Culture as an Economy, Not an Ornament

After more than forty years in aviation, I assumed retirement would feel like arriving at the final destination. I believed the journey ended when the cockpit door closed behind me for the last time, when the engines that had shaped the rhythm of my days became nothing more than a distant memory. But I eventually learned that a person may stop flying airplanes without ever truly stopping the journey. Some voyages begin only after landing, and some wings remain invisible because they are made of words.

I sat before the blank page much as I had once sat before the instruments on my first flight—with caution, humility, and a desire to understand what lay ahead. Writing was never simply a pastime to fill the quiet hours of retirement. It became a way of gathering the scattered pieces of a life lived among airports, cities, departures, and faces. I searched memory for the person I had been and for the person experience had slowly made of me. Somewhere in that search, I began to understand culture differently.

Culture, as I have come to see it, is not merely a book resting on a shelf, a painting hanging under gallery lights, or an evening performance that ends when the audience goes home. Culture is the way human beings resist disappearance. It is memory finding a language. It is sorrow becoming music, wood receiving a soul through the hands of a craftsman, and an old story traveling from a grandfather’s voice into the imagination of a child. Culture is what remains after buildings change, streets are renamed, homes are demolished, and the people who once filled them are gone.

Throughout my years of travel, I saw cities rich in architecture but poor in meaning. I also saw modest places with little wealth and few monuments, yet they possessed a character impossible to forget. The difference was simple: some cities had built only their bodies, while others had built both body and memory. Concrete may create a city, but it cannot create belonging. A place becomes a homeland through the stories people tell inside it, the songs they recognize without explanation, and the photographs that preserve the faces of those who are no longer there.

This is why I struggle to understand why writers, artists, designers, filmmakers, and craftspeople are often treated as though they stand outside the economy. A writer does not merely produce pages. A book creates work for editors, designers, publishers, printers, booksellers, and translators. A film does not rise from emptiness; behind every scene is an entire world of writing, directing, sound, lighting, costume, acting, construction, and technology. A craftsman does more than create an object for a tourist. He turns the memory of a place into something that can support a family while keeping an inherited skill alive.

This is the hopeful side of treating culture as an economic force. It allows creators to live with dignity from their gifts. It creates opportunities for younger generations, connects inheritance with innovation, and offers Jordan something no other country can reproduce. Any nation can build a shopping center, a resort, or a glass tower. No nation can duplicate our stories, our accents, our songs, the memory carried in our stones, or the particular way our people have learned to endure.

Yet I remain cautious, because every promising road can become dangerous when traveled without balance. Money may give culture the means to survive, but it can also quietly take away its honesty. A writer may begin asking what will sell rather than what must be said. An artist may create what the audience expects rather than what the conscience demands. Heritage may be reduced to a colorful background where visitors take photographs without ever learning the grief, labor, faith, and joy from which it was born.

The danger is not that culture may earn money. The danger begins when money becomes the only measure of cultural value. Not every important poem will sell. Not every honest painting will please a market. Not every necessary story will entertain. Some works resemble the small warning lights inside a cockpit. No passenger applauds them, and most people never notice them, yet they may be the very things that prevent the aircraft from losing its way.

There is another danger as well: that culture may become a season of festivals, speeches, banners, and official photographs while the artist remains unprotected, the writer unpublished, the craftsman without a market, and the young creator without a door through which to enter. Celebrating culture is not the same as sustaining it. Applauding a pilot does not maintain an aircraft. What preserves the journey is the disciplined, often invisible work performed far from the public eye.

Aviation taught me that even a small imbalance can change the direction of an entire flight. Culture requires the same precision. It must be able to support those who create it without purchasing their silence. It must enter the marketplace without becoming its servant. It must preserve heritage without freezing it in the past. We do not need a culture displayed behind glass and locked away at closing time. We need a culture that breathes, argues, remembers, creates, and earns its place in everyday life.

The deepest lesson I carried from the sky into writing is that a human life is measured not only by what it accumulates, but by the meaning it leaves behind. An airplane eventually lands and its engines grow cold. A position ends, a title disappears, and a name slowly leaves the news. But an honest word may continue flying long after the person who wrote it is gone. A nation that fails to preserve the voices of its creators may still build highways, towers, and impressive institutions, yet one day it may look into the mirror and no longer recognize its own face.