Why America funds data centers but cuts the arts

Five large technology companies raised their capital spending above $400 billion in 2025, mostly flowing into data centers, the International Energy Agency said in October. In the same year, the Trump administration moved to shut down the National Endowment for the Arts, an agency with an annual budget of $207 million.

Those two facts become part of the same story when viewed through a new academic theory recently proposed in Horizons, the journal of the College Theology Society.

The paper's author, independent scholar Matthew Hale, who holds a doctorate in systematic and historical theology from The Catholic University of America, contends that societies decline when two bad habits of thinking reinforce each other.

Hale builds the case from two men who never met and agreed on little else: Bernard Lonergan, a Jesuit theologian writing in the 1940s, and Max Horkheimer, a Marxist social philosopher of the same decade.

From Lonergan, he takes the idea of "conceptualism," which treats abstract concepts as reality rather than as tools for understanding it. From Horkheimer, he takes "instrumental reason," which treats everything solely as a tool for achieving practical goals.

Hale argues that these two habits of human thinking reinforce each other, and eventually make institutions, scholarship, politics — and even religion — more rigid, authoritarian and detached from real human experience.

Lonergan believed real thinking begins with insight, a spontaneous grasp of the point. The theologians he argued with left insight out.

They believed, Hale said, that "we have perceptions, they go into some sort of black box, and out pops a concept. So, we look at a hairy, happy quadruped and out pops the concept, 'dog.'"

The danger, for Lonergan, is not that people use categories. It is that they forget the categories are their own invention, and start treating them as the world itself.

Instrumental reason, Horkheimer's term, is the habit of reasoning that treats the world as a set of means to make life more predictable and safe. Everyone needs it, Hale said. It built vaccines, bridges and power grids. But left unchecked, it crowds out other kinds of thinking and reduces everything it touches, including people, to a tool.

"Elon Musk, for example, is sort of the embodiment of instrumental reason," Hale said by email.

Hale's contribution is the link between the two. He calls it an "elective affinity," a term he borrows from Max Weber: the two habits do not cause each other, but they travel together and reinforce each other.

Conceptualism creates simplified categories. Instrumental reason likes them because they are easy to use, and rewards the people who produce them. Those people and institutions then reshape themselves to fit the categories, which makes the categories look more true.

"Neither conceptualism nor instrumental reason begets the other, nor does one necessitate the other," Hale writes. "But they coincide with enough regularity and predictability that we can recognize an intelligible, collusive relationship."

Hale applies the idea to theology and to the decline of societies.

He did not use artificial intelligence as an example in the paper but offered it to Urgent Matter. Machine learning, he said, is technology built almost entirely for conceptualization. What strikes him is how little any of that has to do with real problems.

A large language model turns human writing into numbers, tokens and probabilities a computer can process at scale. Seen through Hale's framework, that is a form of conceptualism: the world reduced to units, with no understanding in between.

The units are useful to instrumental reason because they automate and predict. As the models become more useful, companies and schools reorganize work around what the models can handle, turning more of the world into units.

Hale calls one version of this a "doom-loop." A.I. is enlisted to fix problems its own growth worsens, from loneliness to climate change. Each failure then becomes an argument for building more of it.

The cost of running the models is easy to measure. Data centers used about 448 terawatt-hours of electricity worldwide in 2025. That would rank them 11th among countries, behind France and ahead of Saudi Arabia, the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health reported in June.

Demand rose 17% over the year and is on track to double by 2030, the International Energy Agency said in April. The water used to cool servers will reach 9.3 trillion liters a year by then, the report projects.

When the NEA began terminating grants in May 2025, hours after the administration proposed eliminating the agency, the notices said funding would go to projects that "reflect the nation's rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President," according to emails obtained by NPR.

Art keeps its money as long as it serves the stated purpose.

Congress restored the NEA's $207 million for fiscal 2026, records show. The president's 2027 request again proposes cutting it to $29 million. A House subcommittee in June advanced a 35% cut, to $135 million, according to the Americans for the Arts Action Fund.

The NEA accounts for less than 0.004% of the federal budget, and every grant dollar it awards draws more than $9 in matching funds, according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.

In April 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency terminated more than 1,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grants and put about two-thirds of the staff on leave, the National Humanities Alliance and NPR reported.

The acting chair told senior staff the agency would focus on patriotic programming, The New York Times reported. A federal judge later ruled the terminations unlawful.

Senators who protested wrote that shutting the agency would save "a rounding error in the U.S. budget."

Hale’s theory helps explain the paradox: an institution can be portrayed as expendable even when eliminating it produces negligible fiscal savings, because the debate is ultimately about what kinds of knowledge and cultural activity a society chooses to recognize as valuable.

Museums measure themselves by attendance.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, cut 33 positions in January, including seven in its curatorial department and the curators of its Islamic and Native American art.

The museum answered the criticism with a number: paid attendance in 2024 ran 37% above its pre-pandemic average, close to a million people. Leadership took no pay cut.

The Guggenheim cut 20 jobs a year earlier, in education, publications and archives rather than curatorial, after raising admission to $30 while attendance sat a third below 2019, The Art Newspaper reported.

The Portland Museum of Art in Maine cut 13 jobs in 2024 while pursuing a $100 million expansion it said would raise attendance to 500,000 a year, up from 170,831 in 2019, The Art Newspaper reported.

Attendance is only a number. Conceptualism treats it as the museum's mission, so work that does not raise it starts to look expendable. When money is tight, curating, conservation and education are the first jobs cut.

Indiana passed a law in April 2025, added to the state budget in its final hours, setting a minimum number of graduates each degree program must produce. The next month, Indiana's public colleges suspended, merged or eliminated more than 400 degree programs, about 19% of all they offer.

At Indiana University Bloomington, the programs cut or suspended include art history, comparative literature, dance, French, religious studies and ballet, Forbes reported.

In April, WTHR reported that the Indiana Commission for Higher Education will review degrees for graduates earning between $24,000 and $35,000 a year and decide what will become of those programs by December. The bottom tenth of American craft and fine artists earn under $29,120 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Once lower-earning programs disappear, students are pushed toward the fields the state has chosen to preserve. Universities invest more heavily in those areas while the remaining programs shrink. A few years later, declining enrollment in subjects like art history appears to confirm the original decision to cut them.

Hale calls his own conclusion pessimistic. A society that keeps choosing the calculable over the true, he writes, quoting Lonergan, "digs its own grave with a relentless consistency."

Editorial disclaimer: The paper's author, Matthew Hale, is a close personal friend of Urgent Matter's Adam Schrader.

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