The comedian’s late-career epiphany and the nonprofit arts sector begs the question: what happens when you eliminate “hope?”
We’re rounding the turn and heading into the home stretch of 2024. Your nonprofit arts organization is well into its year-end, give now while you can still get a tax deduction, do it for the children (“Won’t someone think of the children?!”), just click on the “donate” button, Christmas is coming (Christmas, for Christ’s sake!), ticket sales only cover 50% of the cost of doing business, help us reach our goal (regardless of what your goal might be), and (that golden oldie), “if we don’t raise $20 million by December 31, we’ll go out of business” campaign.
“A gift to us is a gift to hope.” Ho. Ho. Ho.
But what if we ran our nonprofit arts operations as though hope were not a part of the equation? Not “hopeless,” as in sad, woeful, or fatalistic. “Not hope,” as in though there were no such thing. After all, there’s no mention of hope in the IRS 501(C)(3) code. Among the biblical troika, only faith and charity are mentioned. And nonprofit arts organizations, especially the largest, most “venerable” ones, seem to avoid the charity part anyway.
Let’s remove, for the moment, the commercial aspect of the sector and just concentrate on what it would take for your community to be a healthier, more equitable place to live. What if all the promises of hope engendered by the art were stripped away and left to the community’s own devices?
Among those paying attention, the most important issue facing mankind right now is climate change. But, as the title of this particular column indicates, the issue plagues mankind, not the planet. This planet will be spinning along for billions more years. So when you hear people begging you to “save the planet,” you can look at them with confidence and know that they’re really asking, “Shouldn’t we save the people on the planet?” Shouldn’t we?
Should we?
Drill down on that one: if you believe that yes, people are worth saving, is it because you personally don’t want to die? Or are all people worth saving? Taken further, would you feel anything if all the people with whom you’ll never come into contact suddenly disappeared and you never heard about their disappearance? And what if you had heard and knew that you and everyone you know would be spared, would you feel devastated? Momentarily paranoid? Briefly sad?
What if we eliminated hope from the equation?
If you choose to eliminate hope from your belief system, this is not a difficult question. That same belief system has given you a relatively arbitrary notion that things should be ideal. Hope is the “opiate of the masses,” because without hope, there is no religion.
There is some disagreement among scientists as to whether hope exists in any other living thing on earth. To me, some confuse hope with expectation, anticipation, or the pursuit of happiness and bend the question toward hope being a universal activity. However, when your dog is waiting by the door, is he/she really hopeful, or merely happy to have your company, hungry, and ready to go outside? Love is real, but is love hope?
Promoting hope as a primary goal will doom your arts organization to irrelevance. You can’t eat, sleep in, or gain equity with hope; there has to be action. The continuing, dogmatic treatment of the arts as a panacea for all the ills of the world can only fail for charitable organizations. As Ben Davis wrote in artnet recently, the story of the 2024 election, an election that relegated those on the left are to a state of torpor and grief, is not that “hope” lost. Hope was never in the game.
[P]eople are suffering a narrative shock. The story that they had in their heads to make sense of the world has collapsed. It is similar in nature to the shock after Biden melted down onstage at the debate — very alarming on its own, but absolutely traumatic because right up until that moment, many influential voices had insisted that Biden’s mental unfitness was Republican propaganda, that he was about to school Trump. Because that was a more comforting story, a better product to sell.
— Ben Davis, artnet, November 8, 2024
Now, it’s not just that Donald Trump has triumphed. It’s that the entire Biden-era attempt to disqualify him technically over his crimes and his lies and January 6 prevented a reckoning with Trump’s actual very real popularity in 2020, when he actually did get a really massive popular vote total despite losing (and lying about losing). Focusing so much emotional energy just on emphasizing that he must be too weird, too criminal, to be acceptable to “mainstream” America — and then suddenly having to face the reality that actually he’s way more mainstream than his critics themselves… this is a stunning shock. Some people will never recover.
Trump, the soon-to-be-even-more-conservative Supreme Court, the right-wing House, the right-wing Senate are going to do a bunch of rotten things to people. They really don’t care. Their views on karma, heaven and hell, and moral turpitude line up with George Carlin’s late-in-life disillusionment. Among the millions of things they’ll do is to increase greenhouse gases past the point of no return (assuming we haven’t passed it already).
But does that matter to the most powerful (financially, at least) American nonprofit arts organizations? Do they aim to be a force for good in their communities, let alone the world? Some do. Most don’t. Those that do will be the ones remembered for, at least temporarily, contributing to a thriving community comprised of housed people, fed people, and dignity for all kinds of people.
Most of those behemoth nonprofit arts organizations don’t really care about anything past their own fundraising goals and artistic vision (whatever that is). Don’t worry. The planet is and will continue to be fine. It’s the people that will be f**ked.
It’s been a hell of a 2024. Catch you next year. – AH
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