Finishing up our quick cruise with a stay in a really great hotel, I picked up a book in the room called “On Art and Life” by John Ruskin. I’m not sure anyone was really supposed to read it — it had the look of something that was placed there to lend an artsy atmosphere — but when I started skimming, I found I couldn’t put it down. The author, a renowned English art critic of the 19th century, had much to say about the detrimental effects of the Industrial Revolution that seem relevant now. As I mentioned back HERE, there’s a sliver of opportunity in the changing nature of manufacturing in this country. Perhaps we have a chance of reversing some of what John Ruskin saw so accurately 150 years ago.

And what Ruskin saw as an art critic was that the focus on mass-production was creating flawless, cheap, identically-made ornamentation that couldn’t compare with the charm and cleverness of artisan work (especially in medieval Christian Gothic architecture and ornament, which Ruskin clearly loved). That may seem like something that would only interest another art critic, but there’s a bigger point behind it:

Men were not made to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul’s force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last — a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned.

Ruskin sees more freedom in the medieval apprentice working for his master than the “free” men who went to work at jobs that took all of a human’s abilities to try and fail, think and grow, create and destroy and subjected them to the dismal repetitive nature of industrial labor. In the growing unrest of the working classes at the time of his writing — which would spill over into riots, violent strikes and revolutions in the next 75 years — Ruskin sees a plaintive inability for the workingmen to articulate where the source of their misery truly lay:

It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves. The universal outcry against wealth, and against nobility, is not forced from them either by the pressure of famine, or the sting of mortified pride. … It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure….

Never had the upper classes so much sympathy with the lower, or charity for them, as they have at this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them: for, of old, the separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity, and there is pestilential air at the bottom of it.

Ruskin doesn’t deny the tremendous boon to be found in mass-producing goods, which provides employment on one hand and affordable goods on the other, but only asserts that mankind was so blinded by the power of the assembly line and the conveyor belt that we didn’t stop to consider what was at stake:

And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, — that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages.

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Ruskin’s “modest proposal”

Having laid out the case so completely that a human crisis is at hand, Ruskin flounders when it comes to offering a solution. Because his Big Idea to all the good Victorian readers of his day is to just stop buying mass-produced goods (in fact, stop buying anything they don’t need) and stop valuing the flawless appearance of mechanically-made products.

I won’t say that Ruskin’s solution didn’t bear fruit. His writings encouraged the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and inspired the Arts and Crafts movement. The results of Ruskin’s call to arms are to be seen in the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rosetti (at right), the wallpaper of William Morris, and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Those are some pretty impressive results.

The problem is that even the zeal and strong sensibilities of those movements has played out now, and the desire for cheap, affordable — and yes, machine-perfect — goods has gone on and on. It’s too late at this point to tell people to change their tastes or their buying habits. One segment of the population has been trying to tell another segment of the population to stop buying at Walmart for decades now, but Walmart is unstoppable.

So for my little part, I don’t call for some crusade, or a sea-change on the part of all the buying public. The times have provided the change — at least for now, at least in this country. I wouldn’t expect millions of people to develop a more trained eye to look for things that are simply-made or hand-made, and I wouldn’t expect millions to pay the extra price for them. But a few people is a start. The Web offers many home-made, original, charming goodies by individuals and small shops. Small local shops and arts & crafts fairs do the same. Reward the artisan. Pay a little bit more for an original. Or, if you’ve got the knack, make things yourself and sell them or give them as gifts.

It’s been impossible to stop the great wheels of industry. Ruskin did as fine a job of trying as anyone I’ve read, and the good people that were moved to action tried with considerable talent and courage to do the same. If it turns out that we can succeed in some small measure where they have failed, it is just because the wheels have kept turning until they have passed us by. Much of the unskilled labor force that powered industries for generations has now been let go. What happens now is unknown, but it’s likely to affect almost every aspect of our culture.

I wish Ruskin could’ve been here to see it.