The sea is calm tonight,

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Agean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

1867

Ruskin really took against this thing when he saw it; for him it seemed an emblem of everything he disliked about a city he loved. I like it!

Since this blog was first posted the news has had it that the government is discussing the value of the natural world in the UK (open spaces, parkland, meadows, forests, all the countryside one assumes) in directly monetary terms. How much is having a field near your house worth? £3,000? £12,000? Clearly we still need to recall what Ruskin had to say about this ‘economic’ mentality. If our measure of value is as crudely quantitative as this, the spirit of nihilism is well and truly with us. (June 2011)

I’ve been re-reading some Ruskin this week, while I perspired on the tube to work: Unto This Last. Quite a book for its day (1860), and for our day too, given his polemic against the idiocy of the classical economists, their assumptions about ‘rational man’, and the supposed primacy of narrow self interest  in the market  and in society generally (=‘greed is good’). It was a controversial work, and not at all well received by some of his target audience – the Victorian Bourgeoisie. (For a bit more on what Ruskin has to say in this book , see the post I re-blogged from Jonathan Glancy on Unto this Last).  Reading Ruskin again, I was impressed by another aspect of his polemic.

I was  struck again by the sense that with Ruskin there is an assumption that his audience shares with him a grounding in Christian teaching, particularly the New Testament. Its language and imagery pervades the book (including the title). Of course it’s a Victorian, protestant version and not one that everyone, even at that date, was taking literally. Ruskin certainly wasn’t: he had moved well away by then  from the evangelical creed in which he had been raised. This was due to a number of reasons, but Darwin’s Origin of Species and the accumulating evidence of the great age of the earth played a large part in making the religion of his parents unacceptably simple minded and  narrow. Still, when Ruskin wants to talk about justice, or love, or even the dismal science of economics, he turns to the Bible.

Which leaves me with this thought. What shared language do we have now, when we want to talk about such matters? I’m very far from thinking that no God = no morality, and I’m also alive to the evil Christians have sometimes done. I just wonder whether, when you erase a tradition and a shared discourse in which love and justice find a natural place, you find much left standing. What’s left? economics? evolutionary psychology?

Nietzsche makes a remark somewhere, apropos George Eliot, that the English, having killed their God, were still proceeding as if nothing had changed, that nothing would change in their moral universe. I think he added that they would wake up to what had been lost ‘sometime in the next century’ (i.e. the 20th century). Into the moral vacuum of the late 20th century rushed the promotion of private advantage over the public good. It spoke the language of Gordon Gekko and Milton Friedman  and it  colonised almost every area of public life. Now we live with the results.

This seems to me to be a political and social question, not just one for private moral reflection. Do Darwin, Dennet and Dawkins lead to market fundamentalism? I ask this because it’s a naive piece of liberal ideology to hold that ‘morality’ is somehow just for the private life, with a neutral state acting as a policeman and the market ensuring the efficient impersonal distribution of goods. The state, for them, has a greater or lesser role in supplying a safety net for the injured, or acting as an equal opportunities  enabler for the less fortunate; it  has no substantive vision of the good life that would go beyond this. That’s the point of liberalism.

But if the only driver for social change lies in capitalism itself, then only the self interest of  persons (increasingly imagined as consumers) will stand against the worst that the market can do to jobs, families, and lives. Liberals were keen to finish off socialism (with its Judeo-Christian and Marxist heritage); keen to launch into culture wars against all that would stand against the logic of the individual and the market. But what have they got to show in its stead? The selfish gene?

We need to recover the language, and  practice of public justice, and social solidarity. The promotion of the Good Life that lies beyond the horizons of the dismal science of economics. This is a public thing: the  res publica . And it’s a matter for all of us, as citizens, not mere consumers. So perhaps we need more, not less, of the wisdom of Solomon, the ethic of the New Testament, the polemics of Ruskin and the analysis of Marx. Otherwise what’s left? Sir Alan Sugar? Sir Fred Goodwin? I’m reminded of another of Ruskin’s titles: The  Ethics of the Dust.

Of Skeletons and Souls

I was very pleased that this article appeared. Ruskin is an intellectual and moral hero: I endorse everything Glancy says about him, and about this book. Now read Ruskin!

John Ruskin’s masterful political text is essential reading for MPs in search of a moral compass

In 1906, when the first 29 Labour MPs were elected, the book that had most affected them, they said, was John Ruskin’s Unto This Last. Although no such survey was made of the 418 New Labour MPs elected in 1997, one can only assume it must have been a close call between Investors Chronicle, the Argos catalogue and Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Unto This Last is one of the most far-reaching books published in Britain in the past 150 years. It inspired the foundation of the welfare state and was translated into numerous languages, including Gujarati by Mahatma Gandhi.

Ruskin began sketching the four essays that form Unto This Last in 1859. Appalled by the dishonesty of MPs and by crude, inhumane free market economics causing unspeakable suffering among those who toiled in the new industrial world, he determined to fight for justice and a form of wealth we could all believe in, and share.

A strike by ruthlessly exploited building workers prompted this lover of noble, crafted buildings to let rip. “For my own part,” he railed, “I feel the force of mechanism and the fury of avaricious commerce to be at present so irresistible, that I have seceded from the study not only of architecture, but nearly all of art, and have given myself, as I would in a besieged city, to seek the best modes of getting bread and butter for its multitudes.”

Rushing to complete the last volume of his acclaimed Modern Painters that year, Ruskin agreed to write his radical essays on political economy for the Cornhill magazine, edited by William Thackeray. Conceived in 1859, these were printed in 1860 and published in book form two years later. When MPs break up for the summer recess, they should take Unto This Last with them on holiday. They will dislike it, and be disturbed by it, just as their predecessors – keen students of Ricardo, Mill and Darwin – were when Ruskin wrote this, his finest book, a polemic in favour of health, education, hope, welfare and decency and, in spirit, entirely against the crude, New Labour revival of liberal economics and our debilitating obsession with money, aspiration for aspiration’s sake, shopping malls, PFI, PPP, destruction of craft and industry, MPs’ expenses and every other form of dismal economics and head-hanging greed.

Unto This Last demolishes this view of the world with biblical high-mindedness and coruscating wit. Political economy, Ruskin argued, is an organism, not a mechanism. “Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusions of the science, if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons.” Modern political economy assumes “not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton”, and, thus, “founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometric figures with death’s-heads and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures.”

Ultimately, says Ruskin, in a spirit that will be incomprehensible to most MPs today, “There is no wealth but Life. Life, including all its ­powers of love, of joy, of admiration. That ­country is the richest which nourishes the ­greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life, to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.”

A heavenly book, written by our largely forgotten national archangel, Unto This Last deserves to be read anew, by all of us, but mostly by expense-sullied politicians in search of a moral compass with practical, humane and honest bearings.

via Of skeletons and souls | Jonathan Glancey | Comment is free | The Guardian.