April 13, 2006  When Antanas Mockus became mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, in 1993, it looked like a job nobody in his right mind would want. Bogotá was corrupt, violent, and, in the opinion of many, ungovernable. But Mockus' approach to civic problems was not that of "normal" politicians.

Lawrence Buell teaches a class on Ralph Waldo Emerson: 'There's no question that in the run-up to the Civil War, Emerson's increasing support of the anti-slavery movement helped to give it an intellectual and cultural authority it did not have before.' (Staff file photo Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office)

A mathematician and philosopher who, when he was principal of the National University, had once quieted an auditorium of rowdy students by mooning them from the stage, Mockus kicked off his administration with a series of outrageous stunts, like hiring 20 mimes to direct traffic and instructing each to train 20 more, walking around Bogotá in a spandex bodysuit and a cape and calling himself "Supercitizen," and addressing TV viewers from his shower as part of a campaign to conserve water.

But by the end of Mockus' two terms as mayor, it was clear that his unorthodox approach to government had worked. The homicide rate had fallen by 70 percent, traffic fatalities were down more than 50 percent, water use had dropped by 40 percent, and tax revenues had tripled, due in part to a program in which people voluntarily paid extra taxes.

For Doris Sommer, the Ira Jewell Williams Jr. Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Mockus' success not only proves that innovative strategies can produce good government, it is also a testimony to the power of art and the humanities to effect positive social change.

"Art has a capacity for unclogging stale systems. What Mockus did was to employ risk-taking creative ways out of dead ends. When you're an artist, you're never paralyzed."

Doris Sommer: The humanities 'develop a web of cultural activities that weaves together civic society.'

Learning from artists

Sommer is director of Cultural Agents, an initiative at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies that explores and promotes contributions that the arts and humanities make to civil society. For Sommer and her colleagues, the arts and humanities are not decorative elements adorning the functional apparatus of society; they are what make it work.

"Democratic subjects need to be resilient and flexible, to understand issues from more than one point of view. Society is constructed, an artifice, to be tweaked in ways that bring it close to art. If you see the world as offering raw material, it is impossible to be entirely victimized."

Sommer bases her view of art as a force for social change not only on the results achieved by practitioners such as Mockus, but also on the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant as set forth in "The Critique of Judgment."

"Judgment is possible only when we are free of practical or moral purpose. For Kant, this is when we contemplate beauty or the sublime. We enjoy pleasure without purpose and imagine universal agreement, because judgment doesn't depend on particular needs. We may not agree on what we find aesthetically pleasing, but we can talk about it and learn to see each other's point of view.

This photo of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass and his son in 1875 is part of the Schlesinger Library collection. (The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University)

"Seeing a mime as a traffic cop gives us pleasure," Sommer continued. "Our first reaction might be to giggle. Our second reaction may be to share that pleasure with our neighbors, and from there it has a ripple effect. What we realize is that the city works when it's interactive."

Working with the Rockefeller Center in 2004, Sommer helped to bring Mockus to Harvard where he taught lessons about civic engagement to students and faculty. A few months earlier she helped facilitate the visit of another outstanding practitioner of art as an instrument of social change — theatrical experimenter and activist Augusto Boal.

A native of Brazil who has brought his "Theatre of the Oppressed" to communities around the world, Boal helps people create dramas around problems that affect their lives. At a performance, audience members are free not only to comment on the action, but also to step up on stage and play roles of their choice. In doing so, they discover new ways of resolving the dilemmas that the play presents. In follow-up exercises, community members learn how to translate these insights into social action.

Boal's workshops at Harvard have had sequels in Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School, in an AIDS prevention program for Tanzania designed by Felton Earls and Maya Carlson, and in collaborations with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to teach anti-discrimination to corporate managers. Sommer points to Boal's work as an example of what can be achieved when the arts and humanities are used to enhance the functioning of society.

"Students who are interested in the humanities sometimes become discouraged because they don't see the contribution they can make," said Sommer. "We tell them not to despair. You are precisely what is needed to develop a web of cultural activities that weaves together civil society."

John Stauffer: 'In Whitman's poems there is a leveling of society - women are equal to men, slave to free, poor to rich. There's a breakdown of hierarchies. He even collapses the distinction between high, formal language and slang.' (Staff file photo Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office)

Transcending society's ills

Examples of how the arts and humanities have influenced social change can be found in abundance in North America as well. The literary history of the United States is replete with examples of writers who have had a profound impact on the social and political events of their day. One of the most influential of these was the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"There's no question that in the run-up to the Civil War, Emerson's increasing support of the anti-slavery movement helped to give it an intellectual and cultural authority it did not have before. He helped to widen the circle of Northern intelligentsia that joined the anti-slavery activist bandwagon, and during the Civil War he came to be looked upon as an icon and embodiment of the highest Yankee ideals," said Lawrence Buell, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature and one of the foremost authorities on Emerson and the Transcendentalists.

While Emerson's participation in direct political action was not as frequent or strenuous as that of contemporaries like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Theodore Parker, he struggled to find a balance between direct involvement and engaging social and political issues on an intellectual level. Buell believes that Emerson's struggle has much to teach a contemporary audience about the social responsibility of the intellectual.

