The Illinois Issues Humanities Essays: III

By MARTIN E. MARTY

The humanities and fund-raising: A test of belief

GEORGE Bernard Shaw, who had credentials in both arts and humanities, once advised that in matters of finances no writer or speaker should be diffident. Shaw himself was not shy about the subject. At times he sounded almost like a character in his Heartbreak House: "When I meet a man who makes a hundred thousand a year, I take off my hat to that man . . . and call him brother." Shaw and his character have seldom lacked company among artists and humanists. The only more disconcerting company than folk of his type are those who are diffident about funding and who disguise their need to eat and their desire to thrive by pretending not to care about finances.

Bill Veeck, owner emeritus of the Chicago White Sox, refused to speak, it was said, at any off-season banquets unless he could bring a fistful of season tickets to peddle. To some this was hucksterism. To others, including me, this practice was a signal of his belief in the venture. Veeck was quoted as saying that if he did not have enough faith in the White Sox to market them, then how could he ask others to do it for him? Had he and the team something to hide? (It happened that his teams usually did hide some things quite well, including quality, but that is another topic for a sadder day.)

Three recent national experiences provided me with an opportunity to test old beliefs and fashion new ones about funding. They also gave me some credentials to propose some theses on the subject at this time.

First has been participation on the Board of Trustees of the National Humanities Center (NHC), a stunning "secular monastery" in North Carolina. From the first the planners tried to envision and produce this focus for excellence in the humanities without simple dependence upon government funds. Foundations, corporations, educational institutions, and individuals in the Carolina environs somehow caught the vision of such a center and have helped develop it and give it support. But the NHC is not well-endowed and may never be, and that precariousness may be a source of strength over the long term. Without secure and certain funds, the board and staff must make their case for the humanities year after year. That need has given strength to the effort and prevented the center from withering into slogans and stale self-righteousness. My work on the board has taught me that it's no disgrace for humanistic scholars to put finances on page one of their agenda.

The second experience was the Rockefeller-funded Commission on the Humanities, which, because of Rockefeller funding, could wait until the last chapter of its report to discuss "Support for the Humanities." The drafters did well enough with the subject that I can commend it to you, and the University of California Press will sell you The Humanities in American Life for only $3.50 in a paperback edition. Life on that commission convinced me that as hard as arts and humanities funding is in any decade, and as much harder as it will be in the eighties, good things can happen when advocates make their case. But some of us also wondered whether humanists are sufficiently sure of themselves and their intentions to go before a public.

Whenever NHC or Commission on the Humanities types gather, or whenever academics look for sabbaticals or departmental funds, they have to keep funding up front. Whenever such people are dispersed on general panels involving general publics, they will find that both their funds and their vocations are low on the agenda. This I learned from participation on the President's Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties, which reported in January of this year in A National Agenda for the Eighties. This report, along with one of nine panel reports, The Quality of American Life in the Eighties, provide documentation and valuable resources. (Both are available from the U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402.)

This commission included numbers of people from arts and humanities: Daniel Bell, a humanistic public philosopher; poet Gwendolyn Brooks; Joan Ganz Cooney of Children's Television Workshop; Common Cause's John W. Gardner; President Matina Horner of Radcliffe; Dr. Lewis Thomas, a humanities-minded physician; the Rev. Foy Valentine; Beverly Sills, until she got too busy or too tired. We were outnumbered, of course, by economists, industrialists and labor leaders, special interest advocates and social scientists, but many of them are nationally recognized for their interest in arts and humanities. Yet when discussing a "national agenda," we found that tongues of men and of angels, of women and of demigods, would not have made it possible for the majority to keep our subjects up front. Economic growth, a social agenda, political institutions, and foreign policy naturally dominated debate. Though each of these concerns impinge on the world of arts and humanities and vice versa, they also preoccupied the commissioners and virtually squeezed aesthetic and humanistic elements off the agenda.

May 1981/Illinois Issues/19

In the end, the chairman was kind enough to include in his preface three pages I wrote about how and why the subject slipped from view. We did, after all, have to go home to colleagues who must have wondered why they seemed so unrepresented. And we had to live with ourselves, we who feel that much of the color, texture and meaning of a nation in any decade is embodied or disclosed in its arts and humanities and the kind of support they receive. The apology for our silence included our own recognition of the urgency of other issues, the elusiveness of our own, and the question of whether they can be discussed as well under presidential and other federal auspices as in voluntary and private sectors. Matina Horner's panel and report on The Quality of American Life was able to enlarge upon these few scant lines in the special report, and they do so with reasonable eloquence (pp. 29-33).

