from The Evolution of God:
Anyone who wanted to set up a far-flung organization in the ancient world faced two big problems: transportation technology and information technology. In those days information couldn’t travel faster than the person carrying it, who in turn couldn’t travel faster than the animal carrying the person. Once Paul had founded a congregation and left to found another one in a distant city, he was in another world; he couldn’t return often to check on the operation, and he couldn’t tire off e-mails to keep church leaders in line.
Faced with what strike us today as such glaring technological deficiencies, Paul made the most of what information technology there was: epistles. He sent letters to distant congregations in an attempt to keep them consonant with his overall mission. The results are with us today in the form of the New Testament’s Pauline Epistles (or, at least, the seven, out of thirteen, that most scholars consider authentic). These letters aren’t just inspiring spiritual reflections-though they are often that-but tools for solving administrative problems.
Consider that famous ode to love in I Corinthians. This letter was written in response to a crisis. Since his departure from Corinth, the church had been split by factionalism, and Paul faced rivals for authority. Early in the letter he laments the fact that some congregants say, “I belong to Paul,” whereas others say, “I belong to Cephas.”
There is a second and possibly related problem. Many in the church-“enthusiasts,” some scholars call them-believed themselves to have direct access to divine knowledge and to be near spiritual perfection. Some thought they needn’t accept the church’s guidance in moral matters. Some showed off their spiritual gifts by spontaneously speaking in tongues during worship services, something that might annoy the humbler worshippers and that, in large enough doses, could derail a service. As the scholar Gunther Bornkamm has put it, “The mark of the ‘enthusiasts’ was that they disavowed responsible obligation toward the rest.” In other words: they lacked brotherly love. Hence Paul’s harping on that theme in I Corinthians and, especially, in chapter 13 (the “love chapter,” which has figured in so many weddings). In light of this context, the language in that Chapter makes a new kind of sense. It 'is in reference to disrupting worship by speaking in tongues that Paul writes, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” And when he says that “love is not envious or boastful or arrogant,” he is chastising Corinthians who deploy their spiritual gifts-whether speaking in tongues, or prophesying, or even generosity-in a competitive, showy way.
Paul didn’t go so far as to ban speaking in tongues. But he did stress that speaking to your brothers in a language they can’t understand isn’t a loving act, whereas to speak intelligibly is to “speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation.” Accordingly, he laid down some guidelines. As a rule, no one should speak in tongues unless there is someone present who can validly interpret, and even then the speakers should be few and orderly: “If anyone speaks in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn.” Prophecy, on the other hand, is fine, because it is intelligible and hence can serve others. (But mightn’t people use their claimed prophetic powers to question Paul’s authority? Don’t worry-Paul is way ahead of you; “Anyone who claims to be a prophet, or to have spiritual powers, must acknowledge that What I am writing to you is a command of the Lord. Anyone who does not recognize this is not to be recognized.”)
The beauty of “brotherly love” wasn’t just that it produced cohesion in Christian congregations. Invoking familial feelings also allowed Paul to assert his authority at the expense of rivals. After all, wasn’t it he, not they, who had founded the family of Corinthian Christians? He tells the Corinthians that he is writing “to admonish you as my beloved children. . . .Indeed. in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. I appeal to you, then be imitators of me. Had Paul stayed among the Corinthians, he might have kept the congregation united by the mere force of his presence, with less preaching about the need for unity-the need for all brothers to be one in “the body of Christ.” But because he felt compelled to move on and cultivate churches across the empire, he had to implant brotherly love as a governing value and nurture it assiduously In the case of I Corinthians, chapter 13, the result was some of western civilization’s most beautiful literature-if, perhaps, more beautiful out of context than in.
Thus, for the ambitious preacher of early Christianity, the doctrine of brotherly love had at least two Virtues. First, fraternal bonding made churches attractive places to be, providing a familial warmth that was otherwise lacking, for many, in a time of urbanization and flux. As the scholar Elaine Pagels has written, “From the beginning, what attracted outsiders who walked into a gathering of Christians . . . was the presence of a group joined by spiritual power into an extended family.” ‘9 (And there is no doubt that Paul wanted his Churches to project an appealing image. In I Corinthians he asks: If “the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your mind?”) Second, the doctrine of brotherly love became a form of remote control, a tool Paul could use at a distance to induce congregational cohesion.
Strictly speaking, this emphasis on brotherhood didn’t always mean an emphasis on interethnic brotherhood. For all we know, some of these early congregations weren’t ethnically diverse-in which case cohesion within individual churches didn’t need to involve bonding across ethnic bounds. So where does this connotation of Christian brotherly love come from?
Part of the answer is that transcending ethnicity was built into Paul’s conception of his divinely imparted mission. He was to be the Apostle to the Gentiles; he was to carry the saving grace of the Jewish messiah-~Jesus Christ-beyond the Jewish world. Here, at the origin of Paul’s aspirations, he is crossing the bridge he famously crossed in saying there is no longer “Jew or Greek,” for all are now eligible for God’s salvation.
In putting Jew and Greek on an equal basis, Paul was, in a sense, placing pragmatism above scriptural principle. By Paul’s own account, the scriptural basis for his mission to the Gentiles lay in the prophetic writings, notably in the apocalyptic expectations of Second Isaiah, who envisioned a coming messiah and a long overdue burst of worldwide reverence for Yahweh. And, as we saw in chapter 7, these passages aren’t exactly an ode to ethnic egalitarianism. The basic idea is that the Gentile nations will abjectly submit to the rule of Israel’s god and hence to Israel. God promises the Israelites that after salvation arrives, Egyptians and Ethiopians alike “shall come over to you and be yours, they shall come over in chains and bow down to you. They will make supplication to you.” Indeed, “every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.” Thus, “In the LORD all the offspring of Israel shall triumph and glory.”
