Skip to main content

JOHN RUSKIN — UNTO THIS LAST


John Ruskin was one of the great intellectual figures of the 19th century. He was born in London in 1819, the only child of deeply devoted parents. His father was a hugely successful, and immensely respectable, wine merchant. From an early age Ruskin wrote beautifully and powerfully about the arts; he was a tireless teacher and advocate of all that he thought was missing from rapidly developing economies of the mid 1800s. As he aged he moved from art criticism to social criticism.  The essays that make up this book were first published, across six months in 1860, in The Cornhill Magazine — one of the grandest and most prestigious periodicals of the era. They were so hated by the readers that the editor (who rather admired them) had to terminate the series. The plain cover of the first edition, in which the essays were collected as a book, gives no hint of the fireworks of the text.  Uncontroversially, economics is the study of the production and distribution of ‘things of value’: money being only an instrument that facilitates these more fundamental activities.  Ruskin’s step is both obvious and yet extremely dramatic: he asks about what we value. Suppose, he says, a society, in the grip of a superstition, elected to put all its resources into building an immense pyramid of gold — perhaps to appease a vengeful god — neglecting education, their homes, the welfare of the elderly, the quality of their diet and the elegance of their cities. An economist would have no problem with this; it’s what these people happen to choose, the concern would only be to help them accomplish it as efficiently as possible. To Ruskin, this demonstrates a monstrous outlook. Such a society is tragic and disastrous — and it is, Ruskin hinted, a version of our own.  What we should value isn’t such a mystery, argued Ruskin. In another book, he describes his first visit (around 1840) to the quiet French town of Amiens. The streets are all pretty; the people are dignified but friendly, the shops are ‘uncompetitive’: over generations they’ve evolved to sell what the local people need; there’s no advertising; everyone works productively, but not too much; there are few people who could be called rich and even fewer who could be described as poor. There are no ugly suburbs: the town proper simply gives way to small farms; no-one is striving to build a fortune (why would they) and there’s never any lack of work for someone able to milk a cow or carve a statue.  Ruskin intuited that a very great number of people would like to live this way and was aghast that ‘modern economics’ had not focused on helping us to reach this form of contentment — but rather talked only of maximising the production of steel or lowering the price of shoddy trinkets. We kill ourselves to grow the GDP but don’t judge the worth of what anyone spends their money on.  We’ve unnecessarily embraced economic theories that make a point of ignoring our true longings. And so, in an abundant world, we feel anxious about our resources, dislike our work and live in ugly places. Ruskin understood with shocking clarity problems we’re still only at the beginning of managing to make sense of in our own times.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AGAINST SKIING HOLIDAYS

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a normal person in search of a holiday will enjoy skiing; they will delight in bracing mountain air, thrill at going down mogul dotted slopes and feel pleasantly exhausted after a day of parallel turns. This assumption about pleasure joins a host of others proposed by the modern world. Normal people will equally enjoy white wine, the Amalfi coast, the novels of Margaret Atwood, dogs, high heels, small children, Miami beach, oral sex, Banksy, marriage, Netflix and vegetarianism. We may legitimately delight in all of these elements; the issue lies in the immense pressure we are under to do so. The truth about ourselves may, in reality, be a great deal more mysterious than the official narrative allows. Whatever our commitments to decorum and good order, we may in our depths be far more distinctive than we’re supposed to be. We may — once we become sensitive to our faint tremors of authentic delight and boredom — hate the idea of jogging, the the...
Post a Comment
Dive In »

CLASSICISM

At present, our culture is dominated by a Romantic outlook; its predecessor, and in many ways its more deserving alternative, is a Classical view of life. Classicism is founded upon an intense, pessimistic awareness of the frailties of human nature and on a suspicion of unexamined instinct. The Classical attitude knows that our emotions can frequently over-power our better insights, that we repeatedly misunderstand ourselves and others, and that we are never far from folly, harm and error. In response, Classicism seeks via culture to correct the failings of our minds. Classicism is wary of our instinctive longing for perfection. In love, it counsels a gracious acceptance of the ‘madness’ inside each partner. It knows that ecstasy cannot last, and that the basis of all good relationships must be tolerance and mutual sympathy. Classicism has a high regard for domestic life; it sees apparently minor practical details as deeply worthy of care and effort; it doesn’t think it would be degrad...
Post a Comment
Dive In »

IMPOSTER SYNDROME

 PHILOSOPHY  In many challenges, both personal and professional, we are held back by the crippling thought that people like us could not possibly triumph given what we know of ourselves: how reliably stupid, anxious, gauche, crude, vulgar and dull we really are. We leave the possibility of success to others, because we don’t seem to ourselves to be anything like the sort of people we see lauded around us. The root cause of impostor syndrome is a hugely unhelpful picture of what other people are really like. We feel like impostors not because we are uniquely flawed, but because we fail to imagine how deeply flawed everyone else is beneath a more or less polished surface. The impostor syndrome has its roots in a basic feature of the human condition. We know ourselves from the inside, but others only from the outside. We are aware of all our anxieties, doubts and idiocies from within. Yet all we know of others is what they happen to do and tell us – a far narrower and more edited...
Post a Comment
Dive In »