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Today, Jesse Singal wrote an opinion for the New York Times where he argued that Trump defunding youth gender research was a bad thing, despite the terrible research coming out of that part of science. He thinks that reform is in order, not slash-and-burn practices. In my opinion, there is definitely enough research out there by now that you can confidently release something like a Cass Report without anything new. Certainly, funding bad actors makes no sense, but to me, reform is little gain, and even a good new study must follow around minors that have gone through the unethical transgender science grinder.
It reminds me of an (unpopular) opinion Trace shared the other day on Twitter regarding the axing of funds for museums and libraries. Even if anthropology is 99% leftist, well, the institutions belong to those who show up, so right wingers just need to get in there and fix it themselves. While I appreciated that stance as it related to conservative law organizations, and as it related to Twitter when left-wingers were leaving the site en masse, I find it pretty distasteful to give up anthropology to positive feedback loops, and let our history become a mockery when it is within one's power to just raze it.
Deus Ex took a look at this perspective. Spoilers for Deus Ex:General Carter, after the UNATCO plot is exposed, decides to stay within the organization, because institutions are only as good as the people that comprise them. Later in the game, you see him in the Vandenburg compound. He has given up on his idea of reform and joined the resistance.
I'm going to guess most of this forum disagrees with Trace and Jesse on this matter in pretty much the same way that I do. Can you name any areas in government or other organizations where you do agree with them?
The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance. They can't or won't produce knowledge and they distrust anyone who does. They don't want to become librarians or museum curators or anthropologists. The best they can manage is the occasional court historian or renegade economist, chosen more for partisan loyalty than academic achievement and quite likely to be a defector. The effect is this bizarre arrangement where rather than produce conservative thought, they are demanding liberals think conservative thoughts for them.
Occasionally rightists will plead weakness to rationalize their lack of intellectual productivity, but this is nonsense. They have had plenty of money, plenty of political power, and a broad base of support. Unless we accept the Trace-Hanania thesis that they literally just lack human capital, we're left with the conclusion that the right-wing withdrawal from intellectual spaces is a sort of distributed choice. Razing institutions because you can't be bothered to make your case is just barbarism.
That only works if the right-wing barbarian agrees that there is any value left in those institutions. I’m not sure modern anthropology departments or modern hollywood clear that bar.
Empty museums are depressing. Close most of them, sell all the old coins, keep the mona lisa. If the people then clamor for more museums, just buy the stuff back. And if these so-called ‘public goods’ are only enjoyed by the rich, , like opera, let them pay. The rich and cultured get a perverse kick out of having the poor pay for the very class markers used to exclude them.
Opera! Now this is in my wheelhouse. Your aside is ill informed.
If you’re an American, public/government funding for opera is truly negligible. There is significant state funding for opera in Europe. But Verdi is to Italy what Havel is to the Czech Republic what Yeats is to Ireland, and what rather tragically Wagner was to the Reich, so there’s more of a cultural cause for continued funding. Gershwin, Glass and Adams, for all their merits, aren’t exactly important to our nation-state the way Thomas Paine was.
Opera was a popular art form heading into the middle of the 20th Century, and experienced a commercial boom in America coming out of WW2. But by the 1960s there were warnings that ticket revenues wouldn’t cover expenses. Now, here in the States, it’s about 50/50 on tickets versus philanthropy, with a sliver of NEA money and the like tossed in.
The poor are not paying for opera in America. The truly rich are picking up half the tab for the middle and upper-middle class. And this is after the culling and consolidation of operas and symphonies in America that started in the 1990s, and was twice accelerated by the housing crisis and pandemic lockdowns.
Every opera company in America, sans one, uses the more economical stagione system, staging one, discrete production at a time. Only the Met in New York has the financial capital to operate as a repertory company, with concurrent productions, whereas this is far more common in the state-funded companies of Europe. That NYC is America’s financial capitol is not coincidence.
Now, if I may gripe as a Conservative, because the art form is so dependent on philanthropy — contrasted against that the Magic Flute was a blasphemous production sung in German as opposed to the proper Italian and staged in a common theater, and the Golden Age and Dark Age of opera both refer to its commercial heyday in Italy where there was so much demand that mounds of forgotten schlock was produced — in America today it’s MFA holders who control commissions and grants, and they award these to fellow MFA holders who know how to write for MFA holders, and the art form is now trapped in an artistic ghetto. A beautiful melody, or asks of virtuosity are deemed common and vulgar by MFA holders, and thus they further confine opera to a commercial decline.
I’ve made converts of friends and acquaintances with recordings of Pavarotti‘s Nessun Dorma, and YouTube clips of Donizetti‘s Cheti, Cheti/Aspetta duet. Anything current? Sadly, no.
Mozart genuinely was a genius, as he made sung German tolerable to listen to 😁 For more converting people, Soave sia il vento, no matter what production design shenanigans, is ethereally beautiful.
And Dante wrote The Divine Comedy in the common Italian of his time, not in proper Latin. "High culture" often only becomes "high" after gently marinating for a couple of centuries.
Terry Pratchett in his novel Maskerade made the point that if you want to make money out of people standing around on stage singing, you write musicals. Opera is a machine for turning money into beautiful music and nothing else. That's why it will always need funding, either public, private, or a mix of both. Unhappily as with all high art, the 'you need to be Educated to Appreciate it' has taken over so, as you say, public taste diverges from what the authorities deem correct, and it falls even more out of favour and needs even more propping up by donations instead of generating revenue (I have tried, and failed, to listen to an entire opera by Harrison Birtwistle).
EDIT: An online acquaintance introduced me to this 17th century piece which sounds surprisingly modern (I can see what Birtwistle is trying to do by comparison but this is more listenable) - the Cold Song from "King Arthur".
Way back, there was an Onion headline to the effect of, “Avant-Garde Director Shocks Audiences With In-Period Staging.”
The recontextualization can occasionally be done well. I enjoyed the 2022 Salzburg Festival’s production of the Magic Flute as bedtime story come to life.
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