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Meaning: When the Virtual Becomes Real
I vividly recall once entering the office of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Lawrence Smalls. I noticed a glass case standing in the corner. In that case, I saw a faded graying-to-black top hat. An old top hat is not necessarily a precious object; the materials of its makings are commonplace things: felt, silk, wool, leather, and wire, all ordinary staples of the milliner’s craft. These materials were gathered and conformed into a sartorial feature we now undoubtedly would find archaic or even pretentious on today’s boulevards and avenues. Top hats, like cravats with stick pins, frock coats, or spats—all former hallmarks of a gentleman’s dress—have suffered fashion’s mercurial judgments; those that survive have been banished to the costumer’s wardrobe or to the occasional attic trunk. But not this top hat. There is another element—invisible yet precious, worldly yet sacred—that elevates this object to an ennobling status, the salty residue of the sweat of the man whose head this hat crowned: Abraham Lincoln.
Mr Lincoln’s hat. Personally, it is difficult for me to imagine an object more emblematic of the Smithsonian Institution’s mission than this one. I imagine, though I do not know, that this hat serves as a powerful reminding—even a prompting—force to Secretary Smalls, whose position makes him the custodian of those objects, which assembled, represent our heritage, our culture, our civilization. Simply put, Mr. Lincoln’s hat embodies those principles and virtues upon which we as a people, at our best, aspire to uphold and to preserve. We understand why Mr. Lincoln’s hat is important.
Mr. Lincoln's Hat
Yet, what makes this object precious is purely intangible—its preciousness resides in the meaning we ascribe to it, and that meaning is based on what we know and what we revere. Its preciousness springs from our human nature. One will not find courage in the warp and woof of the silk. One cannot finger nubs of compassion in the felt. You will not discover liberty, equality, or opportunity alloyed with the iron wire that gives this hat its shape. If charity or dignity ever made its leather hatband more pliable, it can only be conjured by someone who feels these things called forth from their own heart, prodded by the memory of a great and humble man who feared praise more than contempt.
As you reflect on what I’m saying, I want to reassert and emphasize my point that meaning is a pure intangible. How we might feel looking at Mr. Lincoln’s hat is no less real than the hat itself but the reality of our feelings is virtual. However, I strongly believe—and I think that events of history would support my premise—that the virtual character of this reality does not diminish its potency. If the top hat in the case were the former property of a merchant from St. Joseph, Missouri who supplied wagon trains embarking west on the Oregon Trail, chances are that it would already be consigned to oblivion, and not rest in a climate-controlled case in the office of the nation’s chief steward of our heritage. No. In this case, the virtual is what’s precious and the real is just a reliquary.
For some reason there is a failure to appreciate that human beings have trafficked in the virtual since the dawn of time? God, ghosts, memory, myth, history, hallucination, imagination and vision are the promontories of the virtual landscape. These are the domains of the artist, the priest, the shaman, and the conjurer. They are also the domain of the entrepreneur, the inventor, the explorer, AND the arts administrator.
When a priest invokes God's blessings upon a child being baptized, the transformation of the water in the font is a product of faith not substance. When Edison sought investors for his new electric company to wire an entire city, he could not prove it could be done; it happened because belief and conviction trumped hard evidence. When Itzhak Perlman coaxes a Bach chaconne from his violin, it emerges with the sweep of his bow and disappears into ephemera with the drop of his arm; we know the music was there but we cannot touch it. We have always lived with the virtual; we just haven't talked about it as such. It is ironic that so much that we treasure cannot not be touched: love, inspiration, desire, hope, joy, and faith.
If technology has raised our consciousness about anything, it has certainly effectively delivered the message that the "virtual" encroaches upon the "real." And the virtual is usually ensconced within information. The information explosion is a byproduct of the emergence of a tech infrastructure which is eclipsing all other economic sectors. Who among us has not encountered the notion of virtual reality? A quality of "fuzziness" comes with the virtual—intangibles elude us. Have you noticed that many distinctions that used to be clear are getting fuzzier and fuzzier? Boundaries are blurring everywhere. Where does government end and the non profit sector begin? What’s news and what’s entertainment? What’s a peccadillo and what’s a crime? Where do good intentions end and manipulation begin? Collaboration and co-dependence are oberservationally identical yet I know that one’s good and the other’s bad and I’m struggling to tell the difference.
Even our language reflects this sea change. Community used to be all about town and neighborhood, place of worship and place of work. Virtual communities have transformed the tangible features of the landscape from bell towers and belfries to fiber optic cable and microwave dishes. We’re still occasionally enclosed in the envelope of the town hall but our enclosures are more than batten and board, clapboard and plaster. They’re threaded conversations, chat rooms, video-conferencing suites, and that reliable high-tech engine of high touch—the telephone.
Well, the world may feel more virtual every day but our challenges still feel real. I suppose that for those of us who long for the real, we can take some comfort from this. The long and the short of it is that managing the real is no longer enough. We must be able to handle the virtual, the intangible, the ephemeral. What’s more, we must be skilled in conjuring these things. It’s not just some New Age figure of speech to recognize that organizations are increasingly searching for shamans. In this "Matrixesque" world where the real and unreal exist in dynamic tension, where the tangible and intangible compete for top-of-mind, leaders MUST be conjurers, especially in the non-profit sector.
Throughout history people have searched for meaning. Along the way we have created monuments to it—lighthouses that warn us away from expediency’s shoals. We have martyred those who terrified us with the penetrating clarity of their visions, later canonized them, and gathered their bones and called them holy. All these things we have done out of meaning, not out of profit. While commerce moves minds, meaning moves hearts, and as history has so often shown us, the mind often makes a practice of justifying what the heart has earlier decided. Our job as leaders, as conjurers, is to move people and we will move them through meaning; story is a powerful way to meaning.
(This entry is an excerpt from a Keynote Address to the San Francisco conference of the League of Historic American Theatres)
Posted on March 9, 2006 11:59 AM | Permalink
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