Philosophy Talk and the Ignorant NEH Panelist: A Rant!

Kenneth Taylor

I don’t usually rant.   I fancy myself a calm deliberate guy.   Not only do I play a dispassionate voice of reason on the radio,  I really do try to be a dispassionate voice of reason in my every day life.   I don’t always succeed mind you.  But at least my heart’s in the right place. 

But I’ve got to get something off my chest.  And what better place to do that than on a blog.  I wish I could do it anonymously, like so many do.  But I don’t think that would work here.   So what’s my beef?

It has to do with Philosophy Talk and the National Endowment for the Humanities.   In general,  i don’t have a big problem with the NEH.  Actually,  I kind of like at least the idea of the NEH.   They’ve funded many worthwhile endeavors — some of which have materially affected my own research. 

But I do have a bone to pick with them — a bone I’d like to share with everybody who wishes Philosophy Talk well. We’ve applied to them five different times for various grants.  And five different times we’ve been turned down.  This time around, we were turned down — rejected, refused, denied  (take your pick) — for an America’s Media Makers production grant.   The grant would have given us funds to produce a special 12 part series on the Philosophical Foundations of American Democracy.   

It would have been a fun series.   We would have done each  episode in front of a live audience at various venues around the country in Town Hall Format.  Sort of a Philosophy Talk takes Democracy on the road, kind of thing. 

The 12 episodes in the series would have covered a range of Philosophical topics designed to provide the American public with a deeper understanding of the problem and prospects of Democracy in the 21st Century.  Shows  would have been clustered around four broad themes.  

One theme was called American Political Philosophies.  Under this theme we proposed to do episodes on:  (a) Rawls, Justice, and Equal Opportunity:  (b)  Communitarianism;  (c)  Libertarianism and (d)  Neo-Conservativism & The Chicago School.   

Another theme  concerned Pluralism and its Challenges and included episodes on the struggle to rewrite the narrative of American history and contemporary challenges raised by Multiculturalism.   

A third theme would have concerned the idea of an educated and informed democratic citizenry and how to achieve it.   We intended to discuss the struggle over creation and evolution, and the role of the state in determining the content of an education more generally. The fourth theme was called something like “Our Brother’s Keepers?  Individual rights and Public Responsibility.”   We would have talked about a variety of things including whether money is speech, whether corporations are really persons,  what sorts of rights and responsibilities corporations have  to promote the social good.  We would also have done an episode on  religious freedom, religious conflict and  religious tolerance and the role of the state vs civil society in mediating these.  

Stuff like that.  Stuff that’s at the core of trying to make democracy work in the 21st century. You could think this wouldn’t make great radio.   You could also think that  even if it would make great radio, there isn’t any audience for it.  You could even think that somehow the Philosophy Talk team was inadequate to the task.  

But it’s hard to imagine being told that these topics were  “strange”  and “confused”  But get this.  That’s just what one of the evaluators for the NEH did say.  I kid you not.  Here’s a direct quote: 

The intellectual content of this proposal is strange. The philosophical foundations of American democracy are to be found in the philosophers that influenced the founding fathers as they created the Constitution. The foundations are not to be found in John Rawls and the Chicago Schoo. You could probably solve this problem by giving the project a new title, something like “philosophical ideas that influence American culture.”

It is not clear what writing American history and multiculturalism have to do with philosophy–at least fundamental philosophy.
 
American education doesn’t seem to be a philosophical question, although the founding fathers excepted an educated and informed citizenry. This seems to be a special question, rather than a foundational question.
 
Individual rights and public responsibility is an interesting question to which philosophers may have much to contribute, but it’s not clear how this is the foundation of democracy.
 
It seems to me that the topics to be considered are rather traditional philosophical topics and it may be much more important to understand (even in philosophical terms) the processes that actually move and shake the country. It might be more important to deal with “the predator state” than with democracy, the public good, or education.
Let’s just call this panelist, Panelist #4 — cause that’s how he/she is referred to in the materials we got back from the NEH explaining why our proposal was not fit to fund.   (Frankly, evaluator # 4 if you read this blog,  I wish you’d have courage enough to try and defend this dribble in a public forum.)  
Now I can accept rejection.  Believe me in both the businesses I am in — radio and Academia — one gets used to rejection and develops a thick skin pretty quickly.  If you don’t, you just  go crazy.  So rejection is not the point.   I can deal with rejection.  Really!  I can!

But what I find  unfathomable is that anybody so ignorant could possibly be allowed to evaluate proposals of any kind for  the NEH.  Evaluator number 4 writes as if  philosophical thinking about the justification of the democratic political state began and ended in the 16th and 17th centuries, that nothing said or done since then adds to our understanding of the foundations of democracy, as if the founding fathers delivered to us our current democratic polity, and its complete philosophical justification, whole cloth.

