Art and the Healthy Society

Some point to our quantum leap in technological wizadry as proof of our societal development. Others to our more racially and sexually just legislation. Still others to our sophisticated international trade agreements and deregulated business environment.

Well, there are good initiatives in all these areas, obviously. But if we look at the great social movements in history - the Renaissance, Britain's Golden Age, the Belle Epoque, we'll see that they were driven in large part by an explosion in the arts.

Today on Healing Through Consciousness, Art and the Healthy Society.

When I first moved to Toronto from the west coast of Canada in the mid '90s, I was impressed by the cultural diversity and concern to preserve it that I found in Canada's largest city. From seed saver groups that were protecting the original plants and flowers of the city's neighbourhood parks, to community jazz concerts and street fairs organized neighbourhood by neighbourhood, I discovered a citizenry passionate about maintaining a lifestyle.

When I bought a little house in the Bloor-Bathurst area, my first summer there was marked by a neighbourhood film festival, which consisted of one guy hanging a huge white sheet on the outside wall of his house and his friend across the street projecting classic old films from a projector on his balcony. This was a community spirit that noted urban planning critic, Jane Jacobs, also observed in her withering critique lamenting the death of the great American city. And it’s why she moved to Toronto back in the late ‘60s.

Art, it turns out, is the real engine of a healthy society, as you’ll also see in the urbanization of NY City. It’s the artists who move into a decrepit part of the city and begin its gentrification, until a certain point where it becomes such a hot real estate market that they can’t afford to live there anymore.

The arts, asserts Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist, Norberto Keppe, forms the basis of society. We know this to be true because who but the very sickest among us would ever agree to living in a society without it? We can easily imagine surviving in the world without Twitter or Facebook, but without Beethoven’s 9th Symphony or the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper? Impossible.

But we don’t act like this is important actually. Economic hard times hit and the first cuts come to arts programs. Got to keep the money flowing for military spending and drug research, after all. You know, the really important stuff.

This is a psychological inversion in Norberto Keppe’s science – a discovery he consolidated back in the late 1970s that fills a huge missing piece in the understanding of the human psyche. We’ve inverted our values and our societal norms so we are very far from the way we should be. And this generates a lot of stress.

Addressing these issues is what our Healing Through Consciousness radio show is all about, and we’re inviting your participation in helping us develop the tone and focus of the show. joneshealing@gmail.com is our email if you want to talk to us, or you can Skype in – healingthroughconsciousness is our Skype name. We’d love to hear your comments and questions.

This week we didn’t have any calls or questions as it turns out, so I took the opportunity to go a little deeper with Dr. Claudia Bernhardt Pacheco about a subject Dr. Keppe has been addressing with us recently in our meetings with him – the healthy nature of society, with a big focus on the arts.

Click here to listen to this episode.