Grant Writing Confidential

In Umberto Eco’s fabulous The Name of the Rose, Adso of Melk says, “In the past men were handsome and great (now they are children and dwarfs), but this is merely one of the many facts that demonstrate the disaster of an aging world. The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head [...]” The novel was published in 1980 and is set in 1321.

In Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, Black says: “A cleric by the name of Nusret [...] had made a name for himself during this period of immorality, inflation, crime, and theft. This hoja, who was from the small town of Erzurum, attributed the catastrophes that had befallen Istanbul in the last ten years [...] to our having strayed from the path of the Prophet.” The novel was published in 2001 and is set in the 1590s.

In the HBO show The Wire, a police commissioner—Herb, I think, but trying to remember the characters’ names is like trying to learn Russian—says in episode three or four, “It’s not like it was.” That seems to be the theme of the entire fifth season.

All three demonstrate beliefs about a superior golden past—we’ve been expelled from the Garden of Eden and the present day is one of monstrous vice, corruption, incompetence, mendacity, bad pop music, and the like. Characters in novels, like their counterparts in nostalgic movies, promote this idea. It’s the kind of assumption that often goes unchallenged in newspapers, and it becomes a corollary of Writing Needs Assessments: How to Make It Seem Like the End of the World: argue that the past was often better than the present, which is an idea many people are primed to accept because our culture is permeated with this concept.

Recently, the New York Times quoted Plato on the subject in “Generation You vs. Me Revisited“: “’The children now love luxury,’ Plato wrote 2,400 years ago. ‘They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.’” For more than 2,000 years, and probably longer, we’ve been telling ourselves about a past that probably never existed. (Incidentally, that New York Times article is interesting for another reason: it questions conventional wisdom and the idea that self-absorption can be measured through tests like the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. Isaac wrote a post about why self-esteem measurements are silly and used similar reasoning to what’s in the article. The underlying phenomena is similar: it is very hard to ascertain what people think and feel because the only methods of measurement we have are words and behaviors, which are at best imprecise.)

Back to the main point: the idea of a fall from an ideal state is a very old one—at least as old as the Old Testament and probably older—so you can claim that you need to operate the program you wish to run as a way of recapturing this past, which is much more wholesome than the degraded present, which beset as it is by all manner of ills, such as gangs. The worse you can make the present appear, the more you need funding. This mostly happens in the needs assessment of a proposal. Then, in activities section (or whatever it happens to be called), depict the program you wish to run as a way to return to or surpass this state and create a better vision for the future.

Or you can frame the issue by arguing that the past has always been as bad as the present: for generations, the target neighborhood/group/city has been mired in poverty, assailed by outsiders, ignored by the government, and harmed by pernicious societal forces. Now, a program has finally come along to remedy the malady and restore the rightful social order, as one might in a traditional Romance (i.e. one with magical events, ordained heroes, and perilous quests). Either way, the present isn’t good, and the agency applying will be the knight in shining armor ready to slay the social beast, be it crimes, gangs, teenagers more generally, and the like.