Bob Dylan has always had a fraught relationship with the world of progressive social change. He wrote some of the most penetrating socially conscious songs of the early 1960s — “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “When the Ship Comes In” — and performed at the March on Washington in the summer of 1963. Then, in December of that same year, he declared in a drunken speech to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, “I’m trying to go up without thinking of anything trivial such as politics.”
That complicated relationship is at the center of the excellent new film about Dylan, “A Complete Unknown.” The core message of the movie is that orthodoxies, however well intentioned, can suffocate creativity. The message for the nonprofit world is clear: Ideological rigidity should never prevent new ideas and solutions from taking root.
The early scenes of the film set the stage. When Bob Dylan arrives in New York City in the early 1960s, Pete Seeger, the paterfamilias of folk music, takes the young musician under his wing, getting him stage time at Greenwich Village coffeehouses and introducing him to important players in the folk world.
Seeger’s convictions run deep, but his worldview is narrow. When Dylan expresses his appreciation for a rock and roll song by Little Richard, Seeger responds with scorn. Folk music, he believes, is the only pure music. In Seeger’s view, electricity distorts everything — the music, the intentions, the people, and the politics.
Dylan’s musical interests are widening, and Seeger’s orthodoxy is suffocating.
It all comes to a head at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Seeger, a co-founder of the festival, had long viewed it as a utopia of folkie purity. Dylan was weeks away from releasing a distinctly unpure rock and roll album, “Highway 61 Revisited,” and was itching to play some of his new songs. Seeger begged him to do an acoustic set of folk standards. Dylan plugged in. Seeger threatened to take an axe to the cord.
The songs that Dylan played that night were destined to become classics of the American musical canon, including “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” If Dylan had not been so prickly and independent, Seeger’s purity fixation may well have overpowered the creativity of one of the great musical geniuses in American history.
Suffocating Orthodoxies
In my years in the social change sector, I’ve seen this dynamic play out repeatedly. My first such experience was back in the late 1990s when I met John “Jody” Kretzmann, who had founded the Asset-Based Community Development Institute, now at DePaul University, with John McKnight. Together, they had co-written the handbook for the field, “Building Communities From the Inside Out.”
When I told Kretzmann that I heard his work referenced at nearly every meeting and conference I went to about urban development, he laughed and said that the concept was almost strangled at birth. Nobody, he said, was enthusiastic about their innovative notion that a community’s existing assets should be used to create sustainable economic development and opportunity. Conservatives wanted to incarcerate their way out of inner-city challenges, and liberals only wanted to talk about the systemic problems of capitalism. The idea of developing the innate capacities of people and neighborhoods was a challenge to both orthodoxies.
But like Bob Dylan, Kretzmann and McKnight persisted, and their idea became the new standard in community development because it recognized the basic importance of nurturing the good rather than obsessing over the bad. And because it worked.
Suffocating orthodoxies exist in every corner of American civic life. For many of those on the conservative side, the answer to any question is some combination of freer markets, larger military budgets, lower taxes, less cultural diversity, and the Ten Commandments in every classroom.
I’ve also written frequently about my frustration with the suffocating orthodoxies on the progressive side of the political divide where blind loyalty to dogma makes it harder to achieve laudable objectives like greater cultural diversity.
Consider the case of Ruy Teixeira, widely regarded as one of the nation’s preeminent experts on how Democrats can build winning, multicultural electoral coalitions. He had been one of the most prominent fellows at the liberal Center for American Progress since it opened in 2003. In 2022, he left for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, not because his policy views had moved right, but because the atmosphere at institutions like CAP had become so rigid that he felt he could not write, speak, or think freely.
In an interview with Politico, Teixeria described an environment at CAP, as well as other think tanks on the left, where having conversations about issues such as race, gender, crime, and immigration had become increasingly difficult. “There’s a default assumption about how you’re supposed to talk about these things, even the language. There’s a real chilling effect on all of these organizations, and I think it’s had an effect on CAP as well.”
The Chilling Effect
I’ve had plenty of personal experiences with the “chilling effect” that Teixeira describes. I remember being part of a discussion with a group of liberal professors about gender imbalances in American life. The first statistic somebody raised was that only 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies have female CEOs.
It took mere seconds for the group to come to a consensus about the cause of this: patriarchy. Certainly plausible, although I was a little struck that no other possibilities were discussed.
Someone else pointed out that there were other important gender imbalances in American life. For example, there might be more men than women in the corner office, but men also underperform women in school, dominate the ranks of the unemployed, and are far more likely to die from drug overdoses or commit suicide.
Why might this be the case? There was a short silence. And then someone bluntly said, “patriarchy.” To that, the group responded with vigorous nods and almost no discussion.
This is what suffocating orthodoxy looks like in practice: An inability to adjust when challenging new facts are presented. A refusal to face social problems that don’t fit neatly into preferred priorities. A talent for raising the volume on ingrained slogans.
Like Pete Seeger’s folk-music purity test, the intentions are genuine and not without merit. But when an orthodoxy is unquestioningly supported for its own sake, creativity always loses. And without creativity, it’s hard to make progress, either in music, or toward solving social problems.
So here’s a plan for 2025: Let’s turn up the volume on Dylan at Newport in 1965 and turn down the volume on doctrinaire ideas that are blocking innovation.