There the panelists remind the public that "when people are asked what contributes to the quality of their lives, the majority of Americans agree about the importance of cultural facilities." In a recent survey, more than four in five ranked the arts on a level with other services considered essential to a community. The report praises the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, wishes them well in the coming hard times and proclaims the importance of a rich and varied cultural life:

But we who believe all that did not do well at convincing our fellow commissioners to include it in the general report.

I write out of respect for fellow commissioners. We came up with a couple of terribly controversial proposals, a silly one, some obvious ones, and I would like to think, many more that are solid. But insofar as they represent the larger public, which is what such a commission is to do, these colleagues served as effective teachers about How Things Are with arts and humanities. Already I have implied several lessons taken from the experiences. Let me connect others with impressions gained during these recent years of stating the case for the arts and humanities and being involved with their funding.

1. You have to make the funding case afresh in each generation. Humanists and artists in the senior generation tend to carry in their genes and memories old rationales and statements of the case. They forget that, unlike individuals, society has no memory. When it "stops to think," a new generation needs schooling in the inherited wisdom. Circumstances change, and with them, cases.

A young generation takes for granted the museums, libraries, faculties, symphonies and drama companies, galleries and theaters. They have "always been there"; presumably they always will be. Yes, one reckons with problems of inflation, but never with the basic existence of such institutions or the good intentions of the people who inhabit them. Yet if one thinks deeply, it is clear that rationales must change. Should there be museums; do we need museums without walls? Is the symphony orchestra a fossil? Are the humanities dying ghosts in the living machines of the technological order, and shall we let them die? Since the arts of our day do not match Shakespeare's or Rembrandt's, Phidias's or Mozart's, why not simply reproduce the old? Why not put everything on a "pay as you go," laissez-faire free enterprise competitive market basis, and let the fittest survive? I string out these questions not because they are silly but because only when advocates face them and come up with tentative answers will they be ready to make a new case.

2. The case for arts and humanities has to be made first on intrinsic, not practical grounds. That may seem to be an obscure idea, but it is a rather simple one to expound, however hard it is to get across. By "intrinsic" I mean that one does not begin by saying that a city should subsidize a blockbuster museum show because it will bring tourists who will improve the economy of the city. There are myriad cases in which the practical benefits of such support are clear. There are communities where the ability to advertise the existence of universities and galleries will help lure industry and commerce, and one's heart leaps to be able to document this. But these benefits have to be secondary. As often as not there is no immediate or even longer range economic payoff.

The public, through small voluntary donations, tuitions and tickets, or through indirect means like governmental and foundation or corporate support, will not over the long pull lend support unless the case is made for the intrinsic value of arts and humanities and their endeavors and achievements. Here we may lack nerve and ability today to make the case. Fear of sounding "elitist" has led humanists to shrink from arguing that there are standards, however hard to define, and excellences, however elusive their terms. We can debate why the night-blooming cereus is more beautiful than a stinkweed, or why a Samuel Barber composition merits attention alongside a performance by Bruce Springsteen. We may have to take a moment to propose criteria for showing why the American Ballet Theatre dance is "better" than that which occurs Saturday night at the Willow Mill Ballroom — even if it reaches fewer people and provides lesser enjoyments in some respects. It takes some doing to help people entertain the idea that one might defend the learning of piano-playing as a child without arguing that the finger exercises will help him or her earn money as a typist some day, or that English has value as literature and not only to play a part in improving business letters. Until arts advocates or those who express themselves in art, literature, philosophy, religion and history, can make the case intrinsically, they will not make it at all — because the public can spot their own lack of faith in what they are doing.

