Critics level two charges against capitalism: First,
they say, that the possession of a motor car, a television set, and a
refrigerator does not make a man happy. Secondly, they add that there are still
people who own none of these gadgets. Both propositions are correct, but they
do not cast blame upon the capitalistic system of social cooperation.
People do not toil and trouble in order to attain
perfect happiness, but in order to remove as much as possible some felt
uneasiness and thus to become happier than they were before. A man who buys a
television set thereby gives evidence to the effect that he thinks that the
possession of this contrivance will increase his well-being and make him more
content than he was without it. If it were otherwise, he would not have bought
it. The task of the doctor is not to make the patient happy, but to remove his
pain and to put him in better shape for the pursuit of the main concern of every
living being, the fight against all factors pernicious to his life and ease.
It may be true that there are among Buddhist mendicants, living on alms in dirt and penury, some who feel perfectly happy and do not envy any nabob. However, it is a fact that for the immense majority of people such a life would appear unbearable. To them the impulse toward ceaselessly aiming at the improvement of the external conditions of existence is inwrought. Who would presume to set an Asiatic beggar as an example to the average American? One of the most remarkable achievements of capitalism is the drop in infant mortality. Who wants to deny that this phenomenon has at least removed one of the causes of many people's unhappiness?
No less absurd is the second reproach thrown upon
capitalism — namely, that technological and therapeutical innovations do not
benefit all people. Changes in human conditions are brought about by the
pioneering of the cleverest and most energetic men. They take the lead and the
rest of mankind follows them little by little. The innovation is first a luxury
of only a few people, until by degrees it comes into the reach of the many. It
is not a sensible objection to the use of shoes or of forks that they spread
only slowly and that even today millions do without them. The dainty ladies and
gentlemen who first began to use soap were the harbingers of the big-scale
production of soap for the common man. If those who have today the means to buy
a television set were to abstain from the purchase because some people cannot
afford it, they would not further, but hinder, the popularization of this
contrivance.
Again there are grumblers who blame capitalism for
what they call its mean materialism. They cannot help admitting that capitalism
has the tendency to improve the material conditions of mankind. But, they say,
it has diverted men from the higher and nobler pursuits. It feeds the bodies,
but it starves the souls and the minds. It has brought about a decay of the
arts. Gone are the days of the great poets, painters, sculptors and architects.
Our age produces merely trash.
The judgment about the merits of a work of art is
entirely subjective. Some people praise what others disdain. There is no
yardstick to measure the aesthetic worth of a poem or of a building. Those who
are delighted by the cathedral of Chartres and the Meninas of Velasquez may
think that those who remain unaffected by these marvels are boors. Many
students are bored to death when the school forces them to read Hamlet. Only people who are endowed with a spark
of the artistic mentality are fit to appreciate and to enjoy the work of an
artist.
Among those who make pretense to the appellation of
educated men there is much hypocrisy. They put on an air of connoisseurship and
feign enthusiasm for the art of the past and artists passed away long ago. They
show no similar sympathy for the contemporary artist who still fights for
recognition. Dissembled adoration for the Old Masters is with them a means to
disparage and ridicule the new ones who deviate from traditional canons and
create their own.
John Ruskin will be remembered — together with Carlyle,
the Webbs, Bernard Shaw and some others — as one of the gravediggers of British
freedom, civilization and prosperity. A wretched character in his private no
less than in his public life, he glorified war and bloodshed and fanatically
slandered the teachings of political economy which he did not understand. He
was a bigoted detractor of the market economy and a romantic eulogist of the
guilds. He paid homage to the arts of earlier centuries. But when he faced the
work of a great living artist, Whistler, he dispraised it in such foul and
objurgatory language that he was sued for libel and found guilty by the jury.
It was the writings of Ruskin that popularized the prejudice that capitalism,
apart from being a bad economic system, has substituted ugliness for beauty,
pettiness for grandeur, trash for art.
As people widely disagree in the appreciation of
artistic achievements, it is not possible to explode the talk about the
artistic inferiority of the age of capitalism in the same apodictic way in
which one may refute errors in logical reasoning or in the establishment of
facts of experience. Yet no sane man would be insolent enough as to belittle
the grandeur of the artistic exploits of the age of capitalism.
