A Plan to Support the Pacific Arts and Sciences in the United States

Mr. Lang Makes a Bet

Eugene M. Lang, a New York businessman made a deal with a graduating class of the Harlem grammar school he attended as a child. Graduate from high school, he said, and he would send them to college. He hedged the bet. He provided tutors and mentors, but more importantly he provided them cultural experiences — tickets. His mentors took the children to the museums and art galleries, the theater, the opera and the symphony; field trips to the zoo and the botanical gardens were also included.

Cultural Amenities

He provided the cultural amenities any well thinking middle class family would provide its own children. The success rate: 66% of the class qualified for college entrance and even one youngster in jail did the high school equivalency. Mr. Lang's experiment demonstrated beyond all doubt that art and cultural activities are the substance of a successful life.

The Arts and Sciences are Blood and Guts

The arts and sciences are not extracurricular activities that add interest to and enliven one's life — they are the blood and guts of one's life. Education feeds on the arts and sciences and cultural activities. Art and sciences and cultural activities feed on education; together they make a life. No matter what the occupational goals, or the desired careers, art and cultural activities fill the interstices of our lives with the experiences and in sights that make life knowable interpretable, ascertainable, attainable, desirable.

Theater of Life

Actors in a children's theater in the heart of the Washington, DC ghetto play to full houses of problem children. The performances are ad hoc. "What kind of problems do you have?" asks the moderator. The children volunteer problems: family problems, drug problems, school problems, street problems. The moderator picks a problem and one or more of the cast of six professional actors act out the problem and its possible consequences. This theater of life is a scientific laboratory where children have the opportunity to experiment with life in non-threatening or dangerous ways. They pose problems and the actors model the problems just like the computer models the flight of a space ship. The actors create paradigms the children can understand. The children learn the solutions to difficult problems by watching a play.

Learn to Read by Reading Shakespeare?

A children's theater in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn signs up would-be thespians for after-school activities in the theater. One little catch: to get a part the child must be able to read it. Learn to read by playing a part in Shakespeare? Why not?

Art Models the World

Art is not part of our life. Art is our life. Our homes, our neighbor hood, our town, nature, the buildings, the utensils of our kitchen, our clothes, our cars; the books and pictures on our shelves and walls, if we are fortunate enough to have them, are art. Art is the way the brain models the world in order to understand it. Art is mature and nature is art. Artists' and writers' insights into life mirror their experiences for us and we in turn can see ourselves in the mirror they provide for us. They provide us the glass with which to see nature.

Our Own Museum

Nature study and art are the door and window of our world and our lives. Each of us lives in the museum of our life. The family photo album, the souvenirs of last year's vacation, the collection of stamps, pressed leaves and flowers, coins, china, fish tanks, dolls, paperweights, rock and mineral collections, lithographs, etchings, paintings, books, household plants, prints, maps, even our furniture, and kitchen appliances, garden tools are artifacts in the museum of our life. When we go to the art gallery or museum we are looking at world class paradigms of what we have in our own homes. The restoration of Louis XIV's bed chamber in Versailles is a preeminent bedroom with tons of gold gilt, but it is a bedroom. It reflected his life as our rooms reflect our life. The glass flowers in a Harvard museum are the epitome of the glass blower's art. The result—scientific reproduction of common every day flowers. We can have Van Gogh's sunflowers any time we want them. We merely have to put some fresh cut sunflowers in a vase in a sunny window of our home.

A Summer Day Without Clouds

To look at art or nature as something apart from our daily lives is to breath an atmosphere with scant oxygen. To consider art or nature for only those who can afford it is to induce sensory deprivation that robs people of their rightful place in the universe. It places them in a night sky without stars or a summer day without clouds. It produces depauperate lives in a mean world. Depriving people of art or nature deprives them of their humanity, and reduces their opportunity to contribute to our cultural well being. They lose their opportunity to live a full life and society loses their creativity.

The Humane Life

The arts and sciences are not adjuncts to the good life, or interesting extracurricular activities, or an entertainment; the arts and sciences are animal life becoming human life and human life becoming humane life, ignorance becoming understanding, darkness becoming light, bigotry becoming tolerance, hate becoming compassion, indifference becoming love.

The Bottom Line

Getting back to Mr. Lang's experiment. What did it cost? To add the arts and sciences to otherwise deprived lives in Harlem cost $400/child/year. The arts and sciences (and the additional attention from tutors and mentors) made winners out of losers—tax-payers out of welfare recipients. Art and science, like education, are not a cost of doing business. Art and science like education are an investment in people. They are an investment in our society and nation. These investments insure our political and economic hegemony. They place us as a nation among other nations and determine what our lifestyle and standard of living will be.

Let Them Study Nature

Konrad Lorenz, the highly acclaimed author of, "On Aggression," in a valedictory comment said the most we can do for our children is to provide them with the opportunity to study nature. In his book he says, "Expert teaching of biology is the one and only foundation on which really sound opinions about mankind and its relationship to the universe can be built."

Children and the Environment

The study of nature is the first and most readily accessible interaction children have with their environment. As pre-literates, they eat it, smell it, touch it, taste it, and generally whet their curiosities in direct action with the living world. Their relations to siblings, pets, plants and animals, birds and insects of the garden form the early and lasting associations with the living world.

