256: Thieves!!…and…

The Ruskin Art Club in Los Angeles is very much a going concern and has been one for over 100 years. First established in 1888 by Mary Boyce, the RAC continues to actualize its original vision–to spread the ideas Ruskin articulated about art, economics, and nature in his many works. Under the guidance of its Executive Director, Gabriel Meyer, it regularly sponsors workshops and cultural gatherings in Southern California (most of which can be attended “live” on Zoom). Prominent among these offerings is a series of “study sessions,” focusing on Ruskin’s books and lectures. The most recent was a consideration of Ruskin’s 1858 lecture, “The Work of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy.” I was asked to moderate the discussion because of my long experience with Ruskin’s works. “Iron” is is a truly remarkable lecture. Indeed, it is the precursor to his masterpiece, Unto this Last (1860). If you would like to read it – and I hope you will – it is available on the Ruskin library website in the UK and reprinted in Clive Wilmer’s masterful collection Unto this Last and Other Writings of John Ruskin (easily available on the web).

I had read the lecture many years ago in Wilmer’s volume and thought it magnificent. Hence, it was a delight to reacquaint myself. In his brief introduction to the talk–which Ruskin delivered to an educated and wealthy audience in the English resort town of Tunbridge Wells, Wilmer, quite rightly in my view, argues that, in the lecture, Ruskin “airs,” for the first time in print, many of the “radical” views he will focus on in his later works on political economy, among these, his contention – most unsettling, or so it would seem to me, for the quiet ears of most members in his well-heeled audience” To wit: that those who had come out to hear him on this February evening as a result of his fame for having written earlier works like Modern Painters and The Seven Lamps of Architecture – were, when we look at the facts of the situation honestly, little better–although all would deny the accusation vehemently and bitterly–than a congeries of thieves, a group of society’s most privileged and powerful who, as a matter of course and without reflection on the long and short-term consequences of what they were really doing, systematically oppressed the poor by finding or inventing ways to pay them less than they needed to live decently or, just as reprehensibly, sell them shoddy goods; in both cases, pocketing the money thus “saved” for their personal use while those they had taken advantage of slid ever deeper into despondency and despair; adding that, in effect (we modern sociologists call the tactic, “blaming the victim”), they had nothing to do with the dire situation, that it was their fault they were in trouble and, if only they had only acted reasonably and judiciously, they and their children would not be sufferjng. (It is worth noting that, in 2020, 37 million people lived in poverty in the richest country in the history of the world–the United States–and that, of these, 11 million were children.)

Here is the most powerful paragraph in the lecture , ehere the speaker explains this discomfiting reality:

(I will return to this lecture in a subsequent post.)

Now these [uneducated, untrained, and medically deprived people] are the kind of people you can oppress and do oppress–and that to purpose!–and with all the more cruelty and greater sting because it is [or so you contend] just their own fault that puts them into your power. You know what the words about the wicked are [in the Psalms]: “He doth ravish the poor when he gets him into his net.” This “getting into the net” [we say] is constantly the folly of the offender, [a result of[ his own heedlessness or his own indolence; but, once he is in the net, our oppression of him is entirely ours. The nets which we use against the poor are just those worldly embarrassments which either their ignorance or their improvidence are almost certainly at some time or another to bring them into. Then, at just that time when we ought to hasten to help or disentangle them, and teach them how to manage better in the future, we rush forward to pillage them and force all we can out of them in their adversity. For, to take one instance only–and remember this is literally and simply what we do whenever we buy or try to buy cheap goods – consider goods offered at a price which we know cannot be remunerative for the labor involved in them; whenever we buy such, remember, we are stealing somebody’s labor. Do not mince the matter. I say in plain Saxon: STEALING– taking from him the proper reward of his work and putting it in our own pocket! You know well enough that the thing could not have been offered you at that price unless distress of some kind caused him to part with it. You take advantage of his distress, and force as much out of him as you can under the circumstances. The old barons of the Middle Ages used, generally, the thumbscrew to extort property. We moderns in preference, use hunger or domestic affliction. We differ from from this myth mainly by being less dexterous, more cowardly, and more cruel. More cruel I say, because the fierce baron and the antique highwayman are reputed to have robbed only the rich, while we habitually steal from the poor. We buy our liveries, and gild our prayer books with pilfered pence out of children’s and sick and weak men’s wages and thus ingeniously dispose a given quantity of Theft so that it may produce the largest possible measure of delicately-distributed suffering.

Food (or possibly not?) – for thought,

Until next time, please do continue well and reflective out there!

Jim

Ruskin in 1854 (detail from a portrait by J. E. Millais, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University)