Of course, Christians like to look back and stress the less nationalistic passages of Second Isaiah- such as Yahweh’s promise to bring salvation “to the end of the earth,” with Israel ultimately serving a selfless role of illumination, as a “light unto the nations.” But these aren’t the passages Paul himself emphasized. Explaining his mission to the Gentiles in a letter to the Romans, he quotes the Verse about every knee bowing and every tongue swearing without mentioning anything about a light unto the nations. He declares that his job is to help “win obedience from the Gentiles.” In line with past apocalyptic prophets, he seems to think that the point of the exercise is for the world to submit to Israel’s messiah; Jesus, Paul Says in quoting First Isaiah, is “the one who rises to rule the Gen tiles.” And Paul seems to accept the idea that ethnic bloodlines can guarantee divine favor, even salvation, for those who wouldn’t otherwise merit it; though many Jews don’t see that Jesus is the Messiah, “as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors.” But ultimately these and other theoretical dispositions mattered little compared to the facts on the ground. Any residual scriptural overtones of Jewish superiority to Gentiles that Paul may have carried into his work were diluted by a key strategic decision he made early on.
There were other Jewish followers of Jesus who, like Paul, wanted to carry the gospel to the Gentiles. But many of them insisted that in order to qualify for Jesus’s saving grace, Gentiles had to abide by the Jewish Law, the Torah, which meant following strict dietary rules and, moreover, undergoing circumcision. In the days before modern anesthesia, requiring grown men to have penis surgery in order to join a religion fell under the rubric “disincentive.”
Paul grasped the importance of such barriers to entry. So far as Gentiles were concerned, he jettisoned most of the Jewish dietary code and, with special emphasis, the circumcision mandate: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love.” Paul was so intent on dropping the circumcision barrier that, when he argued with fellow Jesus followers over this issue, his sense of brotherly love sometimes deserted him. In his letter to the Galatians he expressed the wish that those who preached mandatory circumcision would “castrate themselves!” (And some scholars say that “castrate” is a euphemistic rendering of a Greek passage signifying more dramatic surgery. “Cut the whole thing off!” is an alternative translation.)
There is little doubt about Paul’s strategic wisdom. Many religions of the day, including some of the “mystery religions,” were open to people of varied ethnicities. But these movements tended to have hurdles to membership, including financial ones, such as priests who charged initiation fees. Christian churches enjoyed a competitive edge by having no such financial barriers, and Paul kept the edge sharp by making sure these weren’t replaced by other kinds of barriers.
This decision to leave recruiting unshackled by the Jewish Law not only mitigated the drift of Paul’s letter to the Romans-the idea that his mission was to subjugate Gentiles on behalf of Israel’s messiah. It also got Paul accused of “rejecting” the Torah. But this “rejection” was meant to apply to Gentile recruits to the Jesus movement. Indeed, Paul may have considered himself a good, Torah-abiding Jew, albeit one who, in contrast to most other Jews, was convinced that the Jewish messiah had finally arrived. (In none of his letters does Paul use the word “Christian.”)
Whether or not Paul thought of his identity as now severed from Judaism, he couldn’t afford to sever Judaism’s ties to the Jesus movement, because he needed to use the infrastructure of Jewish worship. According to the book of Acts, when he came to a city and set out to recruit people to the movement, he sometimes started his preaching at the local synagogue. Indeed, according to Acts, some of Paul’s most important early recruits were Jews. So, even as practical considerations distanced Paul’s variant of the Jesus movement from Jewish ritual, they encouraged ongoing contact with the Jewish world. And, even as Paul chafed at the rejection of his doctrines by some Jews within the Jesus movement (to say nothing of Jews outside it), he continued to seek rapprochement, trying to preserve a broad base.
In short, the kind of bridge Paul built to the Gentile world wound up alienating a lot of Jews, and maybe even alienating Paul from them, but it was a bridge he couldn’t afford to burn. So an inter~ ethnic symbiosis persisted and colored Paul’s writing. Thus did the phrase “neither Greek nor Jew” enter the scripture, with its enduring connotations of ethnic egalitarianism.
There were aspects of Paul’s business model that pushed even more powerfully toward interethnic bonding. To see them, begin with the reference above to some “important early recruits” being Jews. Now leave aside the part about some of them being Jews and focus on "important" recruits.
Though Christianity is famous for welcoming the poor and powerless, to actually "run" the congregation paul needed people who could provide a meeting place. And many of the early associates of Paul were like him travelers. These businessmen tolerated ethnic differences for their own financial interests. Also travelers were hosted by their brethren in the church. It might sound cynical to explain the growth of a religion in crass commercial terms, but such practical functions play a role even today.
Sunday, May 06, 2018
Saturday, May 05, 2018
The Romantic Philhellenists
In his love of Greece, Keats was absolutely typical of the cutting edge of English culture. A whole generation of Romantic artists in Britain were absorbed by Graecomania. While the poor Keats languished artistically in London, Lord Byron, forced to flee London, became a superstar poet writing from abroad but entered the pantheon of Romantic artists by dying for Greece. Like many writers and thinkers he was galvanised by the fight for Greek freedom from the Turkish Empire. It was a fight that gave a fully politicised agenda to the ideological idealism of the artistic turn towards Greece. Byron may have in reality achieved next to nothing and died of fever, but he became a heroic symbol of Romantic commitment to the cause of freedom (artistic, political, sexual) which made Philhellenism an essential credo of the age.
Shelly too was passionate about the Greek fight for independence, and many of his greatest poems link the struggle to escape the dulling shackles of social convention and political oppression with the ideal image of a free Greece. Prometheus was a figure who Shelly returned to again and again: the chained creative spirit who suffers for truth and mankind, and yet longs for freedom and justice, a very definition of the Romantic artist as much as a Greek Titan. Shelley also died young and abroad. He drowned off the coast of Italy a death that has been invested with less mythic nobility than Byron’s. Strangely, however, even swimming was touched with the glamour of the classical. It’s hard now to appreciate that swimming was rediscovered as a pastime only in the late eighteenth century, and as a sport much later still. Although Greeks and Romans swam as a leisure activity, there is a long gap in its history people don’t swim in medieval and Renaissance Europe. It was taken up again with a conscious look backwards towards the ancient love of exercise and training the body, especially by Romantic Philhellenes, who fancied swimming the Bosphorus, like Leander of Greek myth, towards a lover of their own. To swim was to sport and strive like a Greek or Roman hero. Shelley’s death by water his last swim becomes part of his self-mythology of Greekness.
