Outright opposition to modernity is often dismissed as backward-looking or “reactionary” and associated with a rigidly hierarchical or aristocratic outlook. But there is another tradition of resistance to the modern world that has very different ideals and can serve as the basis of an old-new radical philosophy of natural and cosmic belonging, inspiring humanity to step away from the nightmare transhumanist slave-world into which we are today being herded. In this important series of ten essays, our contributor W.D. James, who teaches philosophy in Kentucky, USA, explores the roots and thinking of what he terms “egalitarian anti-modernism”.
Beauty will save the world.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
Morris, Carlyle, and Ruskin
William Morris (1834-1896) was an artist (a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite movement), craftsman, epic poet, utopian, fantasy writer, entrepreneur, and practical communist propagandist, perhaps best known for his wallpaper designs. His close friends and associates included the likes of artists such as Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rosetti, literary figures of the rank of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, as well as the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, Karl Marx’s daughter Elinor Marx, and social revolutionizer and sandal promoter Edward Carpenter.i He looked to the past to gain inspiration for an innovative future. The house he and architect friend Philip Webb designed and decorated, Red House, exemplified this in its mixture of mediaeval and renaissance features and sparsely modern and functionalist features such as its open and flowing first floor interior. As a founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, all his designs incorporate a simple and hardy roughness, along with an appreciation of nature, with the boldly innovative.
According to his biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, “Morris’s true originality as a thinker and practitioner springs from this radical idea of the absolute centrality of art.”ii She claims his vision “involved the complete dismantling of the stultifying structures of society and their replacement by a freer, more equable and fluid way of life.”iii Morris saw art as growing naturally from the attempt of free practical producers to make their artifacts beautiful, whether those artifacts were cathedrals, wardrobes, bowls, books, or wallpaper. He set about to discover what were the necessary preconditions of this creative, satisfying, and human mode of production and then to theorize the economic and social revolution necessary to establish it. His guiding model was always the free medieval guild craftsperson.
His intellectual predecessors were Thomas Carlyle (1795-1891) and John Ruskin (1819-1900). As noted in the first essay, I would class Carlyle amongst the aristocratic anti-modernists. This is because he works on the assumption that elites will govern masses, but is highly critical of modern, capitalistic elites. He calls for the restoration of a genuinely virtuous aristocracy. He introduced contemporary German romanticism to the English-speaking world; a version of what has been called ‘natural supernaturalism’. In works like Past and Present (1843) he contributed to the revival of interest in medievalism, along with others such as Sir Walter Scott. In that work he contrasts the leadership of a monastic abbot (via an exploration of a recently discovered manuscript from the medieval abbey of Bury St. Edmunds) to the lack of moral leadership in the contemporary world of laissez faire and abdication of moral responsibility by elites. That he was then a primary inspiration for the likes of Ruskin and Morris shows us that the lines between various forms of anti-modernism are somewhat porous: the Spirit moves where it will.
Morris saw figures like Carlyle and Ruskin as great harbingers of light in the otherwise dreary landscape of Victorian mercantilism and philistinism. Ruskin’s influence came through two main sets of ideas. Of secondary importance was Ruskin’s forays into political economy in works like Unto This Last (1860) and Fors Clavigera (written as a series of letter to the British workers in the 1870s; apparently the British working class was well versed in Latin). In that work he identified himself as “a Communist of the old school.”iv He was being hyperbolic in that appellation, but his student would be rather more literal. In these works, Ruskin critiques contemporary capitalism from a deeply moral and humanitarian perspective. Here Morris could find the roots of many of his ideas about what was required to make laboring a worthwhile and humane endeavor.
What in Ruskin’s ideas really excited Morris though was his aesthetic ideas. Morris later pointed, especially, to a single chapter in The Stones of Venice (1853), a work on the medieval architecture of that city, entitled “The Nature of Gothic.” In that chapter, Ruskin identifies what he calls the “moral elements of Gothic” as being:
- Savageness
- Changefulness
- Naturalism
- Grotesqueness (think of gargoyles)
- Rigidity
- Redundance [or generosity]v
What he saw manifesting itself in the Gothic style, which he called “Christian ornament” and “Christian architecture,” was the creativity and personality of the laborer. There were no strict forms to be obeyed. There was room for experimentation and even failure. Ruskin himself had an unorthodox, to say the least, relationship to religion. He was probably not a believer in any ordinary sense. Yet, he saw that Christian civilization had freed up and given expression to the creativity of the ordinary artisan (contrast this with the geometrical perfection of classical Greek and Roman architecture which permitting of no deviation; work fit only for slaves, which in fact the workers mostly were). What was wrong, from this perspective, with self-righteous Victorian civilization, was that it was actually no longer Christian. It had degraded “the operative into a machine”vi which carried any number of social evils in its wake. He demanded a revolution in manufacture that would enable workers to realize their humanity. Morris picks up all of Ruskin’s themes and runs with them. In this essay we will focus on a couple of his essays and in the next we’ll turn to his literary works.
