"Is it ethical to fund the arts while children are starving in the streets?"
The question was asked by a local philanthropic group and I struggled, not with my response, but with trying to understand why the question was necessary to ask.
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When my son was less than a year old in September 1977, NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft with the goal of photographing Jupiter and Saturn, an impossible 887 million miles away. Against all odds it accomplished that mission and twelve years later, traveling at 38,000 mph, it passed the orbits of Neptune and Pluto and entered deep space. As of December 1, 2025 Voyager was 15.7 billion miles from our sun, and still going. But the Voyager also had another mission. Aboard it is the Golden Record, a time-capsule of the human spirit encrypted in binary code on a twelve-inch gold-plated copper disc in the hope of encountering life beyond our solar system and informing them of who we are. The Golden Record contains greetings in fifty-four languages and one from the humpback whales. It contains images of life on Earth, a human brain scan, a few scientific equations, and a representative selection of our planet’s sounds, from an erupting volcano to human footsteps, children’s laughter, and a kiss. But it also contains something else. Ninety minutes of music. From Bach and Beethoven to a Bulgarian folk song, fully three quarters of this message about who we are is music. NASA scientists believed that more than mathematics and scientific formulas, more than recorded brain waves and chemical equations, music is what we are. Which raises the question; Is music something that we make or something that we are made of? The poet and physicist Alan Lightman saw music as “a language for the exhilaration of being alive.” That is the message of Voyager. The math, the science, the physics, and chemistry that launched the spacecraft across the universe were all just the necessary means to carry the real message of who we are. It will be 40,000 years before the Voyager spacecraft makes a close approach to any other planetary system beyond our own. How many generations are there in 40,000 years? The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there is intelligent life in the universe and only if, within the unfathomable vastness of time and space, their paths happen to intersect. 40,000 years is a long time to wait for a chance encounter. Only love is that foolish. So, when I think about the meaning and intent of Voyager’s Golden Record I keep circling back to the matter of its intended recipient, and it seems to me that the hypothetical addressee, being an abstraction and a hope, makes the Golden Record more akin to a love letter or a long form prayer. Is this what music is? Is this what art is? Is this what we truly have to offer? In many ancient cultures art, music, dance, medicine, and religion are inseparable, all part of a single communion with the divine and each other. It is only recently that we’ve isolated them into separate disciplines. It is only recently that we developed the concept of ‘science’. Lost and adrift in this universe on this pale blue dot of a planet in a turbulent cosmic sea waiting and hoping to make a connection with someone else, the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet and mirrors the longing for connection we spend our life pursuing on this earth. Music and the arts are how we connect with each other, how we say, “Listen to me, and I’ll listen to you.” This is primal. Music is how we lull our children to sleep, celebrate our weddings, remember our dead, honor our gods. How many love songs do you know? Music and the arts allow us to imagine, to travel through time and across space, to feel and experience the full breadth of ourselves, and to step into the mind of another, to feel what it is to live inside another and, in the process, enlarge ourselves beyond the borders of selfhood, into the vaster fields of mutual understanding and empathy. If we make contact with life on another planet we can explain to them that an imperfect world is all we’ve managed to create in our 200,000 years or so on this planet, that we still have poverty and illness, we have strife and inequality and children starving in the streets, but we also have hope and poetry, art, music, and song to comfort us, to help us connect to others, to help us make sense of the world, to occasionally exalt us and keep us moving forward. There is an extraordinary poem by Hannah Fries titled, “Let the Last Thing Be Song”, that begins like this, “Aren’t we all still quivering like tuning forks with the shock of being, the shock of being seen?” And ends this way: “When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold. Don’t you? Doesn’t the universe, with its loosening warp and weft, still unspool its symphony? Sing to me — please — and I will sing for you as all unravels, as time continues past the final beat of the stutter inside your chest. Harmonize, at the edge of that horizon, with the black hole’s fathomless B-flat.” As Rebecca West reminds us in her 1941 masterwork, Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, “Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence is a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.” Deprive your children that, and deprive them of what it means to be alive.
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Bill Sheehan Ajijic, Mexico - December, 2025