For Byron, Shelley and a host of intellectuals the Romantic giants of the first quarter of the nineteenth century Greece was an intellectual rallying call. A generation of English intellectuals defined themselves aesthetically and politically by turning towards an idealized Greece. They were committed to a revolutionary politics and a revolutionary poetics, and in both areas they found the image of a free Greece inspirational. Shelley raised the banner for his whole generation when he proudly declared: ‘We are all Greeks."
These Romantic Philhellenists set the agenda for the century that follows. Greece courses through the artistic and cultural life of England with a continuing obsessiveness. For the educated classes, it was an integral part of the construction of a personal and cultural identity. We can see Oscar Wilde, flamboyant as ever, on his first trip to Greece, which he made with his tutor from Trinity College, Dublin in the 1870s. dressing up as a Greek for the camera, a self-confident smile, and foot poised on the ancient rocks of Greece, in a carefully posed image for friends at home or universitv. It is a highly coded self-projection, with the same flair for spectacular self-presentation that marks Glde’s later career. He had written to his tutor in Oxford to ask permission to be late for term because a visit like this to Greece was so educational. Certainly Wilde was learning.
Wilde was acting out what it meant to say ‘We are all Greeks,’ and he knew well the intense charge of such a claim in the circles in which he was already moving. He found himself at home with a group in Oxford and London known as the ‘Aesthetes’. These Aesthetes offer a distinctive flowering of self-conscious transgression. The group was a self-selected and shifting collection of individuals, linked by their commitment to an extreme aesthetic principle where ‘beauty’ mattered above all. All aspects of life
were submitted to that criterion. And for all of them Greece provided the very paradigm of a world infused with beauty.
Wilde’s later notoriety has eclipsed a line of more serious scholars, including the art historian Walter Pater, poets such as Algernon Swinburne and essayists like John Addington Symonds, who had a profound influence on a generation of young men both by their publications and by personal contact in the elite world of Oxford University education. Greece ran through their debates on beauty and on sexuality. Pater, the movement’s high priest, wanted his pupils to rediscover all around them ‘a world of exquisite craftsmanship, touching the minutest details of daily life with splendour and skill, in close correspondence with a particularly animated development of human existence’ which was how he defined Greek art, his model and hope.
Symonds, however, had a more specific liberalizing sexual agenda.He saw the cultural ideal of Victorian Hellenism in terms of his own socially stigmatized desires. His Greece of the imagination is summed up like this: ‘Like a young man newly come from the wrestling-ground, anointed, chapleted and very calm, the Genius of the Greeks appears before us. Upon his soul, there is no burden of the world’s pain . . . nor has he yet felt sin.’ For Symonds, a longing for Greece is pictured as a beautiful boy without for once the feeling of sin. Greece promised a pre-Christian, guilt-free paradise. Unsurprisingly, it was Symonds rather than Pater who was scathingly attacked by Oxford conservatives for what they all-too-vividly imagined he was thinking of when he demanded that ‘we must imitate the Greeks’. Wilde knew what he was doing when he dressed up as a Greek.
Wilde himself shows his growing engagement with this Greek love in his notebooks and commonplace books, where he collected a series of passages from Pater, Symonds and his other reading. Platonic philosophy and the Symposium’s praise of male love play a special role here. These phrases show Wilde’s Grecian style as it is being formed: ‘We wrestle to embrace and embrace to wrestle,’ he wrote, lovingly dwelling on a mixture of homoeroticism and dialectical philosophy. He added a catchphrase from Pater: ‘to do philosophy with desire’. So strong was the ‘Grecian’ aspect of doing philosophy that ‘being of a philosophical disposition’ became a euphemism for someone with whom you could talk of homoerotic feelings.
Wilde tried to capture those intense conversations between young men in a single principle: ‘the refinement of Greek culture coming through the romantic medium of impassioned friendships’. The romance of his impassioned friendships needed the veil of the ‘refinement of Greek culture’, and in particular Plato’s discussions of desire offer an ideal image to live up to. Hellenism was the medium of homosexual expression for this high-profile and influential intellectual milieu. It’s not by chance that the lead character of Wilde’s best-known novel should allude to a scholarly world of Greek feeling. The Picture of Dorian Gray hesitates to mention ‘the love that cannot speak its name’, but through the odd name ‘Dorian’ it alludes knowingly to the Spartans, the Dorian race par excellence, and thus to a Spartan pederastic tradition, which made male love part of manly warfare, and not a sign of effete softness. This sort of hint and smirk is typical of the insider talk of these aesthetically minded teachers and pupils, writers and artists.
For the educated classes in Victorian Britain, Greece was a fundamental route to understanding the world and, above all, for expressing one’s own place, intellectual, moral, sexual, within it. This is partly why the long-running argument about the place of classics in the school and university curriculum was so heated. This political debate ran throughout the nineteenth century and stretched well into the twentieth. Nor has it finished yet today. But in the nineteenth century the argument started with the question of whether anything else but classics and the Bible should even be taught to children, once they could read and write. For most of the century, classics took up a good 80 per cent of the time in the classroom. The familiarity with Greece and Rome begins with this institutional foundation.
Politicians and educationalists throughout the nineteenth century made educational reform and the place of classics in it a matter of intense national concern. One of the most influential figures in this long debate was Benjamin Jowett. At the same time as the Aesthetes were strutting their stuff on the streets of Oxford and London, Jowett who was friendly with many of them, especially Swinburne was fundamentally changing the educational system in Oxford, starting with Balliol, the college where he was master.
