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Always headed here

With a president suffering from main character syndrome coupled with a steadily deteriorating mental state,  so much ‘seems’ to be going on that keeping up with it in whole much less in part can itself feel maddening.

Two days ago, he gives a televised exposition of just how adrift he is, boxed in by an ill-considered military fiasco and hand-picked, grossly incompetent and corrupt underlings. Ardent, patriotic citizens try to keep up but mostly what’s on offer is the unwillingness to describe a massive, practically unimaginable strategic defeat.

In pondering what are we still wondering about, some well-framed context about some things we already know clicks a light bulb in a closet blocked behind an old armoire. It’s not reassuring but it is forward, and perhaps desperately needed correction against meaningless reassurances:

For more than a century, the political and moral imagination in much of the Persian ecumene was shaped by an urgent quest for alternatives to the pitilessly exploitative regimes of capitalist imperialism. For Gandhi, a historical experience that began in the late nineteenth century in South Africa made him see fascism and imperialism as inevitable features of capitalist states overdependent on violence—disguised and softened at home, extreme and explicit abroad. It was the fate of a later observer like Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, the twentieth-century novelist and essayist, to endure, while still analyzing, the insidiousness of neoimperialism: economic modernization under Western auspices that condemned postcolonial states to perpetual underdevelopment.

Given the religion-capitalism pairing that has defined the very essence of the American experiment since its inception (ask any Republican candidate for any office), it’s fair to ask whether we’ve always been headed here. Not karmically, though there is that; but just as a natural effect of the causes as they have hatched. Every other country and alliance has already figured out that dependence on the US is toxic to their national interests, while we try to make sense of the nonsensical. It feels sped-up, fast-forwarded, still a bit out front of our ability to conceive, believe. He is referred to as the American id. Maybe that’s it and this is all of the accumulated skullduggery, laid bare.

But I did learn a new word.

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Funny, that

In tribute to Romney’s Doofus Abroad act, I wanted to post an excerpt from Graham Greene’s The Comedians, a comic reference to something decidedly not funny.

Of course there’s nothing online that I can find, but you should still take this as a recommendation for Greene’s famous novel about Haiti, wherein friends of Romney could find new and better ways to conduct themselves abroad. See also, The Quiet American.

So instead, we turn to John Ruskin who, in true enlightening nineteenth century fashion, has some choice words for Willard about taxes. This is from Fors Clavigera, Letter VII, 1871:

Do you see, in The Times of yesterday and the day before, 22nd and 23rd June, that the Minister of France dares not, even in this her utmost need, put on an income tax; and do you see why he dares not?

Observe, such a tax is the only honest and just one; because it tells on the rich in true proportion to the poor, and because it meets necessity in the shortest and bravest way, and without interfering with any commercial operation.

All rich people object to income tax, of course;— they like to pay as much as a poor man pays on their tea, sugar, and tobacco — nothing on their incomes.

Whereas, in true justice, the only honest and wholly right tax is one not merely on income, but property; increasing in percentage as the property is greater. And the main virtue of such a tax is that it makes publicly known what every man has, and how he gets it.

For every kind of Vagabonds, high and low, agree in their dislike to give an account of the way they get their living, still less, of how much they have got sewn up in their breeches. It does not, however, matter much to a country that it should know how its poor Vagabonds live, but it is of vital moment that it should know how its rich Vagabonds live; and that much of knowledge, it seems to me, in the present state of our education, is quite attainable.

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Grace to Utility

John Ruskin was the pre-eminent Victorian art critic whose impact is precisely as diverse and long-lasting as the tenants on which any concept of ‘the art of life’ should be. His Fors Clavigera is a series of letters, published as pamphlets, addressed to the working men of Britain during the 1870’s; his Unto This Last was translated into Gujarati by Gandhi in 1908, after Ruskin’s ideas on the value of work inspired him to change his life.

The following is from his lecture, the Relation of Art to Use, part of his Lectures on Art, delivered at the University of Oxford in 1870.

Our subject of enquiry to-day, you will remember, is the mode in which fine art is founded upon, or may contribute to, the practical requirements of human life.