The political economy of beauty
In the 1894 essay, “How I Became a Socialist,” Morris states his guiding animus: “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization”.vii There he points at the role of art in a socialist revolution when he observes that modern “civilization has reduced the workman to such a skinny and pitiful existence, that he scarcely knows how to frame a desire for any life much better than that which he now endures perforce. It is the province of art to set the true ideal of a full and reasonable life before him…”.viii
As something of a sidenote, it is interesting to think of Morris in relation to Marx as that has historically been a debated and contested topic. “Orthodox” Marxists have tended to be critical of Morris, seeing him as rather ‘utopian’ in the Marx/Engels sense and not having anything worthwhile to contribute to revolutionary theory while also falling into a number of heresies. While Morris was not really a philosopher and certainly not an economist (in any technical sense), he did attempt a real engagement with the ideas of Marx, including a study of Capital (1867). What is important to keep in mind is that in the 1880s and 1890s there was not yet, for better or worse (I tend to think better), an orthodox Marxism; there were just exciting ideas that people were engaging with and making use of as they do with any really vital set of ideas. A Marxist can probably sense hints of problems of ‘ideology’ and ‘class consciousness’ and the ‘immiseration of the proletariat’ in this passage, but certainly ‘alienation’ is what is being described. In fact, alienation is perhaps Morris’s greatest social theme. Yet, in the works of Marx that were available to him, alienation is not a central theme (though it is there). The early works where we get our ideas of what Marx thought about alienation were still unpublished manuscripts. Perhaps he had gotten some insight into other concerns of Marx from Elinor, but it seems more likely to me that he was thinking along a lot of the same lines and developing ideas afresh which Marx had also thought, but not published.
In “Useful work versus useless toil” (1893), Morris outlines what he takes to be the minimum prerequisites for good work (work that is good for the worker and work that produces good things). He observes, “it has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labor is good in itself—a convenient belief to those who live on the labor of other.”ix He disagrees and insists there is both good work and bad work. Good work has within itself “hope”: “hope of rest [not ceaseless overtoil], hope of product [that is owning and using it], hope of pleasure in the work itself [because it allows for the exercise of mind and soul as well as body].”x
At the center of Morris’s political economy is a reformulation of ‘wealth’. He writes: “Wealth is what Nature give us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight, food, raiment and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it; means of free communication between man and man; works of art, the beauty which man creates when he is most a man, most aspiring and thoughtful—all things which serve the pleasure of people, free, manly, and uncorrupted.”xi
To some extent, he is shifting the focus of wealth from, in Marx’s terms, ‘exchange value’ (the price a commodity will bring on the market) to ‘use value’ (the actual utility of an item). But he’s doing quite a bit more than that. Here what is aimed at, what is of real value, is the fulfillment of the human capacity to create beautiful things and live beautiful lives.
Beauty and freedom versus catastrophe and control
Morris is a visionary. That is not a bad thing. It does not discountenance his ideas. His vision of the future is appealing. It is built on the fundamental realization that we desire to live in a beautiful world, surrounded by beautiful things, and that beauty is only produced out of freedom. While he is relatively sober about the need for a genuine political revolution to bring about the future he envisions, the vision itself is life affirming in every way.
This establishes a nice contrast with many of our contemporary, so-called, visionaries. I have in mind the likes of Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates. When is the last time you heard one of their ilk say they wanted to make the world and human existence more beautiful or more free? They do not. Their vision for the future is rooted in another pairing: catastrophe and control. Their vision grows not from the soil of human aspiration but from the belief that humanity is not worthy of aspiration. Humanity only inaugurates catastrophes. I certainly don’t deny the existence of human caused catastrophes. I’m only interested in what are the wholesome inspirations for a human future that will require massive change? There is nothing very life affirming in the futures marked out by the Great Resetters. In fact, you can tell they actually hate life. What they love is control. When you start from catastrophe you have to aim towards control. You must fix things and more fundamentally you must fix the flawed human material that inaugurated the catastrophes. You get visions of surveillance cities. You get visions of carefully managed scarcity and austerity (well, except for the Schwabs and Gateses I suppose). And what is it about our needing to eat bugs that so enthralls them (or maybe they’ve moved on to lab-meat; tasty)? Perhaps it’s just that there won’t be anything else to eat once they finish killing all the cattle to lower carbon emissions.
They drive me to think of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (1943), a cautionary tale about the rule of technocrats not well grounded in a solid humanistic ethos. At the opening of the final chapter, he quotes Bunyan: “It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said and however he flattered, when he got me home to his house, he would sell me for a slave.”xii There is no eating of insects in Morris and one does not suspect the intention of enslavement.
i Sandals were an exotic import from India, associated with health and naturalness, and wearing them was akin to being a promoter of free love.
ii Fiona MacCarthy, Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy 1860-1960, Yale University Press, 2014, p. 9.
iii Ibid, p. 39.
iv John Ruskin, Unto This Last and Other Writings, edited by Clive Wilmer, Penguin, 1985, p. 294.
v Ibid, p. 79.
vi Ibid, p.86.
vii Included in William Morris, News from Nowhere: or An Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapter From ‘A Utopian Romance’, Dover, 2004, p. vii.
viii Ibid, p. ix.
ix William Morris, Useful Work versus Useless Toil, LM Publishers, no publication date given, p. 7.
x Ibid, p. 9.
xi Ibid, p. 18.
xii C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, HarperSanFrancisco, 1974, p. 53.
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