Jowett also took Plato as his master-text, but in a quite different way from those who poured over the Symposium as part of their crushes on beautiful boys. Jowett established the one-on-one class or ‘tutorial’ as the mainstay of his educational policy ~ classes deliberately set up like Plato’s portraits of Socrates with a friend, doing philosophy together. He himself translated all of Plato into English, and made Platonic philosophy 3 guide for those in public life something Plato would have appreciated well. Jowett educated his students with Plato to rule the Empire, and, from the study in Oxford to the corridors of power across the Empire, this education was remarkably effective.
It was helped by a civil service exam that awarded many more marks for success in classical papers than any other subject even the languages spoken in the areas to be governed. Classics was a training to rule, and the best and brightest who went from public school to university to government were educated in ancient texts. The role of the civil service in ruling India had been formulated by Thomas Macaulay back in the I 8305. When he traveled out to India first by boat, he carefully read and reread much of Greek literature including nearly all of Plato, and the Iliad and the Odyssey, along with Cicero and other Roman writers. This was his preparation for ruling an empire. When Alexander the Great conquered the known world, he slept with a copy of Homer under his pillow, as he strived to achieve the immortal glory of the Homeric heroes. The pursuit of empire cultural conquest is fed by classical dreams.
The dominance of this educational model was pervasive and Jowett's Oxford formed the apex of a far broader educational commitment in England. From the first schooldays to ruling the Empire to a quiet retirement reading Homer in the evening classics was integral to the formation of the nineteenth-century gentleman.
These snapshots of poets, aesthetes and educational grandees give a good flavour of how varied the passionate lovers of Greece in Victorian Britain were. What such vignettes cannot capture is how pervasive and broad this passion was. The figures I have focused on are the cultural heroes for nineteenth-century England. They set the cultural agenda which was absorbed and followed by vast numbers of the educated classes. The Romantic poets and their self-conscious revolutionary Hellenism, the Aesthetes with their self-consciously transgressive Hellenism, and the Oxford-educated elite with their self-aware commitment to Hellenism as an education for Empire, take very different roots towards an ideal Greece, and use their Greece in very different ways. Yet each group is empowered by their understanding of Greece, and their understanding informs their whole lives. Their interest in Greece is not just one intellectual hobby among others, but a way of responding to the world and existing in it. It is an integral part of the construction of their personal and cultural identities.
A Greece of the imagination informs Victorian culture. In the last hundred years, modern British culture has spent a tremendous amount of energy trying to show how it is different from Victorian society ~ while recognizing its roots in it. It’s one of the obvious places contemporary Britain comes from and anxiously, explores, rejects, fantasizes about. In England, unlike, say, the USA, there are plenty of Victorian buildings in towns and cities around the country. Victorian novels are still a mainstay of our education in English, and of television adaptation.
Shelly too was passionate about the Greek fight for independence, and many of his greatest poems link the struggle to escape the dulling shackles of social convention and political oppression with the ideal image of a free Greece. Prometheus was a figure who Shelly returned to again and again: the chained creative spirit who suffers for truth and mankind, and yet longs for freedom and justice, a very definition of the Romantic artist as much as a Greek Titan. Shelley also died young and abroad. He drowned off the coast of Italy a death that has been invested with less mythic nobility than Byron’s. Strangely, however, even swimming was touched with the glamour of the classical. It’s hard now to appreciate that swimming was rediscovered as a pastime only in the late eighteenth century, and as a sport much later still. Although Greeks and Romans swam as a leisure activity, there is a long gap in its history people don’t swim in medieval and Renaissance Europe. It was taken up again with a conscious look backwards towards the ancient love of exercise and training the body, especially by Romantic Philhellenes, who fancied swimming the Bosphorus, like Leander of Greek myth, towards a lover of their own. To swim was to sport and strive like a Greek or Roman hero. Shelley’s death by water his last swim becomes part of his self-mythology of Greekness.
For Byron, Shelley and a host of intellectuals the Romantic giants of the first quarter of the nineteenth century Greece was an intellectual rallying call. A generation of English intellectuals defined themselves aesthetically and politically by turning towards an idealized Greece. They were committed to a revolutionary politics and a revolutionary poetics, and in both areas they found the image of a free Greece inspirational. Shelley raised the banner for his whole generation when he proudly declared: ‘We are all Greeks."
These Romantic Philhellenists set the agenda for the century that follows. Greece courses through the artistic and cultural life of England with a continuing obsessiveness. For the educated classes, it was an integral part of the construction of a personal and cultural identity. We can see Oscar Wilde, flamboyant as ever, on his first trip to Greece, which he made with his tutor from Trinity College, Dublin in the 1870s. dressing up as a Greek for the camera, a self-confident smile, and foot poised on the ancient rocks of Greece, in a carefully posed image for friends at home or universitv. It is a highly coded self-projection, with the same flair for spectacular self-presentation that marks Glde’s later career. He had written to his tutor in Oxford to ask permission to be late for term because a visit like this to Greece was so educational. Certainly Wilde was learning.
Wilde was acting out what it meant to say ‘We are all Greeks,’ and he knew well the intense charge of such a claim in the circles in which he was already moving. He found himself at home with a group in Oxford and London known as the ‘Aesthetes’. These Aesthetes offer a distinctive flowering of self-conscious transgression. The group was a self-selected and shifting collection of individuals, linked by their commitment to an extreme aesthetic principle where ‘beauty’ mattered above all. All aspects of life
were submitted to that criterion. And for all of them Greece provided the very paradigm of a world infused with beauty.
Wilde’s later notoriety has eclipsed a line of more serious scholars, including the art historian Walter Pater, poets such as Algernon Swinburne and essayists like John Addington Symonds, who had a profound influence on a generation of young men both by their publications and by personal contact in the elite world of Oxford University education. Greece ran through their debates on beauty and on sexuality. Pater, the movement’s high priest, wanted his pupils to rediscover all around them ‘a world of exquisite craftsmanship, touching the minutest details of daily life with splendour and skill, in close correspondence with a particularly animated development of human existence’ which was how he defined Greek art, his model and hope.
