Tag: William Morris

Looking Backward

Jeff

Looking BackwardFinished Looking Backward as the year ended. It has a fun romantic twist ending, but for the most part, it’s one of those books that has me slapping my head at how much I disagree with its sentiments.

An upper class man is mesmerized (hypnotized) in order to get some sleep in 1887, because he is upset that the labor unrest will force him to cancel his wedding. He wakes up in the year 2000.

All strife is gone. The trusts have all been absorbed into one massive trust, which becomes the government.

All citizens are conscripted into the “great industrial army” and must work from the age of 21 until 45; then they are free to do what they want. The gross domestic product is divided up equally among all citizens, regardless of whether they are currently working or not. No more money, perfect equality, no social problems. People who refuse to work are imprisoned and fed bread and water till they agree to go along; this is not considered to be a problem. Housework and cooking have been done away with, though he never really explains how! Everyone is happy as an industrial soldier.

“Know, O child of another race and yet the same that the labor we have to render as our part in securing for the nation the means of a comfortable physical existence is by no means regarded as the most important, the most interesting, or the most dignified employment of our powers. We look upon it as a necessary duty to be discharged before we can fully devote ourselves to the higher exercise of our faculties, the intellectual and spiritual enjoyments and pursuits which alone mean life. Everything possible is indeed done by the just distribution of burdens, and by all manner of special attractions and incentives to relieve our labor of the irksomeness, and, except in a comparative sense, is not usually irksome, and is often inspiring. But it is not our labor, but the higher and larger activities which the performance of our task will leave us free to enter upon, that are considered the main business of of existence.

“Of course not all, nor the majority, have those scientific, artistic, literary, or scholarly interests which make leisure the one thing valuable to their possessors. Many look upon the last half of life chiefly as a period for enjoyment of other sorts; for travel, for social relaxation in the company of their lifetime friends; a time for the cultivation of all maner of personal idiosyncrasies and special tastes, and the unperturbed appreciation of the good things of the world which they have helped create.

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888) Penguin ed. 1986 p. 148-9

Morris disliked the book because it was an exposition about “state communism”; Bellamy calls it “nationalism”. I dislike it primarily because of his idea that things like cooking, cleaning and such are dismissed as being pretty much meaningless, and no thought whatsoever is given to the idea that work might be fun and an essential part of life.  The Nearings really got that part right, I think. Bread labor (as they called it) was part of the core of what it means to be alive. We have to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves. Why shouldn’t that be as rewarding as other more “valuable” pursuits? It seems as if Bellamy has anticipated the mystification of these things which we currently accept as “normal.”

To be fair, Bellamy anticipates things like credit cards (as a payment system instead of money), and places music as a central part of day to day life. It seems that each house as a device on the wall where you can turn screws and fill the house with music, chosen from a variety of programs performed live. No need to go the the concert hall, it is brought to you. He also anticipates radio preachers, because on Sunday you can tune into the services.

There were Bellamy societies  that sought to make this utopia real at the turn of the twentieth century. There are fascinating predictions the book, if you can get past its embrace of National Socialism. Many of Bellamy’s contemporaries didn’t see any problems with that; time has given most of us a different perception.

The Invalid Corps

Jeff1 Comment

The Invalid CorpsI should not fail to mention, “resumed the doctor, “that for those too deficient in mental or bodily strength to be fairly graded with the main body of workers, we have a separate grade, unconnected with the others—a sort of invalid corps, the members of which are provided with a light class of tasks fitted to their strength. All our sick in mind and body, all our deaf and dumb, and lame and blind and crippled, and even our insane, belong to this invalid corps, and bear its insigns. The strongest often do nearly a man’s work, the feeblest, of course nothing; In their lucid intervals, even our insane are eager to do what they can.”

“That is a pretty idea of the invalid corps,” I said, “Even a barbarian from the nineteenth century can appreciate that. It is a graceful way of disguising charity, and must be grateful to the feelings of its recipients.”

“Charity!” repeated Doctor Leete. “Did you suppose that we consider the incapable class we are talking of objects of charity?”

“Why, naturally,”  I said, “insamuch[sic] as they are incapable of self support.”

But here the doctor took me up quickly.

“Who is capable of self support?” he demanded, “There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know family cooperation, each individual may possibly support himself, though even then for a part of his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and constitute even the rudest of society, self-support becomes impossible. As men grow more civilized, the subdivision of occupations and services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence becomes the universal rule. Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support; and that it did not in your day constituted the essential cruelty and unreason of your system.”

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888) Penguin ed. 1986 p. 109-110

I started this book yesterday. I’ve always meant to read it, and prompted by a somewhat disparaging review of it by William Morris, I decided that now was the time. Morris called its utopian view “state communism” and I believe it is. In the future, i.e. the year 2000, the trusts and robber barons have coalesced into a giant mega-corporation which is the government. Curiously, for Bellamy, this is a good thing. Much more to say later, but I found it interesting that this “invalid corps” in the great industrial army (his description of the workforce) is rooted in the Civil War; the Union found its invalid corps in 1863, the confederacy in 1864.

