by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

Years ago, in a different state and different job, I spent at least the equivalent of two 40-hour weeks each year requesting and reporting on a state-funded arts grant that kept my orchestra going, and even growing in important ways. The forward-leaning support for the arts that had existed for some time in that state was not the reason I had gone there, but it was something that I had long admired and had learned how to access.

As this support began to erode with the increasingly conservative bent of the state government in the 1980s, obtaining and keeping these grants became more and more time consuming. What I found particularly vexing was the often ridiculous requirement to boil down the visit of a guest artist to a grade school into a dollar and cents benefit for the community. That frustrating exercise, together with the cuts in funding made to the state arts budget each year, prompted me to begin thinking about how one could quantify the benefits of arts activity in a community. Beyond the register receipts at arts centers and box offices, and the payrolls for arts-related operations, how does the art displayed, the music, dance, or theater produced, or the novel written provide a benefit for the community?

It quickly dawned on me that the answer to this question could only be fully known after the passage of a lot of time. That’s why the political argument over this support would be so hard for the artistic community to win. Opponents who wanted to slash arts support budgets could easily point to numbers and claim that the benefit of this investment was miniscule at best. Supporters had mostly qualitative arguments. Beyond the immediate emotional impact of some rare anecdote, it might only be years after arts programs had been eliminated that we would see their true benefit—or the degradation of community against which they had once been a bulwark. Even then, straight lines to the arts would be hard to draw.

As it is with that specific issue, so it is with the rightward drift of our politics in general. In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky includes these observations in his conclusion:

The driving force of modern industrialized civilization has been individual material gain. It has long been understood that a society based on this principle will destroy itself in time…At this stage of history, one of two things is possible: Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others, or alternatively there will be no destiny to control.

Importantly, Chomsky asserts that an American media dominated by a corporate hegemony works constantly to blunt the empathetic impulses that would lead us toward these communitarian values. These hegemonic forces seek instead to reinforce our baser, material values, leading us to spend all our time and effort on the pursuit of our own narrow self-interests and acquisitions. Given the populist spasm demonstrated in our 2016 elections (misguided as it seems to have been), Chomsky’s decades-old admonition appears prescient.

But to lay this inward turn, away from Enlightenment values and toward zero-sum tribalism, paranoia and magical thinking, at the feet of only a few among us misses an important realization. We have all taken part in this downward spiral. Our penchant for day-to-day decision making, and our reluctance to do the hard work of thinking long-term has led us too often to follow the loudest voice rather than the wisest words, the shiniest new object rather than the soundest investment, and the most pleasing experience rather than the best opportunity to expand and grow. That some have been slightly more aware of the trend and have acted to profit from it is simply another aspect of our lack of vision. Artists are guilty of this failing as much as anyone—maybe more so.

Perhaps the very nature of a free, democratic society leads us toward this sort of carelessness. Yet, as Chomsky observes, we can do the hard work of engaging mindfully in the governing of our own society, and we must. Absent a new resolve among at least most of us to become more engaged stewards of this democracy, we may discover that our democratic republic is anything but, far too late to do anything about it.