When All Else Fails We Turn to Art, Part II

-- By AlinaDvorovenko - 16 Apr 2021

Seeing is Believing, But Feeling is The Truth

“The power of the words in the air, the power of the story and the power of the oration […] addresses itself to the human imagination through the sense of hearing, which is different for hominid primates from the sense of sight.”

My experience with online law school has certainly confirmed this distinction. For the past year, I read and I listened and I gazed into the outside world on appropriately moody rainy days. And yet, reflecting back at it, I realize that I have not really done all that much thorough thinking and have not really let my imagination take me very far. It could be because I was not always reading the right things. But I also think, bringing back the premise of my previous essay, that the reading by itself was not quite enough. Looking back on the past year, I believe that what was missing for me was the ability to see and be inspired, which would give my imagination that necessary bit of encouragement. I needed to see, really see, the professors who taught me and the supervisors who trained me, to believe whatever it is that they were trying to get across. It was necessary to really see them face to face, while occupying the same room and without the Big Brother Telescreen between us. I needed to see them so that I would not just memorize the lessons and learn to regurgitate them with hastily manufactured confidence, but would actually believe the lessons strongly enough to be inspired into some sort of action. While the words that I read did somewhat fuel my imagination, I missed being inspired and encouraged by the emotion of teachers, leaders, and peers that can only by seen and felt in person.

Pictures on Screens

I do not believe that everyone will necessarily agree with me on the necessity of the offline experience. The generation raised on internet friends (or followers, subscribers, etc.) are likely more inclined to believe the people on the other side of the screen. It certainly seems like many of them do, for such purposes as deciding what is popular and worth spending one’s money on.

And here I am reminded of Professor Moglen’s remark “I want some 15-year-old in Taipei to make [the Freedom Box] cool on TikTok? .” I think that is a brilliant idea. We can write books to help the children dream and imagine a different future. Then, we could address them, this generation that operates with the currency of coolness, through the sense of sight and on its own terms. The visual displays of coolness will motivate them to take action, much like a charismatic speaker addressing a room. It is out of fear of precisely this kind of inspiration – the kind that comes from visuals of protesting teens and Russian passports torn in half – that the Russian government turned to fining TikTok? and paying some users to post anti-protest propaganda. Our cause is anti-platform rather than anti-state. Thus, if we succeed, we will be pulling off a clever trick of using a social media platform to convert the people of this generation to the very cause of privacy and freedom that will later lead them to leave that very same platform.

Getting Out of My Head

The people like me, who need to consume their visual inspiration in person, will still need talks and discussion groups and in-person interaction with their role models to give them the encouragement to act, beyond just thinking and imagining. And that is okay. We can have different nudges for different groups of people. The important thing, and another thing that online law school has taught me, is to remember to come out of one’s head and actually interact with the world that we spend so much time theorizing about. One of the first things that Professor Moglen taught me was that lawyering is all about making things happen in society using words. I am still working on finding the right words. But the past year has served as a particularly striking reminder of the importance of using those words with respect to society and not just leaving them in my head.

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