The Arts and Humanities in a Democracy (cont'd)

The Second Question

Why have the arts and humanities been under such prolonged political attack?

One might mark our present troubles as beginning with the U.S. withdrawal in 1984 from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This action sent a clear signal to the international community that we would no longer consider cultural exchange useful to our understanding of others in the world. Concurrent to quitting UNESCO, there were persistent efforts to re-focus our domestic arts policy to support a relatively few western European traditions to the exclusion of the many other excellent artistic traditions that comprise the vibrant American cultural mosaic.

Our nation’s diversity is its renewable source of energy, lighting the beacon of freedom that the rest of the world strains to see. It holds the promise that one day we will come to believe deep in our hearts that all people everywhere are created equal. It is now clearly in our national interest for the Bush administration to end cultural isolationism and replace it with a policy that secures the role of the not-for-profit arts and humanities in international exchange – and links that exchange to a domestic arts and humanities that values our own national diversity. In this way, we can create the framework for the arts and humanities at home and abroad to develop common goals. These goals should include broadening public participation, telling the stories the commercial cultural industries don’t tell, creating understanding among and between different peoples, and supporting the efforts of communities to solve their problems in just ways.

In opposition to the idea of inclusion, beginning with the Reagan administration through the Clinton presidency, federal leadership tolerated relentless attacks on the leading agencies supporting cultural pluralism in the not-for-profit sector – beginning with their own National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. (With some irony, we now recall that those attacks were led by our own homegrown religious fundamentalists.) One effect of the attacks has been to elevate the U.S. commercial arts at the expense of the not-for-profit arts.

The distinction between the two sectors is significant, because devoid of its not-for-profit competition, the impact of U.S. commercial culture in this moment of globalization has become overwhelming. Imagine how the U.S. looks to hundreds of millions of people around the world whose only sources of information about us are television, Hollywood movies, and pop music. Equally troubling, at home this commercial preference has corrupted our own not-for-profit sector’s core values.

Witness the recent reports of excessive compensation for some private foundation presidents and trustees. With not-for-profit boards often drawn exclusively from the for-profit corporate sector, directors probably thought nothing of a $750,000 annual compensation package for their foundation CEO. (After all, we recently learned that the New York Stock Exchange’s CEO was paid 30.5 million in 2001!) Supposedly wholly subject neither to market nor to re-election pressures, the independent sector’s sole purpose is to act nimbly to benefit society. In our recent gilded age, too much of our sector has lost sight of its raison d’être, its very reason for existing, with the result, I contend, that the independent sector now runs the risk of losing its independence.

Epilogue

Several months before the 2000 presidential election – it could be next summer – a reporter in Florida was sent out to interview citizens about why they thought the upcoming presidential election was important. She approached two retirees relaxing by the pool and popped her question, “Why is the upcoming presidential election important to you?”

Without hesitation, the first retiree responded, “The Supreme Court.” The second quickly added, “The economy.” And then almost in unison they said, “The culture.”

The reporter blinked, “The economy I expected, and the Supreme Court I understand, but the culture? What do you mean?”

The first retiree looked square at her, said, “Who controls the culture . . .

And the second retiree finished his sentence, “ . . . controls the story the nation tells itself.”

“Who controls the culture, controls the story the nation tells itself.” What is the story our nation is presently telling itself? Who is telling the story?

With all the day-to-day demands of our jobs, it is easy, I think, for any one of us to lose sight of the fact that what each one of us does in the arts and humanities is at the center of democratic action and that our program choices and their design, seemingly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, have real consequences for the future. But they do. And I expect that it was this realization about the power of the arts and humanities that gave Walter Capps the drive to go into politics. I like to think that many of us here tonight, myself included, are in the spirit of Walter Capps, and it has been an honor to present to you the 2003 lecture dedicated to his memory and to the democratic ideals that he practiced.

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