The new system

Jeff1 Comment

modern-timesI have said that the eighteenth century perfected the system of labour which took the place of the mediaeval system, under which a workman individually carried his piece of work through its various stages from the first to the last.

This new system, the first change in industrial production since the Middle Ages, is known as the system of division of labour, wherein, as I have said, the unit of labour is a group, not a man,; the individual workman in this system is kept life-long at the performance of some task quite petty in itself, and which he soon masters, and having mastered it has nothing more to do but go on increasing his speed of hand under the spur of competition with his fellows, until he has become the perfect machine which it is his ultimate duty to become, since without attaining that end he must die or become a pauper. You can well imagine how this glorious invention of division of labour, this complete destruction of individuality in the workman, and his apparent hopeless enslavement to his profit-grinding master, stimulated the hopes of civilization; probably more hymns have been sung in praise of division of labour, more sermons preached about it, than have done homage to the precept ‘do unto others as ye would they should do unto you’.

To drop all irony, surely this was one of those stages of civilization at which one might well say that, if it was to stop there, it was a pity that it had ever got so far. . . .

. . . However, civilization was not going to stop there; having turned the man into a machine, the next stage for commerce to aim at was to contrive machines which could widely dispense with human labour, nor was this aim altogether disappointed.

William Morris, “The Hopes of Civilization,” News from Nowhere and Other Writings (1993) p.316-7.

Good Work

Jeff

Here, you see, are two kinds of work— one good, the other bad, one not far removed from a blessing, a lightening of life, the other a mere curse, a burden to life.

What is the difference between them, then? This: one has hope in it, the other has not. It is manly to do the one kind of work, manly to refuse to do the other.

What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work makes it worth doing?

It is threefold I think — hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in good abundance and of good quality; rest enough and good enough to be worth having; product worth having by by one who is neither a fool nor an ascetic; pleasure enough for all of us to be conscious of it while we are at work; not a mere habit, the loss of which we shall feel as a fidgety man feels the loss of a bit of string he fidgets with.

William Morris, “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil,” News from Nowhere and Other Writings (1993) p.288.

Rot in the granary

Jeff

Corn Rot

I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.

No, rather than art should live this poor thin life among a few exceptional men, despising those beneath them for an ignorance for which they themselves are responsible, for a brutality that they will not struggle with, — rather than this, I would think that the world should indeed sweep away all art for awhile, as I said before I thought it possible she might do; rather than the wheat should rot in the miser’s granary. I would that the earth had it, that it might yet have a chance to quicken in the dark.

I have a sort of faith, though, that this clearing away of all art will not happen, that men will get wiser, as well as more learned; that many of the intricacies of life, on which we now pride ourselves more than enough, partly because they are new, partly because they have come with the gain of better things, will be cast aside for having played their part, and being useful no longer.

William Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” News from Nowhere and Other Writings (1993) p.253

Back from nowhere.

Jeff2 Comments

Morris, News from NowhereI just finished “News from Nowhere” by William Morris, and I’m still digesting it. I generally dislike most utopian books these days, though I read many of the standards growing up. The short novel contains a crystallization of Morris’s political views, which helps understanding his version of the “ideal” but there is a pollyannaish quality to it all, a romaticiation of the feudal economy that I find hard to stomach. Of course, everyone is beautiful and the clothes are fine as the people toil in the fields.

There are some interesting aspects, to be sure— a gift economy of sorts, sparser populations, a reversal of the movement into cities and back to the country, etc., but it’s clearly written from the perspective of a fellow who has known privilege his whole life. It’s been said that most of the early twentieth century theories of craft are reactions for/against William Morris and Ruskin, and that makes it important to deal with. There are a lot of finer points in Morris that get lost in the translation.

The aestheticism of of the Arts and Crafts, the connoisseurship that surrounds what it became is all that’s left once the complex social theories are stripped away. It’s a shame. It is clear, reading the pieces that I’ve read so far from Morris, that he really wanted to return to the essential goods that we all need and should take care with. The real enemy in “News from Nowhere” is mass production with it’s attendant spiral of unnecessary and unneeded products. It’s not just a diatribe against capitalism, it’s a position statement regarding the expenditure of energy creating massive market economies. Too many factories churning out too much unnecessary crap: a worthy sentiment, somewhat prophetic for 1891.

Well worth looking at, even with its flaws and alarming veiled sexism.

Education

Jeff

Teacher

Well, said the old man, shifting in his chair, ‘you must get on with your questions, guest; I have been some time answering this first one.’

Said I: ‘I want an extra word or two with you about your ideas of education; although I gathered from Dick that you let your children run wild and didn’t teach them anything; and in short, that you have so refined your education that you have none.’

‘Then you gathered left handed,’ quoth he. ‘But of course I understand your point of view about education, which is that of times past, when “the struggle for life,” as men used to phrase it (i.e., the struggle for a slave’s rations on one side, and for a bouncing share of the slave-holders’ privilege on the other), pinched “education” for most people into a niggardly dole of not very accurate information; something to be swallowed whether he liked it or not, and was hungry for it or not: and which had been chewed and digested over and over by people who didn’t care about it in order to serve it out to other people who didn’t care about it.’

William Morris, “News from Nowhere,” News from Nowhere and Other Writings (1993) p.96-97