When I think carefully about the
times in which we live, I am struck by the similarities that our age shares
with Victorian England. This claim might seem, at first glance, to be rather
startling. However, further speculation makes this comparison depressingly apt.
Granted,
we are not surrounded by the starving and abused masses that a typical
Englishman or woman would have seen on a regular basis in Victorian England.
However, for the most part we have simply shifted this huddled mass from our
back doors to the so-called “third-world.” Just like there were once thousands
of poor wretched souls toiling in Welsh or Yorkshire mines or Lancashire mills,
there are now many more thousands of such wretched souls laboring endlessly in
mines in Africa or in computer factories in China. Just like the comfort of Bourgeois
Victorian families was dependent upon cheap labour and expendable workers, most
of our comfort (particularly our obsession with cheap consumer goods) relies on
millions of people laboring away somewhere will little hope for the future.
This is the material reality of our neo-Victorian lives.
But
we also share important ideological similarities with our Victorian
counterparts. The consistency of our socioeconomic system relies heavily on a
powerful and significant set of myths about the natural order. While the
Victorians propagated the notion that the capitalist order as it was developing
was “God-given,” today there is a prevailing belief that the capitalist system
flows directly from our “human-nature” and there is no alternative to the existing
social and economic relations. Today, despite the fact that our economies are
tightly controlled in the interests of large corporations and a small number of
extremely wealthy, most people continue to be convinced that the economy is not
really something we can control because it must be left to some abstract
“market” forces. And like the sad Victorian masses, we have become little more
than faceless cogs in an economic machine. There were, of course, important
resistance movements in the Victorian era such as the Chartist Movement, the
Secular Movement, the IWA, and other socialist or socially minded
organizations. But the vast majority of people continued to harbor deep fears
of social change and even deeper fears of movements that were striving for social
and economic equality. Similarly today, we have major efforts at resistance,
and activists work tirelessly to change the prevailing ideology and find
socioeconomic alternatives that will ensure greater levels of equality and
democracy. But these movements are relatively small, painfully slow, and
recently seem to even be losing ground.
With
the use of ideologies, “the masses” seem remarkably easy to repress and
oppress. But resistance is like water, it flows through the cracks no matter
how people attempt to shore up their ideologies. Some people refuse to be put
down and their exuberance bubbles up. Some people thirst for self–expression,
for love, for pleasure. They strive to be human rather than lifeless parts of a
machine.
But
what form is our resistance to take? This is what the Romantic (Pre-Victorian)
Revolt was, in large part, really about. Faced with an increasingly
mechanizing, world, that was driving people from their traditional lands and
making them mere mechanisms of a bourgeoning capitalism, the Romantic
sensibility looked for liberation in the psyche and in the creative
imagination. This is particularly true of Keats who saw in the human world
something indescribably cruel and painful, and his only escape, his only real
resistance, was found in his aesthetic voice. Of course, the fortress of beauty
can be cold comfort in the face of human injustice. In the words of E.P.
Thompson, for Keats “The beautiful is posed as a remedy for the oppressions of
the world: but, in the heat of Keats’ rage, it seemed to him an inadequate
remedy, as he cried out for a recourse ‘somewhat human,’ a remedy ‘within the
pale of the world.’” But though it is perhaps, at times, woefully inadequate,
art can be a genuine form of resistance; a subversive act of humanism in the
face of an ideology that strives to continually dehumanize us.
For
Thompson, as for many writers, Keats was perhaps the greatest example of an
artist attempting to hold the pain of human existence at bay through the
production of beauty. But if the so-called Romantic rebellion was about
anything, it was surely about the embracing of hope. In everyday life, Keats
had little be hopeful about with his father dying when Keats was young, and
family members dying from tuberculosis, a fate that he knew probably awaited
him. But in his poetry Keats, to borrow a modern phrase, kept hope alive and
this was a great inspiration to those who came after him. However, by the
height of the Victorian Era Romanticism itself was dying and with it so was the
optimism that some said was at its core.
We
are in a similarly hopeless era. The long post-war boom was (if not a Romantic
period) a period of great hopefulness. I don’t know if I can point to any
particular artist who was like a modern Keats, looking beyond the great
tribulations of life toward a world of pure beauty, but perhaps it matters
little now because artists, along with the rest of society, have entered
largely into a period of cynicism.
