Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another—which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver. The new car will rapidly be absorbed, like all the other wonders we already own, into the material backdrop of our lives, where we will hardly register its existence—until the night when a burglar does us the paradoxical service of smashing a window to steal the radio and brings home to us, in the midst of the shattered glass, how much we had to be grateful for.
The advertisement stays quiet, too, about the relative inability of any material thing to alter our level of happiness, as compared with the overwhelming power of emotional events. The most elegant and accomplished of vehicles cannot give us a fraction of the satisfaction we derive from a good relationship, just as it cannot be of any comfort whatsoever to us following a domestic argument or abandonment. At such moments, we may even come to resent the car’s impassive efficiency, the punctilious clicking of its indicators and the methodical calculations of its onboard computer.
We are equally prone to misunderstand the attractions of certain careers, simply because so much of what they entail is always edited out of the description, leaving only highlights that it would be impossible not to admire. We read of the results, not of the labour required to produce them.
If we cannot stop envying, it seems especially poignant that we should be constrained to spend so much of our lives envying the wrong things.
7.
The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves.
Incensed by their wrongheaded prioritising, John Ruskin excoriated nineteenth-century Britons (he had never been to the United States) for being the most wealth-obsessed people in the history of the world. They were never at any moment, he wrote, free of concern with who had what, and where it had come from (“the ruling goddess may be best generally described as the ‘Goddess of Getting-on,’” he grumbled). They felt shame over their own financial state and jealousy towards those whom they perceived as being better off.
Ruskin had a confession to make: contrary to expectations, he, too, felt frantic to become wealthy. The thought of wealth preyed on his mind from breakfast till dinner, he admitted. In fact, however, he was sarcastically playing off an ambiguity in the term wealth to emphasise all the more forcefully how far he felt his fellow countrymen had strayed from virtue. For the dictionary tells us that wealth refers not only, and historically not even primarily, to large amounts of money; it can denote an abundance of anything, from butterflies to books to smiles. Ruskin was interested in wealth—obsessed by it, even—but in wealth of a very different kind than is usually meant by the word: he wished to be wealthy in kindness, curiosity, sensitivity, humility, godliness and intelligence, a set of virtues to which he applied the collective name “life.” In Unto This Last, he therefore entreated his readers to set aside their ordinary monetary conceptions of wealth in favour of a “life”-based schema, according to which the wealthiest people in Britain would no longer automatically be the merchants and the landowners, but rather those who felt the keenest wonder gazing at the stars at night or who were best able to sense and alleviate the sufferings of others. “There is no wealth but life,” he intoned: “life, including all its powers of love, of joy and of admiration. That country is richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others … Many of the persons commonly considered wealthy are, in reality, no more wealthy than the locks of their own strong boxes, they being inherently and eternally incapable of wealth.”
Ruskin was here uttering the plain, unsophisticated truths of the prophets, and when people did not guffaw (the Saturday Review dismissed the writer as a “mad governess” and his thesis as “windy hysterics,” “absolute nonsense” and “intolerable twaddle”), they listened. In 1906, on entering Parliament, Britain’s first twenty-seven Labour MPs were asked what single book had most influenced them to pursue social justice through politics. Seventeen of them cited Unto This Last. Thirteen years later, George Bernard Shaw, speaking on the centenary of Ruskin’s birth, declared that the invective of Vladimir Lenin and the indictments of Karl Marx, when compared with Ruskin’s works, sounded more like the platitudes of a rural dean.(Ruskin himself, however, because he enjoyed teasing label-fixers, had claimed to be a “violent Tory of the old school—Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s”).“I have met in my lifetime some extremely revolutionary characters,” Shaw went on, “and quite a large number of them, when I have asked, ‘Who put you on to this revolutionary line? Wa s it Marx?’ have answered plainly, ‘No, it was Ruskin.’ Ruskinites are perhaps the most thorough-going of all the opponents of the existing state of our society. Ruskin’s political message to the cultured people of his day, the class to which he himself belonged, began and ended in this simple judgement: ‘You are a parcel of thieves.’”
Ruskin was not alone in holding this opinion. There were others in the nineteenth century who hammered home, in tones alternately outraged and melancholy, identical criticisms of money’s deification as the chief determinant of respect, a presumed badge of demonstrable goodness, rather than merely one component, and surely not the most important one, of a fulfilled and fulfilling life. “Men are always apt to regard wealth as a precious end in itself and certainly they have never been so apt thus to regard it as they are in England at the present time,” lamented Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869). “Never did people believe anything more firmly, than nine Englishmen out of ten at the present day believe that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being so very rich.” As Ruskin had done seven years before, Arnold urged the inhabitants of the world’s first and most advanced industrial nation to think of wealth as only one of many means to secure happiness, an end that he defined (to further hoots of laughter from critics at the Daily Telegraph) as an “inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life and increased sympathy.”
Thomas Carlyle had earlier made much the same point, if less diplomatically. In Midas (1843), he asked, “This successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth … which of us has it enriched? … We have sumptuous garnitures for our life, but have forgotten to live in the middle of them. Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors, but in the heart of them, what increase of blessedness is there? Are they better, beautifuller, stronger, braver? Are they even what they call ‘happier’? Do they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in this God’s Earth; do more things and human faces look with satisfaction on them? Not so … We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.”