The Moral Order - Illuminating essay by Morris Berman

In the interest of saving space and of providing a more readable experience, we are providing a link to the original essay along with the excerpts below. We believe this is relavant material as it explores the malnourishing cultural context in which poets, artists, musicians and other creative beings of this age are "caged".

...Modern societies, said (Max) Weber, were governed by bureaucracy; the dominant ethos was one of “rationalization,” whereby everything was mechanized, administered according to the dictates of scientific reason. Weber famously compared this situation to that of an “iron cage”...

(referencing the book"How Americans Use Time", John Robinson, 1977)
...Robinson discovered that on an average daily basis, five minutes were spent on reading books (of any kind), one minute on making music, thirty seconds attending theater and concerts, and less than thirty seconds on visits to art galleries or museums. As depressing as these figures are, they are surely much worse thirty-two years later, given the heavy corporatization of the culture, the dramatic increase in the attention paid to television and video screens in general, and the widely acknowledged decay of the American educational system. Indeed, the square footage of shopping malls in the U.S.–4 billion as of ten years ago–vastly exceeds that of schools and churches. All of the available data show that the typical American citizen has about as much interest in the life of the mind as your average armadillo...

http://morrisberman.blogspot.com/2009/02/moral-order.html