in a week. And more than that, all of us were getting messages particularly from educators saying, ‘my whole class watched it and cried.’ We realized that we just tapped into a hunger for an awakening of a utopian imagination. And it’s sad that a utopia is associated with the most basic right to survive and have a decent life. But I think that it’s something that only art can reawaken for us, that we need these different stories of the future.
And it’s really worth remembering that art was absolutely central to the successes of the original New Deal. FDR saw artists as workers, like any other, who needed to feed their families and needed to have programs to give them work. A lot of art that was created in this period was completely apolitical. It was just about recognizing that people had a right to beauty in their neighborhoods; that art is not the purview of elites in big cities, but everybody has a right to it, everybody has creativity inside of them – so it was a real democratization of creativity.
One of the things that I’ve been banging on about for a long time is that art is low carbon work. And I think that a big part of what we need to do as we think about a Green New Deal is to expand the definition of what a green job is. Too often, we still think about the guy with a hard hat putting up a solar panel – it is that, but it’s so much more than that. Making art is low carbon, teaching kids is low carbon, healing the sick can be low carbon, and these sectors can be reimagined to be zero carbon if we invest in that organizing work.
So I see art and creativity as absolutely central to winning and sustaining people. This is hard work, and people need to be fed as full human beings not just with food, but their spirits need to be fed as well. Art keeps people in movements because it gives us moments of beauty, release and community.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
No comments:
Post a Comment