20/May 1981/Illinois Issues

3. The arts and humanities suffer today from an absence of eloquent and informed critics. And that void is crucial because the lack of informed criticism makes it difficult for humanists to make the intrinsic case. In my sphere of the humanities, the history of religion, we have come almost to state as a truism that faith does best in the face of deep doubt, and that thelogy is most bold and clear in the face of antagonistic atheism. Today nonbelievers tend serenely to ignore the claims of faith instead of opposing them. Thus they give a free ride to anti-intellectual evangelizers or faddist seekers for "new experiences," while letting theology grow mushy in a world where believers see no reason to outthink their counterparts. So with the humanities in general. They suffer from being treated with apathy instead of violent opposition, or from having awakened inept critics. I will give several illustrations. Since I chose the world of religion for the previous point, let me stay in it for the present. Fund-raising evangelists, eager to prosper and gain political power, have to create bogeys or foils. They have to show that the person of civility is the enemy, whose cities must fall into ruin. In the present fracases, the tribalists have chosen to use "humanism" and "humanists" as their bogey. On humanism they blame moral decline, collapse of education, perversion of arts and letters, and national impotence. In a wild new conspiracy theory they have settled on the notion that exactly 275,000 humanists have led the other 225,000,000 Americans into left field. Unfortunately, they are guilty of lumping together many innocents, of overlooking rich traditions of Jewish and Christian and other humanisms, and of confusing humanities as fields with secularistic humanism as an arcane philosophy. We should console ourselves, and I sometimes do, with the suggestion that "as long as they spell our name right," they can go on spreading it. But at other times one wishes that more gifted, honest, careful and noble-minded critics would challenge fields of human learning and artistic expression.

Example two: the moderate political right claims to be conservative and yet often makes a cause of opposing governmental funding of art or any funding beyond "free market" competition. As a person whose one side is conservative — aren't most historians and theologians, since we cherish the past and the texts from it? — this strikes me as a grievous misreading of tradition and conservatism. What do conservatives stand for except conserving? And who does that more intensely than custodians of museums and libraries, professors of art history, critics who recognize great literature? Such self-contradictory thinking as one often hears from this form of conservatism does little to stimulate creative response from artists and humanists. There can be a vigorous debate over public versus private funding, of amounts for specific projects, and the value of such projects, without mindless attack on arts and humanities as such.

Some professed humanists do little better. In New Republic, "humanist" Ann Hulbert reduced the whole Commission on the Humanities Report, with its meager last chapter on funding, to a mere "Humanities Hustle." Her response was a distortion of the report. The commission did not "declare the relevance of the humanities on every plausible occasion when public support might be forthcoming." Even a quick reader will see the report's considerable reticence about making dramatic claims for relevance. It does not "vacuously claim . . . that the humanities, whatever they may be, need everything and can do anything." Read the report and see if she is telling the truth. Hulbert closes with romanticism: humanities will make their way in the world of "quiet libraries, tattered satchels," and through pursuit of particular disciplines and not when anyone cares about the zone of the humanities on the crowded terrain of American life. Back to the garrets, oh starvers and purists!

Yet, one hopes. One hopes that the evangelists and the conservatives-against-conservatism, the tattered-satchel romantics and the distorters of language, are paying the humanities a compliment the arts have longer had. They are taking notice of a presence that can be disturbing and hence creative. Maybe disputes about budgets and funding, public and private, will issue in better challenges to the humanities. Then, like theologians when confronted by atheists on the scale of Feuerbach or Nietzsche or Marx, the advocates may come up with more compelling apologies.

4. The distinction between elitist and populist in support of arts and humanities is more political than esthetic or intellectual. I hesitate to bring up this dreary subject, but it comes up whenever funding is a theme for debate on Capitol Hill, in state humanities and arts councils, or in book reviews from left and right. For those who have not had to pay attention to the debates and distinction, let it only be said that one political faction believes that funding should go only to what is already of proven excellence, in order to make it more excellent and thus to help establish better norms to which others might aspire. Certainly any effort to drag the excellent toward mediocrity, or to dry up the green tree or starve the now healthy, would be foolish. But this faction often forgets that excellence resulted from a process of stimulating interest broadly in a generation, of casting wide nets and allowing for loss between the threads, of recruiting talent so that genius could emerge.

The other faction derides support out of public funds for a Harvard English professor or a Cleveland Symphony player, both of whom, it is presumed, are well off. In practice, both might earn better as skilled laborers, or certainly would had they poured their talents into the Master of Business Administration rather than spending many years in doctoral work or endless practice. But since I want to erode some distinctions between professors or symphony players and skilled laborers and MBA's, let that economic note be forgotten as quickly as it came up. The "populists" or diffusionists argue that a thin spread of funding for lower-level expressions is more democratic and, in the long pull, more promising for arts and humanities than is subsidy of the already excellent.