Its offices in this respect are mainly twofold: it gives Form to knowledge, and Grace to utility; that is to say, it makes permanently visible to us things which otherwise could neither be described by our science, nor retained by our memory; and it gives delightfulness and worth to the implements of daily use, and materials of dress, furniture and lodging. In the first of these offices it gives precision and charm to truth; in the second it gives precision and charm to service. For, the moment we make anything useful thoroughly, it is a law of nature that we shall be pleased with ourselves, and with the thing we have made; and become desirous therefore to adorn or complete it, in some dainty way, with finer art expressive of our pleasure.

And the point I wish chiefly to bring before you to-day is this close and healthy connection of the fine arts with material use; but I must first try briefly to put in clear light the function of art in giving Form to truth.

Much that I have hitherto tried to teach has been disputed on the ground that I have attached too much importance to art as representing natural facts, and too little to it as a source of pleasure. And I wish, in the close of these four prefatory lectures, strongly to assert to you, and, so far as I can in the time, convince you, that the entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth, or full of use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful or impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main objects,—either to state a true thing, or to adorn a serviceable one. It must never exist alone—never for itself; it exists rightly only when it is the means of knowledge, or the grace of agency for life.

Now, I pray you to observe—for though I have said this often before, I have never yet said it clearly enough—every good piece of art, to whichever of these ends it may be directed, involves first essentially the evidence of human skill and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.

Skill, and beauty, always then; and, beyond these, the formative arts have always one or other of the two objects which I have just defined to you—truth, or serviceableness; and without these aims neither the skill nor their beauty will avail; only by these can either legitimately reign. All the graphic arts begin in keeping the outline of shadow that we have loved, and they end in giving to it the aspect of life; and all the architectural arts begin in the shaping of the cup and the platter, and they end in a glorified roof.

Therefore, you see, in the graphic arts you have Skill, Beauty, and Likeness; and in the architectural arts, Skill, Beauty, and Use; and you must have the three in each group, balanced and co-ordinate; and all the chief errors of art consist in losing or exaggerating one of these elements.

For instance, almost the whole system and hope of modern life are founded on the notion that you may substitute mechanism for skill, photograph for picture, cast-iron for sculpture. That is your main nineteenth-century faith, or infidelity. You think you can get everything by grinding—music, literature, and painting. You will find it grievously not so; you can get nothing but dust by mere grinding. Even to have the barley-meal out of it, you must have the barley first; and that comes by growth, not grinding. But essentially, we have lost our delight in Skill; in that majesty of it which I was trying to make clear to you in my last address, and which long ago I tried to express, under the head of ideas of power. The entire sense of that, we have lost, because we ourselves do not take pains enough to do right, and have no conception of what the right costs; so that all the joy and reverence we ought to feel in looking at a strong man’s work have ceased in us. We keep them yet a little in looking at a honeycomb or a bird’s-nest; we understand that these differ, by divinity of skill, from a lump of wax or a cluster of sticks. But a picture, which is a much more wonderful thing than a honeycomb or a bird’s-nest,—have we not known people, and sensible people too, who expected to be taught to produce that, in six lessons?

Well, you must have the skill, you must have the beauty, which is the highest moral element; and then, lastly, you must have the verity or utility, which is not the moral, but the vital element; and this desire for verity and use is the one aim of the three that always leads in great schools, and in the minds of great masters, without any exception. They will permit themselves in awkwardness, they will permit themselves in ugliness; but they will never permit themselves in uselessness or in unveracity.

And farther, as their skill increases, and as their grace, so much more, their desire for truth. It is impossible to find the three motives in fairer balance and harmony than in our own Reynolds. He rejoices in showing you his skill; and those of you who succeed in learning what painter’s work really is, will one day rejoice also, even to laughter—that highest laughter which springs of pure delight, in watching the fortitude and the fire of a hand which strikes forth its will upon the canvas as easily as the wind strikes it on the sea. He rejoices in all abstract beauty and rhythm and melody of design; he will never give you a colour that is not lovely, nor a shade that is unnecessary, nor a line that is ungraceful. But all his power and all his invention are held by him subordinate,—and the more obediently because of their nobleness,—to his true leading purpose of setting before you such likeness of the living presence of an English gentleman or an English lady, as shall be worthy of being looked upon for ever.