The preeminent art of this age of "mean
materialism and money-making" was music. Wagner and Verdi, Berlioz and
Bizet, Brahms and Bruckner, Hugo Wolf and Mahler, Puccini and Richard Strauss,
what an illustrious cavalcade! What an era in which such masters as Schumann
and Donizetti were overshadowed by still superior genius!
Then there were the great novels of Balzac, Flaubert,
Maupassant, Jens Jacobsen, Proust, and the poems of Victor Hugo, Walt Whitman,
Rilke, Yeats. How poor our lives would be if we had to miss the work of these
giants and of many other no less sublime authors.
Let us not forget the French painters and sculptors
who taught us new ways of looking at the world and enjoying light and color.
Nobody ever contested that this age has encouraged all
branches of scientific activities. But, say the grumblers, this was mainly the
work of specialists while "synthesis" was lacking. One can hardly
misconstrue in a more absurd way the teachings of modern mathematics, physics
and biology. And what about the books of philosophers like Croce, Bergson,
Husserl, and Whitehead?
Each epoch has its own character in its artistic
exploits. Imitation of masterworks of the past is not art; it is routine. What
gives value to a work is those features in which it differs from other works.
This is what is called the style of a period.
In one respect the eulogists of the past seem to be
justified. The last generations did not bequeath to the future such monuments
as the pyramids, the Greek temples, the Gothic cathedrals and the churches and
palaces of the Renaissance and the Baroque. In the last hundred years many
churches and even cathedrals were built and many more government palaces,
schools and libraries. But they do not show any original conception; they
reflect old styles or hybridize divers old styles. Only in apartment houses,
office buildings and private homes have we seen something develop that may be
qualified as an architectural style of our age. Although it would be mere
pedantry not to appreciate the peculiar grandeur of such sights as the New York
skyline, it can be admitted that modern architecture has not attained the
distinction of that of past centuries.
The reasons are various. As far as religious buildings
are concerned, the accentuated conservatism of the churches shuns any
innovation. With the passing of dynasties and aristocracies, the impulse to
construct new palaces disappeared. The wealth of entrepreneurs and capitalists
is, whatever the anticapitalistic demagogues may fable, so much inferior to
that of kings and princes that they cannot indulge in such luxurious
construction. No one is today rich enough to plan such palaces as that of
Versailles or the Escorial. The orders for the construction of government
buildings do no longer emanate from despots who were free, in defiance of
public opinion, to choose a master whom they themselves held in esteem and to
sponsor a project that scandalized the dull majority. Committees and councils
are not likely to adopt the ideas of bold pioneers. They prefer to range
themselves on the safe side.
There has never been an era in which the many were
prepared to do justice to contemporary art. Reverence to the great authors and
artists has always been limited to small groups. What characterizes capitalism
is not the bad taste of the crowds, but the fact that these crowds, made
prosperous by capitalism, became "consumers" of literature — of
course, of trashy literature. The book market is flooded by a downpour of
trivial fiction for the semibarbarians. But this does not prevent great authors
from creating imperishable works.
The critics shed tears on the alleged decay of the
industrial arts. They contrast, e.g., old furniture as preserved in the castles
of European aristocratic families and in the collections of the museums with
the cheap things turned out by big-scale production. They fail to see that
these collectors' items were made exclusively for the well-to-do. The carved
chests and the intarsia tables could not be found in the miserable huts of the
poorer strata. Those caviling about the inexpensive furniture of the American
wage earner should cross the Rio Grande del Norte and inspect the abodes of the
Mexican peons which are devoid of any furniture. When modern industry began to
provide the masses with the paraphernalia of a better life, their main concern
was to produce as cheaply as possible without any regard to aesthetic values.
Later, when the progress of capitalism had raised the masses' standard of
living, they turned step by step to the fabrication of things which do not lack
refinement and beauty. Only romantic prepossession can induce an observer to
ignore the fact that more and more citizens of the capitalistic countries live
in an environment which cannot be simply dismissed as ugly.
No comments:
Post a Comment