In 1935, during the depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt unveiled the Works Progress Administration, a hugely ambitious initiative to use the economic might of the federal government to boost employment. Over the ensuing eight years, the program created paid work for millions of trained and unskilled workers, building roads, dams, schools and bridges.

Also on the payroll were tens of thousands of artists — painters, writers, composers, performing musicians, theater directors and more.

Why? Because the arts, too, are part of the nation’s critical infrastructure.

That wasn’t necessarily an easy case to make in 1935 (Roosevelt himself seems to have gone along with the arts funding angle without notable enthusiasm or interest), and it’s one that continues to face opposition in some quarters. If you regard the arts as a luxury or an optional amenity — the fuzzy bathrobe that makes life just that little bit less abrasive — then it might seem natural to ask why society at large should foot the bill.

但这是一个不稳定的前提下,我相信,一个错y one. Music, literature, dance, the visual arts — all of these activities exist right at the heart of what it means to be human. They prompt us to feel more keenly, think more deeply and respond more vigorously to the outside world. They are among the most essential and nuanced resources we have for processing the perplexities of the maelstrom that surrounds us.

And as you have surely noticed, that storm has become ever more alarming in recent years. Political developments have revealed a nation split more fiercely than most people ever imagined. Many of the civic institutions that have sustained American life — both for good and for ill — are beginning to teeter.

Perhaps most urgently, the latest bill for America’s centuries-long orgy of white supremacy is yet again coming due. Reckoning with our national race problem will be an extended, painful and arduous struggle, one that will entail attentive listening to voices that have too long been silenced or marginalized.

At a juncture like this, why would we leave any useful tools on the table? How is it possible to imagine we will get through any of thiswithoutthe arts?

There are problems ahead of us that the playwrights and painters and musicians and filmmakers will grasp more swiftly and subtly than anyone — because they have, as the phrase goes, a very particular set of skills.

The scientists will know how to deal with the raging pandemic (assuming, God willing, that we can now go back to listening to scientists). The economists are poised to weigh in on the fiscal devastation the last few years have wrought. There are social scientists and government bureaucrats trained to make systems work.

But for help in understanding what it means to live the way we live now — from the quotidian details to the overarching themes — only the arts will serve.

To talk about the arts as a tool this way may seem strangely utilitarian, especially for anyone heavily invested in the idea of “art for art’s sake.” Isn’t the whole idea of art that it stands apart from the grubby reality of the world, in its own sacred aesthetic realm?

Well, no. For one thing, there is no such realm. Art is another name for a dialogue among people. If it were truly disconnected from the concerns of humanity, why would we care about it at all?

And we know — because every one of us has experienced it in one way or another — just how potent a force art can be. We’ve all read a poem that mysteriously seemed to be addressing itself directly to us, or walked out of a movie with our grasp of an emotional situation enriched, or succumbed to the sheer wordless beauty of a dance.

These are among the blessings that any society worthy of the name owes to its members, no less than clean drinking water, safe streets or — ahem — universal health care. Not as an afterthought or a perk for the wealthy, but as a fundamental human right.

That in turn means it is incumbent on the government to lend its support. The rationale for the WPA’s arts programs may have been primarily economic (Harry Hopkins, the agency’s head, said of artists, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people”), but its cultural impact was enormous. Itbequeathed us a wealth of public art, music, literature and cultural knowledge that continues to delight us today.

Maybe another way to say it is that art, in addition to all its other virtues, is an economic multiplier. The dollar we invest today repays us, and our descendants, a thousandfold.