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Is Beethoven a “Monument”?

JANUARY 2, 1987

 

Conservatives raised on libertarian principles have long since remarked that any invasion of the sacred No Trespassing sign puts you on the slippery slope toward collectivist capitulation. People argue endlessly the question whether Ronald Reagan has restored conservative principles, and both positions can be taken with cogency. Yes, he has caused people to look government gift horses in the mouth; no, he has not reversed the great trends of the century that have given more and more responsibility to government, less and less to society. You will have noticed that recent talk about how to handle the financial crisis of college students goes forward almost exclusively in terms of how much more federal aid of one kind or another is needed. A generation ago there was no such thing as federal aid to a college student.

The great guidelines inherited from the political philosophy of Adam Smith called on government to look after the national defense, administer justice, and protect national monuments. Abraham Lincoln marched us a huge step forward (or, better, backward) when he suggested that government should also undertake anything the private sector could not undertake, or not undertake as well. And Catholic social policy gave us the principle of “subsidiarity,” which states that nothing should be done by the public sector that can be done by the private sector, and nothing by a higher echelon of government that can be done by a lower echelon (subsidiarity is a position most Catholic bishops have either forgotten or wish that history would forget).

It is certainly true that we live in a mixed economy, and I find myself inquisitively exploring the mandate given by Adam Smith to preserve national monuments. The mind was propelled thataway when in an idle moment during a holiday I searched the wave band of a portable radio in quest of something to listen to.

There were between twenty and twenty-five options at that location, none of them relaying classical music. It required only a little Cartesian Geländesprung to alight at my conclusion: Isn’t it the responsibility of the government to maintain monuments that are man-made, as well as those given us by nature? Nobody argues against the government’s maintaining Yellowstone National Park. No one argues against the government’s maintaining the Lincoln Memorial, and only about half of us argue against the government’s maintaining Hyde Park.

Isn’t it, by the same reasoning, a responsibility of government to maintain (to limit oneself to a single poet) Shakespeare? Happily, there isn’t anything for the government to do to maintain Shakespeare, since we do not own Stratford-upon-Avon. And isn’t it the responsibility of government to maintain (once again, to name only a single artist) Beethoven?

The cavil that Beethoven doesn’t need looking after since his records sell by the trainload isn’t at all satisfying to someone spelunking through the radio channels in search of Beethoven. Yes, you will find him in Chicago, and New York, and San Francisco, and several other oases. But you do not find him in many places, and you are entitled, it is my thesis, to ask whether the government is therefore doing its duty.

We remember that not so long ago, when the wavelength that became television’s Channel 13 was available in the New York area, the Federal Communications Commission put great pressure on sellers and buyers to make it an outlet for educational television. Why not hold out one channel for classical music in every part of the world subject to U.S. airwave supervision?

One hesitates, in any exploration of political theory, to cite Switzerland because Switzerland is so heavily congested with paradoxes (e.g., everyone must have a firearm in his house and nobody ever gets shot), but in that very free society you can order for a buck a month or less a six-channel music box attached to your telephone, and lo! one of those channels gives you, eighteen hours a day, classical music, nonstop.

I doubt if anyone has gotten around to calculating whether the monthly dollar that comes in pays the expense of the six channels that reach out to you. But it is such a civilizing amenity, and so eminently defensible under the aegis of protecting the monuments, is it not? Who says that Mount Rushmore is In, but J. S. Bach is Out? Isn’t Adam Smith a living instrument, like the Constitution? Do we need a Warren Court to ordain that it is a constitutional responsibility of the U.S. Government to make it possible for us to hear Beethoven on our vacations?

Had enough?