Emerson's friend and disciple Henry David Thoreau seemed less troubled than his mentor about the writer's obligations to society, often turning his back on the turbulent events of his time to dwell in the solitude of Walden Pond or disappear on long hikes or canoe trips. Yet, paradoxically, one of his essays has turned out to be a foundational text in the history of social and political activism.

"Resistance to Civil Government," Thoreau's rationale for refusing to pay his taxes as a protest against slavery and the Mexican War, has had, like Mockus' mimes, a profound ripple effect, influencing the thought and practice of figures such as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.

"It didn't have much influence at its own moment," said Buell. "It appeared in an obscure publication, and Thoreau at the time was very much in Emerson's shadow, but it's had a tremendous posthumous reputation. That partly has to do with its extraordinary eloquence, but it also has to do with its substance. It's the strongest statement in American political writing about the claims and the responsibilities of an individual of integrity when faced with an oppressive social system. And it is exceptional for the pointedness with which it argues that a single individual's conscienceful decision to oppose a corrupt state through civil disobedience can indeed have revolutionary consequences. That was certainly an inspiration to both Gandhi and King."

Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library is the home of many treasures, including an 1852 daguerreotype of Harriet Beecher Stowe. (The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University)

Catalyzing social change

Whether a work of art or literature can be shown to decisively turn the tide on a particular social issue is difficult to prove, but John Stauffer, professor of English and American literature and language, has assembled some impressive facts and statistics that suggest such a work can act as a catalyst of public opinion.

A first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's world-altering work 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' When Lincoln greeted Stowe in the White House, he is reported to have said, 'So you're the little lady who started this big war.' (The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University)

According to Stauffer, who teaches the Core course "American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac," there are many instances where the appearance of a piece of writing or a photograph has been correlated with a widespread shift in attitude.

Tom Paine's "Common Sense," for example, was published in January 1776, at a time when there was little enthusiasm among Americans for independence from England. But the pamphlet's powerful rhetoric seemed to galvanize opinion and to convince many colonists that autonomy from the mother country was the most desirable outcome.

Similarly, Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin," appearing in 1852, soon became the best-selling book of the 19th century with the exception of the Bible and succeeded in conveying to millions of readers in the United States and other countries an emotional account of the evils of slavery. So effective was the book that when Lincoln welcomed its author to the White House, he is reported to have said, "So you're the little lady who started this big war."

Photographs have had significant catalytic effects on public opinion as well, Stauffer said. Photos of emaciated prisoners in the Confederacy's Andersonville Prison outraged newspaper readers in the North, and while no causal connection can be drawn, it is significant that the only Southern officers to be executed after the war were those who had served in Andersonville.

During the Vietnam War, the largest shift in public opinion against the war occurred in February 1968, following the publication of a picture by photographer Eddie Adams of a South Vietnamese officer summarily executing an alleged member of the Viet Cong.

Not all protest literature assumes a tone of anger or accusation. Stauffer's working definition of protest literature is "a text that critiques society and suggests a resolution to social ills either implicitly or explicitly." Based on that definition, Stauffer includes Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" in the class reading list.

A portrait of Renty, an African-born slave, by photographer J.T. Zealy, March 1850. This image, rediscovered in the Peabody Museum in 1976, is among a collection of rare daguerreotypes of African Americans taken before the Civil War. (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology)

"I argue that it articulated an America in which an egalitarian millennium had already occurred. In Whitman's poems there is a leveling of society — women are equal to men, slave to free, poor to rich. There's a breakdown of hierarchies. He even collapses the distinction between high, formal language and slang."

Whitman's style of social protest has had a long and powerful impact, said Stauffer. There are countless examples of lives being transformed by the book, and to many it has taken on the status of an almost sacred text, he said. There is even evidence that Abraham Lincoln may have read the work and that his rhetorical style may have been influenced by it.

Reaching a wider consensus

In the 20th century writers and artists have created works that have driven as well as reflected social change without necessarily employing political rhetoric or pointing an accusatory finger. Homi Bhabha, the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and director of the Humanities Center, sees evidence of such influence in the artists and poets of the 1930s whose work reflects the ideological and human struggle of the Spanish Civil War.

Even though art works like Picasso's "Guernica" and Auden's "September 1, 1939" may have been inspired by political events, Bhabha said, "this didn't coarsen their quality. Rather, they appealed to the best selves of people who appreciated such works. They take a stand in a deep, internal sense that political speeches often fail to do. Humanists may not have an instrumental and direct relationship to social change, but they do have a reflective and imaginative connection with social reality that can create a noncoercive and wider consensus."

Bhabha even finds an important element of social engagement in the "Confessional" poets of the 1950s and '60s, figures like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and John Berryman.

"That whole group of poets showed us the effect of a social and historical crisis on the attentive psychological structure of the mind. They showed that even the anguished psyche could be a mirror of the times, that their intimate, wounded verses could be deeply inward but also finely reflective of social anxiety."

Homi Bhabha: 'The communal (and communicative) world of the humanities encourages a diversity of intellectual approaches in order to ensure that our scholarly culture preserves traditions of democratic participation and protects freedom of interpretation.' (Staff photo Justin Ide/Harvard News Office)