Symonds, however, had a more specific liberalizing sexual agenda.He saw the cultural ideal of Victorian Hellenism in terms of his own socially stigmatized desires. His Greece of the imagination is summed up like this: ‘Like a young man newly come from the wrestling-ground, anointed, chapleted and very calm, the Genius of the Greeks appears before us. Upon his soul, there is no burden of the world’s pain . . . nor has he yet felt sin.’ For Symonds, a longing for Greece is pictured as a beautiful boy without for once the feeling of sin. Greece promised a pre-Christian, guilt-free paradise. Unsurprisingly, it was Symonds rather than Pater who was scathingly attacked by Oxford conservatives for what they all-too-vividly imagined he was thinking of when he demanded that ‘we must imitate the Greeks’. Wilde knew what he was doing when he dressed up as a Greek.
Wilde himself shows his growing engagement with this Greek love in his notebooks and commonplace books, where he collected a series of passages from Pater, Symonds and his other reading. Platonic philosophy and the Symposium’s praise of male love play a special role here. These phrases show Wilde’s Grecian style as it is being formed: ‘We wrestle to embrace and embrace to wrestle,’ he wrote, lovingly dwelling on a mixture of homoeroticism and dialectical philosophy. He added a catchphrase from Pater: ‘to do philosophy with desire’. So strong was the ‘Grecian’ aspect of doing philosophy that ‘being of a philosophical disposition’ became a euphemism for someone with whom you could talk of homoerotic feelings.
Wilde tried to capture those intense conversations between young men in a single principle: ‘the refinement of Greek culture coming through the romantic medium of impassioned friendships’. The romance of his impassioned friendships needed the veil of the ‘refinement of Greek culture’, and in particular Plato’s discussions of desire offer an ideal image to live up to. Hellenism was the medium of homosexual expression for this high-profile and influential intellectual milieu. It’s not by chance that the lead character of Wilde’s best-known novel should allude to a scholarly world of Greek feeling. The Picture of Dorian Gray hesitates to mention ‘the love that cannot speak its name’, but through the odd name ‘Dorian’ it alludes knowingly to the Spartans, the Dorian race par excellence, and thus to a Spartan pederastic tradition, which made male love part of manly warfare, and not a sign of effete softness. This sort of hint and smirk is typical of the insider talk of these aesthetically minded teachers and pupils, writers and artists.
For the educated classes in Victorian Britain, Greece was a fundamental route to understanding the world and, above all, for expressing one’s own place, intellectual, moral, sexual, within it. This is partly why the long-running argument about the place of classics in the school and university curriculum was so heated. This political debate ran throughout the nineteenth century and stretched well into the twentieth. Nor has it finished yet today. But in the nineteenth century the argument started with the question of whether anything else but classics and the Bible should even be taught to children, once they could read and write. For most of the century, classics took up a good 80 per cent of the time in the classroom. The familiarity with Greece and Rome begins with this institutional foundation.
Politicians and educationalists throughout the nineteenth century made educational reform and the place of classics in it a matter of intense national concern. One of the most influential figures in this long debate was Benjamin Jowett. At the same time as the Aesthetes were strutting their stuff on the streets of Oxford and London, Jowett who was friendly with many of them, especially Swinburne was fundamentally changing the educational system in Oxford, starting with Balliol, the college where he was master.
Jowett also took Plato as his master-text, but in a quite different way from those who poured over the Symposium as part of their crushes on beautiful boys. Jowett established the one-on-one class or ‘tutorial’ as the mainstay of his educational policy ~ classes deliberately set up like Plato’s portraits of Socrates with a friend, doing philosophy together. He himself translated all of Plato into English, and made Platonic philosophy 3 guide for those in public life something Plato would have appreciated well. Jowett educated his students with Plato to rule the Empire, and, from the study in Oxford to the corridors of power across the Empire, this education was remarkably effective.
It was helped by a civil service exam that awarded many more marks for success in classical papers than any other subject even the languages spoken in the areas to be governed. Classics was a training to rule, and the best and brightest who went from public school to university to government were educated in ancient texts. The role of the civil service in ruling India had been formulated by Thomas Macaulay back in the I 8305. When he traveled out to India first by boat, he carefully read and reread much of Greek literature including nearly all of Plato, and the Iliad and the Odyssey, along with Cicero and other Roman writers. This was his preparation for ruling an empire. When Alexander the Great conquered the known world, he slept with a copy of Homer under his pillow, as he strived to achieve the immortal glory of the Homeric heroes. The pursuit of empire cultural conquest is fed by classical dreams.
The dominance of this educational model was pervasive and Jowett's Oxford formed the apex of a far broader educational commitment in England. From the first schooldays to ruling the Empire to a quiet retirement reading Homer in the evening classics was integral to the formation of the nineteenth-century gentleman.
These snapshots of poets, aesthetes and educational grandees give a good flavour of how varied the passionate lovers of Greece in Victorian Britain were. What such vignettes cannot capture is how pervasive and broad this passion was. The figures I have focused on are the cultural heroes for nineteenth-century England. They set the cultural agenda which was absorbed and followed by vast numbers of the educated classes. The Romantic poets and their self-conscious revolutionary Hellenism, the Aesthetes with their self-consciously transgressive Hellenism, and the Oxford-educated elite with their self-aware commitment to Hellenism as an education for Empire, take very different roots towards an ideal Greece, and use their Greece in very different ways. Yet each group is empowered by their understanding of Greece, and their understanding informs their whole lives. Their interest in Greece is not just one intellectual hobby among others, but a way of responding to the world and existing in it. It is an integral part of the construction of their personal and cultural identities.
