‘I think there can’t be too many pictures and statues and works of art,’ Hyacinth broke out. ‘The more the better, whether people are hungry or not.’ Henry James, The Princess Casamassima
This week (and the next few weeks) I have been wrestling with the topic of perfectionism in moral theory. It has very important implications for how one might justify public funding for the arts, and might deal a heavy blow against such funding.
Let’s start with how economists look at the world (yes, typical of an economist to do this).
When economists consider a policy question, they look at the effects on the well-being of individuals. In garden-variety benefit-cost analysis, they will ask whether the gains to those individuals who benefit from a policy outweigh the losses to those who lose out, and will also note whether income and wealth inequalities will be made bigger or smaller. Efficiency and equity, in short. Economists are consequentialists, meaning, as you might expect, that policies are judged on their consequences. But they are a particular type of consequentialist: the only consequences that matter are the welfare of individuals. This can be called welfarism. Utilitarianism is a type of welfarism, that looks to add the sum of well-being across society. Not every economist would subscribe to utilitarianism, but welfarism is standard practice in the field.
This has an implication for arts funding: economists judge a policy of granting funds to artists and/or arts organizations, or giving “culture passes” to young people, on the basis of the effect on people’s well-being, and nothing but the effect on people’s well-being. A view that the support of classical music is important because we are morally obliged to pursue the highest levels of excellence and artistic creation in music regardless of whether people happen to notice is not welcome in this framework. Steven Wall, in his survey in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, calls such a view nonhumanistic perfectionism.
Does anybody advocate for nonhumantistic perfectionism? Nietzsche is our most famous perfectionist. Milton Babbitt, in his 1958 essay in High Fidelity, “Who Cares if you Listen?” (reportedly he did not like the title that was given to the piece, but, really, he truly seems not to care if you listen) seems to go there:
I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media, with its very real possibility of complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition. By so doing, the separation between the domains would be defined beyond any possibility of confusion of categories, and the composer would be free to pursue a private life of professional achievement, as opposed to a public life of unprofessional compromise and exhibitionism.
And Clive James, in Civilization (1928), echoes Hyacinth:
Civilization requires the existence of a leisured class, and a leisured class requires the existence of slaves – of people, I mean, who give some part of their surplus time and energy to the support of others. If you feel that such inequality is intolerable, have the courage to admit that you can dispense with civilization and that equality, not good, is what you want. Complete human equality is compatible only with complete savagery.
The high arts, civilization, must be pursued regardless of whether the lower classes pay it any mind at all, even if their labour pays the price for it.
Now, we don’t hear arts advocates voice this sort of perfectionism now.
But let’s consider a milder form, a human nature perfectionism, as Wall would have it. Here, we have an advocacy for something – let’s stick with classical music as a running example – that enables people to move towards a personal human excellence, and in turn greater true well-being (which may be something more than simple hedonistic pleasure), even if most people do not realise it. Encouraging a love of classical music, and keeping alive a vibrant and ever-evolving form of art, confers benefits on the individual, though they may need to be nudged in this direction by a benevolent government.
Would economic analysis allow for this to be a factor in an analysis of arts policy? Not typically. In benefit-cost analysis economists take people’s preferences, gauged by how much they are willing to pay for things, as data, and, as they say, De gustibus non est disputandum. This doesn’t mean economists can’t find reasons for public funding of the arts, but they don’t usually rely on going against what people say they want right now – I’ll come back to this in a future blog post.
Economics did have a go with a version of human nature perfectionism, with the concept of merit goods. Introduced by Richard Musgrave in his Theory of Public Finance (1959), he wrote:
… a case for the satisfaction of merit wants and for interference with consumer sovereignty, narrowly defined, may derive from the role of leadership in a democratic society. While consumer sovereignty is the general rule, situations may arise, within the context of a democratic community, where an informed group is justified in imposing its decision upon others
But the concept never caught on in mainstream economics, which, you might think for better or for worse, simply takes what people are willing to pay for, no questions asked.
So, let’s broaden our scope here beyond the econosphere, and consider liberal theory in general. Consider a broad definition of liberalism that holds that individuals have the right to decide for themselves what constitutes a good life, so long as it does not involve restricting the rights of others to do the same. Can a human nature perfectionism find a home in a liberal society? In an essay I’ll eventually write about (I’m setting a lot of future tasks for myself), Ronald Dworkin asks “Can a liberal state support art?“. He answers yes, though I’m not sure awfully persuasively.
So, next week I’ll look at liberal theory old (Kant) and new-ish (Rawls) and others, and see whether there is room there for arts funding based on perfectionist goals…
But now to finish grading.
There is, of course, little public interest in supporting artistic excellence–or “perfectionism,” to use the loaded term that reveals your agenda. After all, Joe Six Pack doesn’t care about high standards in the arts, and we know we should set the standards of society according to Joe’s views. It is much more entertaining and revelatory to watch him belch the entire Pledge of Allegiance after chugging three Buds. (And I’m sure there are quite a few students at IU who share exactly that form of cultural expression.) And while we’re at it, lets get rid of the effete philosophizing of college professors. Joe isn’t interested in that either. Anyway, I’m not part of Joe’s circle, so I look forward to your future thoughts on the rarified topics you mention, even if I might not agree.
I have wondered about the adoption of the term “perfectionism”, but it is so embedded in contemporary ethics literature at this point I might as well go along. Be cautious about assuming my agenda: I am not a Rawlsian-liberal, nor one who thinks standard economic analysis has the answer to our all policy questions. For now I’m working my way through these approaches, but they are not the only approaches. What policy-makers seem to assume about Joe, at least at the moment, is that he is interested in “community” rather than artistic excellence, and that arts policy as such should be directed at community development (the arts role in this is never precisely defined) rather than artistic excellence, even if in practice many arts organizations are funded precisely because they represent artistic excellence. The next few posts I will be looking deeper into the anti-perfectionist case and whether it holds up. I appreciate your reading and commenting on these posts through the years
Looking forward to your study of these questions.
Interesting musings, but the fatal flaw of most economists is that they insist that people are rational actors and always behave in their best interest. But that’s obviously not true, as many have pointed out. I begin with the premise that the species is woefully ignorant (me, included) and, as Larry Niven tells it in Ringworld, we’re just lucky.
Given that, a liberal policy (on anything) is to place bets (investments) across the board and hope we get lucky. So, with the arts, we ought to very liberally invest because, as luck may have it, the next Shakespeare, Kahlo, Yo-Yo Ma, or Denzel Washington might just flower. Yes, we’ll get a lot of weeds—what else is new? But if we focus primarily on some notion of collective good, the calculations will always mean that the arts will lose. We’re too ignorant to know what’s good for us, but we’re smart enough to know we can get lucky. As Thornton Wilder put it in The Matchmaker via Dolly Gallagher Levi: “Money is like manure; you’ve got to spread it around to do any good.”
There is something to this: Tyler Cowen, in his book on arts funding, Good and Plenty, argues something along these lines: as an economist he is interested in what activities generate the biggest spillover effects, and he suggests it is in young artists, some of whom will be very inventive and spur many other artists to try new approaches, even if it is only a few (and we cannot tell in advance which of the young artists will have this effect).