Ten Good Reasons to Continue (in fact to increase!) Funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities A number of innocent federal agencies are being caught in the groundswell of the conservative "revolution" of the 1994 Congressional elections. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Information and Museum Service, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities are on the brink of extinction as conservative politicians try to reduce government spending and taxes, and punish agencies they have come to associate with elitism, leftist cultural politics, and the "welfare state." Each of these modest agencies deserves to survive. They do fine work at a very small price to the taxpayer. They represent some of the most admirable creativity of American civilization. I know a fair amount about the work of each of these agencies, but since I have spent almost twenty years in the public humanities sector, I will confine my defense to the NEH. Why should the National Endowment for the Humanities, with its $177 million budget, survive? Here are ten good reasons. 1. The NEH and its state affiliates fund good projects. The NEH is not a bureaucratic abstraction or a hotbed of "secular humanism," but rather a modest agency that gives grants to worthy humanities projects throughout the United States. People who have never heard of the NEH have probably encountered projects that the agency has funded: Ken Burns' outstanding film series on the _Civil War_ and _Baseball_; the elegant _Library of America_ publishing project, featuring the works of such American writers as Willa Cather and Benjamin Franklin; national museum exhibits on the Bill of Rights, the world of Columbus, American Indian cultures, Seeds of Change, etc.; first-person historical impersonations (Chautauqua) of such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, and Abigail Adams; the award-winning documentary films _Northern Lights_ (about agrarian discontent in North Dakota in 1917) and _Heartland_ (about a woman homesteader in Wyoming). Most of what the NEH funds has received acclaim from the general public as well as the academic community. Some of its projects have been merely thoughtful and competent. Only a handful of projects in its thirty-year history can be said to have been failures. Unlike its sister agency the National Endowment for the Arts, the NEH has not been involved in serious controversies about the content of its programs. 2. The NEH and its affiliates provide only a small portion of the budget of the projects they fund. When the Pentagon funds a tank or an aircraft carrier it must pay the full amount. But when the NEH funds a project, it pays only a fraction of the total cost. The sponsoring group usually must provide a substantial cash match, raise money from other sources, and provide a range of "in-kind" services such as free publicity, free use of rental facilities, etc. The NEH provides seed money for projects that might not be able to pay their way alone, but which are not solely dependent on tax dollars. The NEH might fund the first year of a lecture series that goes on to find other financial support. Ken Burns might not need NEH money today, but at an earlier stage of his career NEH grants were essential to survival. By funding one segment of a conference on race relations, the NEH insures that the humanities are brought to bear on a question that might otherwise lack a careful historical perspective. Or the NEH might fund a panel discussion on revenge and justice to follow a production of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_. In short, the NEH gets a great deal of bang for its buck. 3. We need the humanities to help make sense of our lives. We spend most of our time getting and spending, and scurrying around to fulfill our responsibilities as parents, workers, and citizens. Everyone, irrespective of educational background, is perplexed by life much of the time. The humanities, with their emphasis on history, literature, jurisprudence, philosophy, and anthropology (what used to be called the science of man), can help all of us explore the unresolved questions of our lives. Who has not felt religious doubt, jealousy, anger, intense loneliness, a sense of sin, or wild flights of fancy? We all have to struggle to understand the impulses of human nature, but the humanities exist to help us make sense of them. The Homeric epics can help us explore anger, war, monogamy, and sense of place. Shakespeare's _Othello_ can help us make sense of jealousy. Goethe and Wordsworth bring understanding to loneliness, a sense of inarticulate sorrow, a nostalgic longing for nature. Thomas Jefferson's letters teach us about the inevitable problems of democracy. Thoreau helps us make sense of the feeling of helplessness that accompanies our work lives. Unlike the sciences, the humanities do not provide tight logical answers to life's questions. They explore something as vague but compelling as the human condition. They ruminate about the concerns we feel between midnight and four a.m. It is possible, of course, to live one's life without the humanities. But virtually no one who has encountered the humanities has been sorry for the experience. 4. The humanities are an alternative to _presentism_ and naive historical judgement. One of the characteristics of our time is a propensity to judge the past according to our own standards of enlightenment. Thus Thomas Jefferson's vision of a democratic nation is denounced because he was also the owner of African-American slaves. The intense religious feelings that carried Columbus to the New World and influenced his responses to the native peoples he encountered are dismissed as superstition masking for naked imperialism and genocide. The Constitution of the United States is rebuked for its failure to enfranchise women and African-American. The railroads are condemned as the symbol of the evil of manifest destiny. The humanities are a form of intellectual discipline as well as a set of academic vocations. The humanities insist that history be understood in a broad context, that the voices of the past be seen in all of their complexity, not excerpted for use in a moral argument or a sound-bite. The humanities examine the human condition, warts and all. Their goal is not to judge but to understand, not simply to deplore racism or the urge to war, but to try to understand what it is about the nature