Again
we can turn to E.P. Thompson for a discussion of the end of Romanticism and the
rise of cynicism. Thompson uses the great Victorian William Morris as an
expression of the death of Romantic hope. Thompson tells us that Morris’ great
epic poem (or, more rightly, series of poems) entitled The Earthly Paradise is
“the poetry of despair. The extinction of hope in the world around him drove
Morris to abandon Keats’ struggle, and the struggle of his own youth, to
reconcile his ideals and everyday experience, and he turned his back on the
world.” This is a compelling, and somewhat depressing notion, because William
Morris, as a primary leader of the Arts and Crafts movement, was a consummate
rebel, a man who stood against the mechanization of capitalism in so many ways.
The fact is that William Morris, like any person of conscience, fought against
his pessimism of spirit with an optimism of will. Like so many of us today, he
had lost hope but still worked tirelessly against the dehumanization of
Capitalism.
Ironically,
Morris’s The Earthly Paradise was successful, widely read, and praised by
reviewers. This is because like so many great works of art, the poem could work
on many levels and Morris’ Victorian readers chose to see his poem ostensibly as
a series of Romantic stories. Here again we seem to share a great deal with
Victorian cynicism. So much art of today could be seen as hopeless resignation
of a faltering system of inequality and injustice or even as a cruel indictment
of our global economic and social relations – from the Lego Movie to the
strange, lyrical books of G.W. Sebald. But one of the great strengths of capitalism (both today and
in the Victorian Era) is its ability to generate what Peter Sloterdijk called
“enlightened false-consciousness.” People have an overwhelming sense that the
system isn’t working, that the endemic inequalities are wrong, that we are prospering
on injustice and pain, but people overlook these problems either because they
are just trying to make a decent life in difficult times or because they are
genuinely convinced that they can’t do anything about it. Many prosperous and
middle-class Victorians who weren’t necessarily politically radical must have
known, despite the rhetoric of religion or the spin of ideology, that the
system in which they lived was radically unjust and morally reprehensible.
However, many (if not most) of those people were caught up in a whirlwind of
history and stuck in a psychic place of enlightened false-consciousness. Thus,
many Victorians were placated by great artwork or just great entertainments,
and many of them surely justified their unjust economic system with the commonplace
fact that they were also engaged in bolstering a growing system of fine art and
literature which enriched the souls of the citizen in illimitable ways.
Similarly, many of our own ultra-rich have followed in these Victorian
footsteps and are deeply involved in the arts in important and significant
ways. However, I believe that we have gone from the placation offered by arts
and crafts, to the mindless stupor offered by modern digital entertainment. In
this sense, at least, we are foreign from our Victorian progenitors. We are
devoid of hope in ways that the Victorians would have been unable to imagine,
but our hopelessness is modified into a vaguely coma-like state of obliquely
comforting melancholy.
However,
there is an interesting upshot of at least one part of this story. For many
years William Morris sank slowly in hopelessness while he conversely labored
away at the so-called ‘Firm,’ his arts and crafts business which, though it
serviced an almost exclusively rich clientele, produced remarkably fine works
of furniture and art. But when it seemed as though the injustice of society and
the haplessness of the human race was just too much to bear, Morris found a new,
invaluable sense of hope in the form of socialism. This is the real rub of the dirty era of industrial
exploitation that we call the Victorian Era – it created the very concept of
modern socialism. It seems as though if you create enough blatant inequality
and injustice, particularly in a society that touts its civilized sophistication
and Christian morals, you will unwittingly lead people to the promised land of
hope, a hope that is born out of the desire to overthrow (or significantly
reform) the very system of injustice that led to the injustice in the first
place.
And
it is fitting that an artist like William Morris would look for inspiration in
a more hopeful and cooperative future. Because, after all, what is art if not a
dream of something better?
And
in this sense, once again, we can be seen to be much like the Victorians – we are
faced with a renewed social inequality and a period of hopelessness. But, like
Morris, we are feeling a new hope stir inside us. A spectre is haunting modern capitalism
– the spectre of hope; a reinvigorating hope for a better society born out of
profound inequalities. Since the time of William Morris the traditional arts
have almost died out but new arts are taking their place and I believe that artists,
being creatures of hope, will surely play a role in the new hope, just has men
like Morris did in the Victorian era.