Budding Taxonomists

Learning the names of living objects, distinguishing harmful from harmless species, flies and spiders, rats and squirrels makes each child a budding taxonomist and ecologist. The mental curiosity that is stimulated by the immediate and proximate living world, results in artists, astrophysicists, engineers, chemists, musicians, and all the rest of human activity, where curiosity, wonder and amazement are the ingredients to apprehension and utilization of knowledge. It is with nature that the child is first immersed into a world of question, inquiry, scrutiny, query and doubt which leads to challenge, confrontation, and discovery. It is in the enlightened interaction with nature that the child comes to the self-realization of being human.

A Humane Environment

The costs of incarceration in a minimum security prison are between $20,000 and $40,000 per year—a maximum security prison between $40,000 and $80,000. We as a society can pay to keep criminals in jail, or we can invest in proper housing, nutrition, environment and education. At every step of the way the arts and sciences are integral to creating and maintaining a humane environment — a humane society. Supporting the arts and sciences increases our worth as individuals, as a society and nation.

Amenities and Productivity

Corporations have long since learned that amenities—social amenities—have a direct effect on productivity. Our ability to compete locally, nationally and internationally is as dependent upon our support of the arts and sciences as it is in our support of education or technology. The study of art and nature allows each of us to become sentient individuals.

We Need More Than Miserly Support

We as a nation have been miserly in our support of the pacific arts and sciences, and we are failing to reap the benefits therefrom. For too long the arts and sciences have been seen as the province of the few instead of the many. For too many people the arts and sciences have become something they can live without. All of this results from our failure to see the basic role the arts and sciences play in our individual lives and in our society and nation and our failure to see support of the arts and sciences as an investment in our personal lives and the collective future of the nation.

Cultural Wealth

Each generation receives an inheritance of cultural wealth to which it must add its own special flavor and pass on to future generations. As we have received cultural wealth from our forbearers we must add to that cultural wealth for our children and our children's children. As a nation we can and should do much more. We are squandering our commonwealth senselessly, shamefully, when we should thoughtfully tax ourselves to run the business of the nation.

Unalienable Rights

The Institute for domestic Tranquility (IdT) is dedicated to the promotion of the pacific arts and sciences. Further, the IdT asserts that we all have unalienable rights among which is a right to an equal share of the commonwealth. IdT is dedicated to the wise use of the commonwealth, i.e. the public domain and the dedication of the income from the public domain to the common benefit of the people of the United States, i. e. promote the right of all Americans to an equal share of the commonwealth.

The Public Domain

The public domain includes but is not limited to the following:

• 330 million acres of land, principally in Western United States.

• The Outer Continental Shelf with all its oil and gas.

• Public water projects in the West.

• Public power projects.

• Harvestable timber on the public lands.

• Grazing rights.

• Mineral rights.

• The atmosphere (aircraft use and air reduction) and the air waves (radio and television).

• Areas covered under the Laws of the Sea and Space.

A Lot of Money

At the present time no fees are collected for the use of airspace or the use of the airwaves. The income from the public domain varies from 2 to 8 billion dollars a year. Every year—year in and year out. At present the income from the public domain is applied to the public debt. It is spent for purposes which clearly should be covered by taxes. In so using these funds, the Congress is depriving all citizens of the United States of one of their unalienable rights, i. e. an equal share of the commonwealth.

Converting Non-renewable Wealth to Renewable Wealth

It is the position of IdT that the income from the public domain, since in large part it comes from non-renewable sources (oil and gas), should be dedicated to renewable sources, and that can best be accomplished by establishing a trust fund or funds the income from which is dedicated to the common benefit of the citizens of the this and future generations of the United States.

American Heritage Trust

There is precedent for this action currently pending in the Congress. Representative Udall has introduced a bill in the House with over 130 sponsors to establish the American Heritage Trust. A similar bill has been introduced in the Senate by Senator Chaffee. The nominal amount of funding specified from the royalties from off-shore oil leasing is $1 billion. This is a good number for starters but should be increased substantially, according to the revenues from the public domain. Interest from the trust, in the case of the Udall bill, would be appropriated for outdoor recreation and other purposes. Other trust funds for other purposes should be proposed in the course of time.

An Enormous Constituency

The American Heritage Trust and other trusts to be successful will require the massive support of the citizenry. Tire general public must become the advocates through an educational program aimed at informing citizens of their rights in the public domain and the commonwealth. The general public must be organized to protect and enhance the public domain so that the wonders and bounty of nature and the largess of cultural amenities can be shared with all the citizens of the United States, not only of this but of future generations.

Sharing Curatorial Riches

An equal share of the commonwealth is an unalienable right. There is no better way this right can be expressed than by providing a culturally enriched environment for the common benefit of the people of the United States. By acting together we can demonstrate the wisdom of protecting and conserving the public domain and using the income therefrom to provide continuing natural and cultural enrichment of the nation.

We Can Seek No Less a Blessing

We the People are the sovereign. The commonwealth in the form of the public domain is our patrimony and the heritage of our children. We simply must insist that the public domain he protected and conserved and that cultural amenities flow from this source in perpetuity. We can seek no less a blessing for ourselves and our posterity.

. . . Ted Sudia . . .

© Copyright 1989
Institute for domestic Tranquility