of humanity or the types of civilizations we have produced that has led to human misunderstanding, not to moralize about what the psychologist Jung called the "shadow," but to explore the shadow thoughtfully, soberly, unblinkingly, and with a generosity of spirit. In an age when much discourse has been reduced to verbal brickbats on Geraldo, the humanities continue to insist on reflection, dispassionateness, intellectual fairness. We need the humanities as a counter-balance to the violent hasty judgments of our time. 5. People are hungry for the humanities even if they don't use that term. Most of us are bewildered by what appears to be the decline and fragmentation of American civilization at the end of the twentieth century. Many of us feel the country seems to be coming apart. Most of us feel that the future is less promising than the past. We want somehow to restore the nation--its economy, its moral fiber, its civic institutions--but we don't know how. our current perplexity has two important causes: more than any other nation we are ignorant of our past; and we have let our common culture slip away. The exclusive focus of the humanities is the cultural tradition of our past and what it has to say about our contemporary lives. People attend humanities programs in large numbers. They have a great deal on their minds and they are grateful for the clarifying force of the humanities and the scholars who have dedicated their lives to historical understanding. At humanities programs throughout the United States, average citizens express a desire to slow the pace of our discourse, to examine things in greater depth, to let history reveal its patterns and lessons, and to back away from the shallow communications of the electronic media. The humanities are our best lens on our past and on the culture we share as a people. 6. The adult, out-of-school, public both needs and wants continuing education. The old academic joke is that education is wasted on the young. In a sense this has never been more true. The American educational system, by almost any measure, is in crisis. Young people exhibit diminished literacy skills. Few books, even textbooks, are actually read in the public schools. Most students graduate from high school without having had a serious encounter with the great texts of civilization, from Homer and Dante to the Indian _Upanishads_ and the oral tradition of the Navaho. Not infrequently however, these same citizens become interested in the history of ideas later on in their lives The NEH (and other cultural agencies) provide lifelong educational opportunities for all American at an annual cost of less than one commercial movie per capita. When citizens are ready to take books and cultural history seriously, the NEH is poised to introduce them to some of the finest scholars of America, some of the best texts ever written, and some of the most engaging ideas they have ever encountered. 7. The NEH is not a wild invention of the New Deal or the Great Society. All civilizations sponsor culture. Most culture has always been a private enterprise, as indeed it is in the United States of 1995. But every civilization finds ways to support its finest cultural achievement using public funds. In ancient Athens, the first democracy, the Parthenon was built with public money, even though it was not a government building. Greek tragedy was so important to the state that the polis funded the annual dramatic competition, the Festival of Dionysus, and even provided seats gratis to citizens who could not afford to pay. Although Rome was much less culturally sophisticated than Greece, it too provided funding for architecture, for the visual arts, and for cultural events. The cathedrals of the middle ages were built in part with public funds. Native American cultures dedicated tribal and not merely individual resources to dances, feasts, parades, and art. Today every advanced civilization helps fund the arts and humanities from the public treasury. German cities subsidize opera, one of the finest and most expensive of the arts. Britain supports its stupendous national museum, its world-famous portrait and art galleries, the Open University (by television, for adults), and of course the Royal Shakespeare Company, the finest theater company in the world. Our northern neighbor Canada supports public broadcasting, a National Film Board, and intensive public subsidies for arts and humanities programming. The fact is that the arts and humanities have never been able to pay for themselves. They have always been funded partly by sales, partly by rich patrons, and partly by the state, just as they are today in the United States. A movie like _Batman_ can, of course, pay for itself. It bills itself as entertainment and makes no pretensions to culture. A film series like Ken Burns' _Civil War_ cannot pay its way, at least not until Burns had won humanities grants sufficient to launch his great career. The market has never been the exclusive judge of cultural viability. There is nothing unusual or "socialist" about state sponsorship of some creative activity. It is as old as civilization. Indeed, the more remarkable the civilization (Greece, Rome, Renaissance Italy, modern Britain) the more public funding for arts and humanities one finds in the historical record. America is a great civilization. It must not neglect its best thought, best art, best writing, best ideas merely because they cannot all compete with _The Simpsons_. 8. It's a good idea to get scholars away from their ivory towers. America is a democracy. A democracy cannot permit itself to fragment into an intelligentsia, splendidly isolated, on the one hand, and the great mass of citizens who have no contact with academic ideas, on the other. In a democracy the privileged world of academic ideas must be mingled with the concerns of the general public, partly because the public pays taxes which enable the academy to exist, and more importantly because Thomas Jefferson was surely right to argue that the foundation of self-government is a liberally educated public. "Enlighten the people generally," he wrote, "and every form of tyranny, both of mind and body, will disappear." When scholars go out to meet the public, they see conditions that are rarely present in the privileged cloisters of the academy. They also meet the citizens who pay their salaries. This can only be beneficial. The NEH and its affiliates help to break down the town vs. gown misunderstandings that are not uncommon in less democratic cultures. 