A Greece of the imagination informs Victorian culture. In the last hundred years, modern British culture has spent a tremendous amount of energy trying to show how it is different from Victorian society ~ while recognizing its roots in it. It’s one of the obvious places contemporary Britain comes from and anxiously, explores, rejects, fantasizes about. In England, unlike, say, the USA, there are plenty of Victorian buildings in towns and cities around the country. Victorian novels are still a mainstay of our education in English, and of television adaptation.
the 1920's amongst the Frankfurt School
Via Jeffries
Lukacs (in his masterpiece of 1922 History and Class Consciousness) posited that the proletariat, once conscious of its historic role, would destroy capitalist society. Class consciousness was understood by Lukacs as a result of the proletariat being the product of the contradictions of history, chief among which is the exploitation of its labour under capitalism. But then Lukacs made a key distinction between the ascribed and actual consciousness of the proletariat- the higher ascribed consciousness was embodied in the revolutionary party, while actual consciousness may not be able to grasp its historic role. The party, in a sense, knows what is good for the proletariat- how it must act, and what the historic significance of its suffering under capitalism is. Into this gap between ascribed and actual consciousness, too, the Frankfurt School, as we will see, would insert itself, trying to understand what it was about capitalism’s oppressed that stopped them rising up to end their bondage to be delighted, rather, with the very chains that bound them.
Revolutionary leaders such as Lenin didn’t suffer from such false consciousness- they were adepts at revolution and understood the historic role of the proletariat which, as Lukacs put it in Hegelian terms, was to be the subject-object of history, by which he meant that instead of the proletariat being, as it currently was, in a mode of contemplation or passivity, it became an active subject engaged in the production of the world in which it could flourish. But why was there a gap between actual and ascribed class consciousness? Lukacs’s answer to that is what made his book revolutionary in Marxist theory and go on to have a profound influence on the Frankfurt School. To account for the gap, Lukécs developed the notion of reification, extending Marx‘s analysis of the ‘fetishism of the commodity form’ in Capital. The problems of society, perhaps even the reason the German Revolution had failed, could be traced to a riddle of the commodity form that Marx wrote about at the start of his master work.
Lukacs’s book discussed a new form of alienation that confronted industrial workers in the 1920s. Industrial nations such as Germany, Britain and the United States were now entering what became known as the Fordist era, a period of mass production. In 1913, Henry Ford had installed the first moving assembly line for the mass production of motor cars in Detroit, reducing the time it took to build a Model T Ford from twelve hours to two and a half. Fordism’s new industrial revolution changed production, consumption, culture and thereby what it was to be human. At the level of production, by training his workers to specialise in one of the eighty-four discrete steps necessary in the car production, and by deploying motion-study expert Frederick Taylor to make those jobs even more efficient, Ford raised output, enabling him to cut the prices of the finished cars and, crucially, change the relationship between workers and the product of their labour. For philosophers as far back as Spinoza and, in particular, for Karl Marx, humans were productive beings, who were only alive to the extent that they grasped the world outside themselves in the act of expressing their own specific powers. Mass production, through division of labour, increasingly thwarted the possibility of such fulfilment. The idea of personally fulfilling labour, sanely remunerated and manifesting artisanal skills, was the stuff of William Morris’s anti-machine-age socialist-medievalist fantasies.
Assembly lines sped up the production processes but diminished workers: they increasingly became cogs in a machine, or, worse, rendered obsolete by machines. For example, Henry Ford’s car factories included machines that could stamp out parts automatically far faster than mere humans. Humans were becoming unlit for productive purpose, a fact that, for Marxists who deemed humans to be essentially productive beings, might have seemed existentially tragic were such terms part of their theoretical vocabulary. ‘When I’m through' Ford said of his cars, ‘about everybody will have one.’ Humans weren’t just becoming machines or being replaced by them,
but were becoming desiring machines their identities defined through their more or less passive consumption of mass-produced goods.
At the level of culture, Fordism made the world modern. Those mass-produced goods included not just Model T Fords, but also Charlie Chaplin films. Mechanisation didn’t just revolutionise industry but also industrialised art, speeding up the possibilities of production and distribution, making new art forms cinema, photography possible and making old ones -novels, painting, theatre seem sluggish. Speed, economy, the ephemeral and the entertaining were the hallmarks of mass-produced culture. While Italian Futurists eulogised on the machine age’s unleashing of velocity, and while, as we will see, Walter Benjamin saw revolutionary potential in new art forms, others bemoaned the pace of cultural production. ‘In all the arts the output of trash is both relatively and absolutely greater than it was’, wrote Aldous Huxley in 1934.
But it wasn’t only conservative dystopians who worried about mass-produced culture. For Frankfurt School thinkers like Horkheimer and Adorno, if not Benjamin, this output of trash had a function: to pacify the masses. Even Benjamin could write of these times: ‘Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into a bottomless abyss.’ Weber’s iron cage of capitalism had subdued humans during working hours; now the culture industry subdued them at their leisure changing them increasingly from productive beings to consumers, from the Marxist dream of creatively vital humans to stupefied moviegoers all giggling at the same thing.
What it was to be human was changing radically in this Fordist modern age. Like an importunate lover, monopoly capitalism had come on too quickly in its flashy new motor promising all kinds of ruinous temptations to the masses. ‘A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and beneath these clouds, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body’, wrote Benjamin. To be human under such conditions was to find oneself, as Lukacs put it in 1920, transcendentally homeless, longing nostalgically for what was lost.
To be human involved being alienated from the machine-like, functional replaceable thing one had become.
In Capital in 1867 Marx wrote about the fetishism of commodities, how human consciousness becomes reified and how the class consciousness necessary for proletarian revolution can be thwarted. The Marxists gathering at Ilmenau were living under a more advanced form of capitalism than the one Marx had described. Why was socialist revolution increasingly unlikely in the 1920s? Because the reified structure of society, the alienation of workers and the commodity fetishism of the modern world were so complete that they militated against the class consciousness necessary for such a revolution.