I certainly wish Evaluator #4 would tell that to the hundreds or thousands of  scholars currently writing books and articles about the foundations of democracy.  He/she should tell them that it was all already said by Locke and Montesquieu. They should just stop wasting paper and killing trees. 
 
Just to carry on with the rant a tiny little bit more.   Again,  you might think the topics uninteresting, but to say that  “writing American history and multiculturalism”  have nothing to do with philosophy or the foundations of democracy is, well, extraordinarily ignorant again.     Not just we Americans, but peoples around the world, are faced with burning questions about whether and how there can be a shared democratic polity among people who are more or less divided and at odds with one another.   The question is one about what Philosophers like to call  “reasonable pluralism.”  To be sure, the problem of developing a philosophical defense of a reasonable pluralism is indeed a problem with which our Founding Fathers, in their great but incomplete wisdom,  were hardly seized.  In their world   many, many voices were silenced, oppressed, etc.   But of course  the 20th century was massively seized with the problem of achieving a reasonable pluralism.  And no doubt the 21st century will also be.  Frankly,  it’s hard for me to see what could be a more urgent topic of discussion for a radio program that purports to bring the resources of philosophy to greater public attention.
 
I’m  almost done with my rant. I swear. Indeed, I’m feeling calmer already. But I can’t let this go without standing up for John Rawls and defending him against the claim that his work has nothing to do with the Philosophical Foundations of Democracy.
 
But on second thought.  I don’t have to do that.  A former US President already did that.  I cite no lesser authority than former President William Jefferson Clinton, who awarded Rawls the National Humanities Medal in 1999.  I quote in full below  Clinton’s citation of Rawls:

THE PRESIDENT: John Rawls is perhaps the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century. In 1971, when Hillary and I were in law school, we were among the millions moved by a remarkable books he wrote, “A Theory of Justice,” that placed our rights to liberty and justice upon a strong and brilliant new foundation of reason.

Almost singlehandedly, John Rawls revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy with his argument that a society in which the most fortunate helped the least fortunate is not only a moral society, but a logical one. Just as impressively, he has helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy itself.

Ladies and gentlemen, Margaret Rawls will accept the medal on behalf of her husband. 

Take that evaluator #4,  whoever you are.
 
We don’t have much hope of changing the NEH’s mind. I’m sure that if we apply a sixth time,  we’ll get turned down a sixth time.     Plus,  I suppose everyone — even someone as  ignorant as evaluator #4 — is entitled to his/her opinion.   But I don’t have to be happy that someone  so manifestly out of his/her depth sits in judgment of proposals to the NEH.  Do I? 
 
If I thought it would do any good,  I’d urge all right-thinking Philosophy Talk fans everywhere to write to the  Senior Program Officer for the Public Programs division of the NEH to urge that the Evaluator #4 on proposal TR50035,  be barred, on grounds of sheer ignorance,  from ever evaluating an NEH proposal again. 
 
But I’m not that bitter or vindictive.   I’m really not.   And rejection doesn’t bother me — much.
 
UPDATE:  Somebody pointed out that I left out the parts where panelist 4 (and also another panelist) call our proposal “confused.”   But that’s worth quoting too. So here is panelist 4’s overall conclusion: 

The discussion convinced me that the content was confused and not terribly important to understanding democracy. 

Another panelist,  who was initially more favorably disposed to our proposal ended up confused too (and lowered our score):

Still confused on the content — what is the role on the philosophy in the program? Are we learning philosophical approaches? Or basic philosophical ideas? How philosophy can help us in the present?

I have to admit that the last one really gets me.  Is there supposed to be some conflict between learning philosophical approaches, basic philosophical ideas, and showing that philosophy can be applied to present social problems?   How else would one imagine that we might go about trying to present philosophy to a non-philosophical audience?   Seriously,  would it even be possible to do one of these things without doing the other two?   Imagine that we tried to teach philosophical approaches without teaching philosophical ideas.  How would that even work?   And suppose we taught approaches and ideas,  but didn’t try to show how philosophy can help us in the present. Then who would care?   Or suppose we tried to illustrate that philosophy had application to present problems and situations,  but we never said what a philosophical idea is or didn’t try to show how philosophers approach problems.
 
In short this statement is sophomoric babble that shows as much seriousness of thought as one might expect from a casual conversation in a bar over too many beers.   That it is presented as some sort of criticism of our proposal is just astounding, utterly astounding.   That such nonsense could be utter as part of the NEH’s supposedly “rigorous”  evaluation process is, well, both infuriating and depressing.

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