9. Humanities scholars teach the public, of course, but they also learn from the public. Scholars who have participated in NEH-sponsored programs have reported that their ideas were clarified, criticized, and brought down to earth by contact with the general public. One of the best public humanities scholars in America has said, of the public, "Never overestimate their information or underestimate their intelligence." This is a superb insight. The people of the United States are thoughtful, intelligent, and insightful. They do not often think in academic terms, but they frequently ask questions that help scholars think more clearly about their work. Their challenges sharpen the minds of scholars who are used to being indulged in their classrooms and laboratories. Citizens are also eager to share their real-world experience, which helps scholars anchor theory in life as it is actually lived in America. NEH events are rarely one- directional: knowledge trickling down from the expert to the people. Most NEH programs involve a genuine and mutually respectful exchange. The medieval poet Chaucer, in describing the character of his scholar pilgrim, said, "And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach." This is the principle that most public humanities scholars carry into their public programs. They have ideas they wish to communicate beyond the academic walls. But they also want to learn from the good sense and the wide range of perspectives of the citizens of the United States. They come to speak. But they also come to listen. 10. Public humanities programs are an antidote to the malaise of university humanities departments. Many academic humanists and many university humanities departments have lost their way. They have proudly abandoned the celebrated texts of western civilization for new, neglected, or obscure cultural artifacts.. They prefer critical theory to the practical work of the humanities. Thus they invoke such terms as postmodern, deconstruction, new historicism, new Marxism, eco-feminism, and post-structuralism, rather than provide sensible readings of admirable texts. Much of the academic humanities community has become cynical about such ideas as beauty, truth justice, piety, compassion, democracy, culture, even civilization. They pretend that all human expression is a power game, and that such concepts as justice and beauty are the shibboleths of the privileged who are in fact lackeys for the existing power structure. The old humanities values such as clear-headedness, fairness, and honest truth-seeking have been obscured by a highly technical cultural philosophy with an impenetrable professional jargon. Not all humanities scholars have pursued this Obscurantist path (which I have of course oversimplified in this brief survey), and not all universities are characterized by an intellectual contempt for traditional cultural values. But everyone who has observed the academy knows that the humanities are less accessible to average intelligence than ever before, and many responsible students of culture have concluded that the academic humanities are in disarray. The existence of the NEH and its state affiliates is a marvelous antidote to such self-indulgence. A literature scholar may be able to convince (or silence) an impressionable nineteen-year-old in his or her own private fiefdom, the university classroom, of the importance of a postmodernist reading of _Paradise Lost_ or _Laverne and Shirley_, but he or she will not fare so well with the adult, out-of-school public. In public humanities programs the scholar has no choice but to speak in a language actually used by average citizens.. The scholar must either explain or abandon his or her Continental theories about the nature of discourse. The public demands good sense and lucid communication. It will not sit long for jargon, over-wrought theory, or contempt for the values of average American citizens. In taking ideas to the public the scholar is disciplined, humbled, even reclaimed for good sense. It is not, of course, the case that every scholar can communicate every idea to the general public, any more than that every citizen could understand special relativity or the nature of black holes. Some ideas are so complex that only a handful of individuals can understand them after a lifetime of study. But the very process of trying to make sense of academic ideas in public settings has a salutary effect on every humanities scholar. So far from being unnecessary, the public humanities in America may play a vital role in reclaiming humanities disciplines from their excesses of theory, politics, and language. This is exactly what one would expect in a democracy. Conclusion: These are just a few reasons for saving the National Endowment for the Humanities and other cultural agencies. We are the wealthiest, most privileged, and most energetic nation in the history of the world. We can afford to spend seventy cents per citizen per year on an agency which does so much good at so little cost and with so little bureaucracy and political agenda. The NEH is one of the best things we do with our tax dollars. Of course the NEH can be made more efficient. It should take its share of across-the-board budget cuts along with every other federal agency. It should be carefully supervised so that its grants go to projects which explore our culture respectfully and not to groups and individuals with extreme political views on either side of the spectrum. If enlightenment is the foundation of a democratic people, we ought not to eliminate the NEH simply because our deficit is huge or because some conservatives are offended that our taxes are used for something so frivolous as culture. When the budget is in better balance we should look forward to greatly increased funding for our cultural agencies. As a nation we ought to look to the Parthenon and the Vienna opera, to the films of Ken Burns and the remarkable historical impersonations of Chautauqua, for our model, not to the moral strictures of the righteous or the novels of Ayn Rand. Clay Jenkinson Reno, Nevada 19 January 1995 FORWARDED BY -- [log in to unmask] Everett C. Albers ND Humanities Council 2900 Broadway E., Suite 3 PO Box 2191 Bismarck, ND 58502-2191 FAX: 701-223-8724 TELEPHONE: 701-255-3360 TOLL-FREE OUTSIDE BISMARCK: 1-800-338-6543