But what do these terms mean? Alienation? Reification? Class consciousness? Commodity fetishism? Think of the chair you’re sitting on, or the iPhone to which you’re umbilically linked. A chair is a commodity not because you can sit on it, but because it was produced by humans to be traded. It has value, that is to say, not because value is a natural property of the chair, but because each commodity has a use value, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. This is all very sensible and straightforward, but hold on to your hat (also a commodity) because we’re going into a spectral realm. Under capitalism, the things that humans make take on phantasmagoric lives of their own. Marx’s Capital is not just a forbidding tome of philosophical and economic thought, but a racy gothic novel, a Frankenstein-like tale of how we created a monster (capitalism) from which we are alienated and which, by means of class struggle, we will slay
The crack humans opened in the world that allowed all these monstrous things in is the gap between use value and exchange value. Through that gap came the corrupting flood of commodities. Here comes one now: it’s Apple launching a fatuous new iPhone minimally different from its predecessor. When a chair or an iPhone is sold, it is exchanged for another commodity (money for instance). The exchange takes no account of the labour that went into the chairs making, still less that, for example, of Apple’s overstressed and underpaid workers, some of whom have contemplated suicide in order to escape the penal servitude of manufacturing ostensibly must-have gizmos for you and me.
But that’s only one part of the ghost story. The other has to do with what happens when the worker is paid wages for her labour. For Marx, the wage relationship between capitalist and worker takes no account of their respective social positions or of their social relations. The labour that produced the value in the form of a coat is treated as an abstract commodity that is equivalent to any other commodity, just as the exchange value of the chair detaches the chair from its use value. This is what Marx calls commodity fetishism.
Strikingly, both Marx and later psychoanalytical thinkers derived their accounts of fetishism from nineteenth-century European attitudes to African religions.‘ Just as, in some religions, an object invested with supernatural powers becomes a fetish for those who worship it, so commodities under capitalism are accorded magical powers and illusory autonomy. The strange illusions unleashed under capitalism, for Marx, aren’t just one but many: sometimes the relations between humans become a relation between things; sometimes value appears as what is not a natural property of the thing; sometimes the commodity takes on a life of its own and becomes personified. But, Lukécs argued, such commodity fetishism, which existed in Marx’s day, has become all-pervasive in the modern age. Under capitalism the properties of objects, subjects and social relations become reified or ‘thinglike’ in a particular way. According to Lukacs, the mechanisation and specialisation of industrial work processes fragments human experience, leading to an attitude of ‘contemplation’ where one passively adapts to a law-like system of social ‘second nature’ and to an objectifying stance towards one’s own mental states and capacities. The commodity form, he wrote:
stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of ’ like the various objects of the external world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic ‘qualities’ into play without their being subjected increasingly to this reifying process.“
Reification affects relations between persons, and even within the person: one becomes an object to oneself, self-alienated as well as alienated from other humans, particularly those With whom we should be expressing class solidarity. .
This implies that objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor. Hypostatisation, a term that runs through Frankfurt School writing like a thread, refers to an effect of reification which results from the fallacy of supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist. It’s a word that crops up many, many times in the Frankfurt School’s writings, as a jibe to thinkers of lesser stamp. The concept is related to, but distinct from, other terms in Marx’s technical arsenal. Alienation is the general condition of human estrangement. Reification is a specific form of alienation. Commodity fetishism is a specific form of reification.”
The result of all this, for the Frankfurt School thinkers, is that under capitalism we don’t so much inhabit a world as a phantasmagoria, a world turned upside down in which things become persons and persons things, and things (both human and non-human) take on a spectral life of their own. It was this spectral life of things that haunted the writings of Walter Benjamin. It helps explain the shift from his first attempt at memorialising his childhood in his Berlin Chronicle of the 1920s to the obsessively reworked Berlin Childhood of the 19305. In the process, as we saw earlier, Benjamin’s remembrance becomes increasingly depopulated, his attention focusing on things rather than people. But the point here is that in a phantasmagoric society dominated by commodity fetishism, things could stand in for persons and vice versa; perhaps even that things, bearing the Proustian imprint of pasts painfully recalled, could serve better as fetish guides to our lost childhoods than mere remembered humans.
But what Benjamin draws attention to again and again, particularly in his long laboured-over but at his death incomplete Arcades Project, is how the endless substitutability of commodities (both things and humans), and our immersion, under capitalism, in a fantasy world of material well-being, ensure that we lose sight of the class struggle that underpins this phantasmagoria. It is as though capitalism, having rubbed out the true nature of class struggle and airbrushed historical contingency, had covered up the tracks of its murder and diverted us from our detective work with the captivating allure of commodities. But that seeming heaven is exposed by Benjamin as a kind of unwitting damnation a ring of hell in which the consumerist faithful endlessly buy and sell, eternally deluded in believing that this activity will bring fulfilment.
This was, indeed, the hell that Benjamin explored in the Arcades Project, a Paris that, for him, created the modern world by erasing the conditions of its existence. The Arcades Project is throughout bent on contrasting alluring appearance with Marxist reality. The nineteenth-century Paris he described in this book was not so much a city as a beguiling phantasmagoria akin to the one he had witnessed in the Kaiserpanorama in Berlin as a child. Paris, to Benjamin, itself a ‘conse~ quence of the reifying representation of civilisation’. What would the world be like if there wasn’t commodity fetishism? If goods were made for use rather than for sale? It had become almost impossible even to imagine because capitalism had made the way in which it functioned seem natural or immutable. As Slavoj Ziiek later wrote: ‘the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own mad dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people’. For Lukacs, the madness was such that real people didn’t know their real needs: hence the difference between actual and ascribed consciousness.
Classical economists such as Smith and Ricardo saw nothing mad in the free-market capitalist economy; rather, they treated prices, profits and rents, the law of supply and demand, as natural phenomena. Marx’s incendiary point was that these were historically specific features of a particular economic system. They had not existed under feudalism; nor, moreover, would they under communism.
The Marxist article of faith, then, is that the horror story must end. Thus, for instance, in his preface to Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, Eric Hobsbawm suggested that Marx was right to argue that the contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment: a system of exploitation and of ‘endless accumulation’ can never be overcome: that at some point in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of this essentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described as capitalism.
