Commentary: In a single day preceding his inauguration, the incoming potentate announced plans to eliminate funding for, by my count, 19 agencies and programs. Time Magazine calculated the aggregate cost of these programs per capita at less than $25 per year. By comparison, we spend $1,890 per capita on war.
Among these endangered programs is the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funds and promotes museums, libraries, research and educational programs, and public participation, all at a cost of $0.46 per capita. This work is intersectional, involving history, anthropology, cultural studies, literature and philosophy, architecture and design, and the arts (although the National Endowment for the Arts is a separate agency). This is not about maintaining ivory towers but rather bringing scholarship to bear on questions of concern to local communities and those of us living and working in them: How shall we live? Where have we been? Where are we headed, and is that where we wish to go?
Nonetheless, many readers will instinctively approve of cutting such programs. A long-standing shibboleth of the Reagan Revolution is represented in a quotation: "That government is best which governs least." Knowing who actually said this, and in what context, is an aspect of the humanities. It is often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and even Ronald Reagan himself - the internet being prone to "alternative facts" - but the statement is actually from Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay on civil disobedience. Thoreau would have gladly sat in jail rather than pay his $1,890 for perpetual war, and as long as I walk free I wonder at how less humane I am. Conservatives might want to read Thoreau a bit further before quoting him: "That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." The anti-government right would retain the means to tell people (especially women and people of color) what to do while mandating endless consumption and capital accumulation. Thoreau rejects these principles and challenges us to get rid of our stuff, consuming less and thereby needing to earn less through alienated labor, and to investigate deeper human values rooted in the land. It is an outrageously optimistic and democratic vision of society as opposed to coercion by government and capital as a united force.
"Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness," wrote Thomas Paine, another figure sometimes claimed by the right. "The former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.” This distinction is seldom discussed anymore, in part because such concern has been pushed aside in our education and popular culture. For its own purposes, government marginalizes the humanities and emphasizes STEM, perfecting the apparatus of force and disdaining conversation (or even factual knowledge). This imbalance will make us a nation of walls and gun towers.
The humanities allow us to know what we value, how to talk to other people, and even how we might govern ourselves instead of being ruled. Choose a "hot topic," be it abortion, refugees, energy, the environment, trade, foreign relations, or job creation in your community, and notice that having a real discussion about any of them involves the humanities. Without them, we cannot know what we value or what our principles are, and we grope in darkness.
That isn't wasteful spending; it is a necessity.
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Algernon D'Ammassa writes the Desert Sage column for the Deming Headlight and Sun News papers. Write to him at DesertSageMail@gmail.com.