Culture in Republican crosshairs
In 1959, the British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow introduced a concept that has resonated and been debated ever since, that of the existence in western society of two cultures—that of the sciences and that of the humanities—whose mutual incomprehension and even hostility make it harder to solve the world’s problems.
President Trump’s most important accomplishment in his first 100 days of his presidency may be an unwanted and unheralded one, the minor miracle of getting the two cultures to agree on a single objective, that of resisting this administration’s unprecedented frontal assault on both the scientific and the humanistic cultures.
Through their words and their work, artists, actors, and writers have been speaking out ever more loudly against Trump, from the start of his campaign to today. The fight between the Republicans and the creative community goes back a long way. Republicans for years have been trying to defund, or at a minimum defang, government-supported cultural institutions, such as the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), among many others.
Lacking the political power to altogether destroy these organizations, in the past administrations have resorted to appointing right-wing ideologues such as William H. Bennet to head the likes of the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) so that they could undermine them from within. Bennet went on to become Reagan’s Secretary of Education and later made a pile of money peddling books on morality. The media subsequently discovered Bennet was a gambling addict, thus a typical exemplar of Republican hypocrisy.
However, now that the Republican right-wing dominates everything in Washington from Congress to the White House to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is working hard to finally drive a stake through the heart of the NEA, the NEH, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, among other cultural entities.
Why the long crusade, what do the Republicans have against culture anyway? Art, after all, has been one of the most distinctive manifestations of the uniquely human since cave-dwelling homo sapiens painted exquisite depictions of animals on the walls of their dwellings tens of thousands of years ago. Chimps can manipulate tools but they don’t produce pictographs.
The standard Republican response, the official story, is that they have nothing against art, only against government spending for it. But that’s not the main reason for the GOP’s aversion. Federal spending on culture is minuscule, the whole yearly culture budget couldn’t fund the Pentagon for an hour, and there are plenty of examples of truly wasteful spending Republicans won’t cut.
Let’s not mince words. The Republican party, from the base to the apex, is chock-full of pious, parochial philistines. Art is often transgressive and thus offensive to the pious, the parochial and the philistine. Republicans want to tear down the NEA for sponsoring such blasphemous works as Andres Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ.’ (Photo shown at top) The Taliban in Afghanistan literally did tear down a massive and magnificent work of Buddhist sculpture for being un-Islamic.
The crusade against science involves the same three “p’s” (piety, parochialism, and philistinism) that drives the thrust against the humanities but here material, economic interests are the main drivers.
Yes, most people who don’t believe in evolution are Republican. More crucially, those who profit big from polluting the planet are mainly Republican too, and often among the biggest donors to the Republican/right-wing cause. They express disbelief at the careful and copious science behind the thesis of human-produced global climate change mainly because they don’t want to believe it.
These are people for whom money talks and the scientific method sucks. One of them is Donald Trump. The fate of future generations on the planet, especially in the poorest places on earth, today hangs far too much on people like him. Why should an ignoramus billionaire in America worry about any of this?
The good news is that the scientists, less schooled in, and less comfortable with, political combat than the artists, made their voices heard last Saturday on the streets of the United States and all over the world. GOP politicians have been insulting the intelligence and the integrity of scientists for too long, and now they are cutting funds for politically-inconvenient science as well. Finally, the scientists are pushing back.
Science and art, not real estate development, are the greatest accomplishments of our species. Speaking metaphorically, who doesn’t find the music of Bach or Beethoven or Einstein’s world-shattering equation sublime is missing a bit of the genetic code that defines homo sapiens.
The Trump-Republican campaign against the arts and sciences can be described only as barbaric. On the eve of World War I, the great Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario warned France about “the barbarians (the Germans) facing Lutece” (the Latin name for France). The barbarians did invade, but eventually they were driven out, albeit at an enormous human cost to French, German, British, and American alike.
Eventually, we too shall beat back the barbarians, but at what cost?
For the barbarians among us are not foreign invaders. They are our barbarians, part of the body of American society and thus as difficult to extirpate without undue harm as a malignant tumor.
