Let me begin by crossing my fingers as a sign of my ambivalence about what I am about to undertake here. I fear that I may be walking a little too close to the edge of apologetics for dominant cultural (white, Western, US-based, educated, middle-class) privilege than is comfortable or safe for my soul—but I am willing to risk that damnation in order to reassert the value of the imaginative, the well-wrought, the beautiful, to the common weal—the public good. This may sound a bit too much like David Brooks, who wrote a moving, but ultimately mistaken, lament for the state of the humanities last year in The New York Times :

The culprits in this sad story of lost faith are those who allegedly abandoned notions of “truth, beauty, and goodness” in order to espouse ideas about “political and social categories like race, class and gender” (Brooks). In other words, according to Brooks, you can have your truth and beauty or you can have your social justice but you can't have both because that will just confuse the youth of America and drive them away from our inspiring exemplars to more prosaic pursuits like accounting or engineering.