Much Ado About Something: "The welfare state of the intellect"

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY that a long-dead Elizabethan playwright hits the headlines here at home. Creative New Zealand's decision to defund (or not to defund) a high-school Shakespeare competition spiralled into a debate into what Creative New Zealand should be funding and promoting. Competition supporter Terry Sheat argued a public enquiry must be held into what and how Creative New Zealand goes about its funding choices:

If I were to mark CNZ’s funding criteria and outcomes against the duties under the legislation, I would be forced to give them a failing grade. I wouldn’t give them funding. They are not delivering to the proper scope of their mission statement. Diversity is not diversity of “New Zealand art”, it is diversity of all art in New Zealand, with freedom of artistic expression for all. That is literally in the statute.
    In the case of Shakespeare Globe Centre NZ, funding was terminated primarily if not solely because Shakespeare is, to quote CNZ’s assessment, “located within a canon of imperialism” and not “relevant to a decolonising Aotearoa in the 2020s and beyond.” Vincent O’Sullivan dismissed this as nonsense in his letter published last week in the Otago Daily Times, describing it as “a breathtaking absurdity from a government body whose brief is to promote excellence in the arts.” An editorial in Stuff said that “the CNZ assessment has exposed the obvious problems that come with interpreting art through the narrow lens of national identity and politics.”

And then before you knew it, everyone was debating Creative New Zealand's funding criteria, how it should best promote "Aotearoan art," and whether or not Shakespeare was an "imperialist."[1]

Which rather starts where the argument should end. To me, it’s not an argument about how Creative New Zealand's bureaucrats should choose whom to fund in order to promote the latest fashionable ideals; it's whether these bureaucrats should have the power (and the money) to do that at all! The problem is not how Creative New Zealand goes about handing out money, in other words: it’s that Creative New Zealand hands out any money at all.

And here the issue here isn’t primarily the amounts that the establishment elects to pays out; it’s the effect of what that money buys: which (like its more quotidian companion, the Public Interest Journalism Fund) is intellectual conformity.

You may not realise it (and the dullards at the myopic Free Speech Union almost certainly won't), but this is a free-speech issue -- but not in the way you probably think.

WERE YOU AWARE THAT there is more than one way to curtail free speech? Government organisations who censor speech or expression are one way. Government organisations who promote it, like Creative New Zealand. are another.

I’m going to repost a piece from 2006 to make this point…

This is a post about free speech.  
It is not a piece about outrageous assaults on free speech committed in Paris last month, or by government censorship offices, or by successive NZ governments keen to curtail criticism during election periods.  
    No, this is a post about a different kind of attack on free speech. One more subtle, and no less chilling. One in which artists, musicians, scriptwriters, screenwriters, television producers and television production companies are kept afloat by government cash and government grants from Creative New Zealand and Te Mangai Paho and New Zealand on Air or their proxies, or in which many scientists are kept afloat by government grants or by employment in government research projects.  
    The direct result of this is what Ayn Rand once called ‘The Establishing of an Establishment’²: not the sponsorship of creative souls to toe a government line, but a more insidious kind of greyness inciting would-be creatives to to a culturalline embodied by those doling out and reviewing these government grants.

    What's the problem, you might ask?  
Well, think about this. There is more than one kind of censorship. In fact, I'd suggest to you that there are two. The first and most straightforward method of censorship is for a government to ban speech that they don't like -- that's just what National and Labour and the Greens and Gareth Morgan want to do at elections, and I hope you lot feel disgusted enough about that to do something about it. The second form of censorship is one that Ayn Rand called "the establishing of an establishment," and it is even more insidious and no less chilling: 

Governmental repression is [not] the only way a government can destroy the intellectual life of a country... There is another way: governmental encouragement.

That's right. Rather than simply banning opponents or banning expression, this form of censorship is much more subtle: it encourages expression (or scientific research) that is deemed acceptable, and by implication discourages anyone interested in career advancement from engaging in possibly unacceptable expression or research, . 

Governmental encouragement does not order men to believe that the false is true: it merely makes them indifferent to the issue of truth or falsehood.

It makes them sensitive instead to what is deemed acceptable, and thereby lucrative -- it encourages and makes lucrative that very form of sensitivity – it invites all those lucred up by the process to band together against whoever they perceive as their ‘other’ [and no better target for that than the phoney shibboleth they call 'neo-liberalism'].  
    This is what Rand referred to as "the welfare state of the intellect," and the result is as destructive as that other, more visible welfare state: the setting up of politicians, bureaucrats and their minions (the establishment) as arbiters of thinking and taste and ideology; the freezing of the status quo; a staleness and conformity, and an unwillingness to speak out – what Frank Lloyd Wright once called “an average upon an average by averages on behalf of the average” such that in interrogating any one modern artist you would get essentially the same answers as from any other -- in short "the establishing of an establishment" to which new entrants in a field realise very quickly they are all but required to either conform or go under. 

If you talk to a typical business executive or college dean or magazine editor [or spin doctor or opposition leader], you can observe his special, modern quality: a kind of flowing or skipping evasiveness that drips or bounces automatically off any fundamental issue, a gently non-committal blandness, an ingrained cautiousness toward everything, as if an inner tape recorder were whispering: "Play it safe, don't antagonize--whom?--anybody."

If you've ever wondered where this "special, modern quality" comes from, this is perhaps one answer -- through the intellectual mediocrity advanced by this less well-known form of censorship -- a censorship of encouragement. It's a much less obvious and much more insidious method of censorship, and no less chilling for that. 

The [US] Constitution forbids a governmental establishment of religion, properly regarding it as a violation of individual rights. Since a man's beliefs are protected from the intrusion of force, the same principle should protect his reasoned convictions and forbid governmental establishments in the field of thought.

Think about it.

NOW, IT SOUNDS LIKE good news that the Shakespeare funding has been reinstated, for which everyone and his leather codpiece are praising the Prime Minister's intervention

And I applaud the establishment luvvies and others who came out in defence of one of my favourite playwrights. Good for them.

I'm also happy that for a week or so we've been discussing his work. 

But why should you or I other folk be forced to pay, for the most part, for theatre (or art) you don't like. Especially when this process of bureaucratically-selected funding -- bureaucrats choosing what to fund based on what best fits the government's fashionable cultural concerns -- constitutes the self-same censorship of encouragement New Zealand is presently enjoying with the Public Interest Journalism Fund.

By my own literary and theatrical standards, it looks like the restatement this week was a small win. From the larger standpoint however, the amounts involved are but a tiny pimple one the huge arse of the government-promoted cultural establishment.

If we understand how that whole arts and literary establishment has become so comfortably established, we might feel more uneasy not just about the way this sausage is sliced - but that it's there to be sliced at all.

* * * * * 

1. You would have thought one look at Henry V would answer that one.
2. Cresswell (1996), reposted with the generous permission of Dave Perkins.
3. From "The Establishing of an Establishment," republished in her book Philosophy: Who Needs It?, from which the otherwise unreferenced quotes above derive.
Highly recommended if you want to get to grips with this subtle form of censorship.

[Pics from The Spinoff]