May 1981/Illinois Issues/21

Of course, one must make choices in practice when budget times come, whether for NEA and NEH, corporations, foundations or educational institutions. Equally "of course," different institutions will have different priorities that will help them tilt one way or the other. But to make a polarity of "elitist" and "populist" and to dismiss everything that does not come to one's own favored pole is intellectually unsound. A ghetto kindergarten, like all other education, is intrinsically and inherently elitist. All knowledge is power. The child who learns to watercolor a representation of an apple in elementary school is a member of an elite over against those who can only look at apples but cannot hold or dip a brush. The seventeenth chair trumpeter in a high school band is in an elite that the person who only hums through wax paper over a comb cannot enter.

Meanwhile there is a populist tinge to all performances, whenever the doors fling open to a true public, especially when the performances are free of charge. Whenever an author offers a book to a public and hopes for enough sales to pay for the review copies, he or she is hoping that "the people" will eavesdrop or kibitz on a conversation with specialized readers. It is my belief, based on observation, that the elitist/populist polarity serves chiefly as an excuse for opponents of all funding to reject all funding, or for selfish partisans to gain support for their own cause. A realization that elite and populist are code words for elements that are on a continuum will lead to a less mean spirit, a more catholic vision.

5. All patronage of the arts and humanities is corrupting, yet most artists, humanists and patrons can in some measure transcend mere corruption. The temptation for artists to cater to buying or attending publics, for academicians to arrange their research in order to make them acceptable for careers in the academy, and for both to "play it safe" in the face of governmental support is a natural one. Humanists, at least, ought to know enough about the human experience to recognize this. Similarly, the purchase of a book or a ticket, the apportionment of funds by a foundation or corporation, and the subvention of artistic or humanistic ventures by governmental agencies can imply a certain limitation on or direction to artists and humanists on the part of the "patrons." Again, that kind of corrupting temptation ought to be obvious.

To single out governmental involvement as uniquely corrupting is humanistically unwarranted and intellectually unsound. In the economy of the United States, the best guarantee against corruption or diminishing of standards apart from the self-restraint of the tempted, is a rich pluralism of competing forms of patronage and a vigorous system of scrutiny and criticism. Such a system exists, motivated as it is both by a desire for high standards on the part of some and jealousy on the part of others.

From time to time critics either claim to find "models" that governmental agencies impose, or they encourage development of such models. The rich pluralism that I have just described pretty well takes care of any dangers on these fronts. Here, unlike China, Mao's dictum that a hundred flowers should blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend seems to be followed, whether by conscious policy or unconscious politics.

6. There will never be enough money for good arts and humanities, nor never enough good arts and humanities for the money. In a society of 225 million people, there are hundreds of artists who will not find means of support to produce their best, and hundreds of humanist scholars who cannot be sprung free for crucial sabbaticals. There are not enough "robber barons" or Renaissance princes around to serve

as patrons, and any realist knows that the public funding sources will decrease in the eighties. The economy is in crisis. Defense expenditures are attractive. ("Give me one army tank!" says an NEH man who points out that all NEH support for elementary and secondary school humanities comes to the cost of but one of the thousands of army tanks now on order.) The scramble for funds will continue.

At the same time, it is foolish to think of unlimited funds producing unlimited works of merit. In the presumably halcyon decade after the Russians lofted Sputnik, goaded America into the space age, and stimulated faith in and funding for universities, including the arts and humanities corners thereof, there was not a great burst of creativity and learning. Concurrently, anti-art instead was making its way in art departments, and barbarian humanities students grunted or group-groped, having lost faith in language. Money alone produced no new Renaissance, while the somewhat more stringent situation in the seventies saw the beginning of humanistic recovery. The logic of this is not to say that cutting funds more in the eighties will produce better arts and humanities, though, alas, we may be given a chance to test out the possibility. It is to say that funding is not the only issue before artists and humanists and their advocates. Yet it serves, as I have argued, to help them clear their minds and their speech for a case that needs making. Still, and again. □

Martin E. Marty is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor at The University of Chicago, associate editor of The Christian Century, and author of many books, including the National Book A ward winning Righteous Empire and A Nation of Behavers. In addition to the commissions and boards mentioned in the article, the Illinois Humanities Commission was another sphere of his activity in the 1970s.

22/May 1981/ Illinois Issues