But when? That is the $64,000 question. Henryk Grossman, Widely held as the Frankfurt School thinker who theorised when that the (sic) mad dance would end, argued in The Law of Accumulation and Collapse of the Capitalist System (1929) that because capitalism increases the productivity of human labour and accelerates the production of use values, there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall and, ultimately, for capitalism to create the conditions of its own demise.
It happens like this: what Marx calls labour power (roughly, the ability to work) yields surplus value to the capitalist over and above the costs in wages. Capitalists reduce commodity prices to undercut rivals, often by introducing new technology or machinery to increase labour productivity. But as output expands, constant capital (machinery, equipment, raw materials) expands more rapidly than variable capital (invested in wages to labour). So what? Well, as a greater share of investment goes into machinery and plant, rather than the living labour that produced surplus value, which under Marxist economics is the source of capitalist profits, the rate of profit to the total capital invested declines. Grossman apparently used to lecture at Frankfurt wearing white gloves and carrying a cane. One can imagine him with a flourish of the cane and a magician’s ‘Abracadabra!’ on clinching the ramifications of this equation.
But, of course, as you’ll have noticed, capitalism hasn’t ended. Why? Because capitalists found other means of staving off the calamitous decline of p and thereby their doom such as exporting loan capital or the crazed speculation that Ziiek mentions. Such speculations could defer capitalist oblivion to the long term, that functionally irrelevant prospect in which we are all, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, dead. Indeed, in The Law of Accumulation Grossman argued against Rosa Luxemburg’s account of the necessary collapse of capitalism, in which she proposed that only when there are no non-capitalist markets left to be exploited will capitalism founder.
That, he thought, could take ages. For Grossman, her proof or the absolute economic limits to capitalism comes close to the idea that the end of capitalism is a distant project because the capitalisation of non-capitalist countries is the work of centuries’. Centuries? Only the most laid-back Marxists could wait that long.
In the same year as Henryk Grossman’s masterpiece appeared, perhaps the biggest crisis for capitalism in the twentieth century occurred when the speculative bubble burst on the New York stock exchange, starting a world economic crisis and undermining what Iohn Kenneth Galbraith called the ‘faith of Americans in quick, effortless enrichment in the stock market’.“1 But capitalism didn’t fall. Instead, capitalists dusted themselves down, renewed their faith in quick, effortless enrichment and started the mad dance again.
Grossman did not specify when capitalism would end. Rather, he is most bracing in The Law of Accumulation not for dating the revolution but for exploding the myths that suggested capitalism could carry on in principle forever and that it was not prone to crises that would ultimately destroy it that the economic disruption was just a problem of disproportionality between different parts of the economy, or that workers’ consumer spending was insufficient to buy overproduced goods. The barrier to capitalist accumulation, as Marx explained and as Grossman elaborated, was capital itself.
In such circumstances, it’s a great shame that Grossman’s analysis has been derided as predicting the automatic collapse of capitalism. ‘The full ramifications of his argument, whose predictions have obviously failed to come true’, writes Martin Jay, ‘need not detain us here. Let it be said, however, that the quietistic implications of his thesis, similar to those of all Marxist interpretations that stress objective forces over subjective revolutionary praxis, were not lost on some of his contemporaries.“ That seems a particularly unfair charge to throw at the one Frankfurt School scholar who, unlike his colleagues philsophising from their armchairs, had seen active service in the socialist struggle. Rather, the truth of the matter is that Grossman adhered to the Leninist notion that the revolutionary process was dialectical and that capitalism’s fall was one in which workers were actors in history rather than spectators observing the economic forces.
True, much of Grossman’s work was directed against those who thought that the revolution could be successfully launched irrespective of the propitiousness of the circumstances. He wrote in 1928, for example, that for a revolution to break out, it is usually insufficient for the lower classes ‘not to want [to live in the old way], it is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable [to live in the old way], that it becomes objectively impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their domination in unchanged form’. Rather, Grossman was arguing, in a non-quietist manner, that revolution could only take place when the objective conditions could be exploited by a revolutionary party conscious of the historic role of the proletariat. The revolutionary process he envisaged was dialectical: capitalism created the working class, and the circumstances in which it was compelled to struggle against capitalism. It was during struggle that the proletariat could become aware that the destruction of capitalism was necessary for its self-liberation.
The chastening words here are ‘could become’, and they take us back to what worried the Marxists gathered in Ilmenau in 1923. Lukacs had argued in the previous year’s History and Class Consciousness that capitalist society is reified. It was the reification of capitalist society that shifted Marxism from the firebrand optimism of The Communist Manifesto to the melancholy resignation seeping through the Frankfurt School: it was as if, under the modern capitalism that confronted Marxists in 19205 Germany, the proletariat had become the gravediggers not of the bourgeoisie but of their own hopes and aspirations, so alienated from their labour and from themselves that they couldn’t remember what it was they were burying.
To understand this alienation, Lukacs and the Frankfurt School read Marx’s early account of it in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. There Marx draws on the notion of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) in which an alienated soul is divided and whose aspirations to universality are thwarted. Hegel’s unhappy consciousness is the ‘consciousness of self as a dual natured, merely contradictory thing’. For the early Marx, the worker is similarly alienated, finding not joy in her work but slavery before a commodity system that exploits and denies what labour could have been, joyful and fulfilling. ”This Hegelian theme of self-division and alienation wasseized on by Marx‘s predecessor Feuerbach who, in his Essence Of Christianity, came to the view that the Christian God was a projection of an essence otherwise denied to humanity. For Feuerbach, what we were alienated from as human beings, we turned into an object and called God. For Marx, by contrast, alienation was the necessary consequence of capitalism, distancing the worker from herself and her work. She becomes part of a system that exploits her and her fellow workers. As a result, instead of the working Class being capable of changing the conditions under which it lives, it becomes passive in the face of the apparently autonomous exchanges of commodities. It becomes, in extremis, unable to create the conditions for its own self-liberation.
But if all these thoughts about alienation, commodity fetishism and reification are in Marx already, why was Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness so influential, especially for the Frankfurt School? For one thing, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in which Marx developed that theory of alienation were not published until the late 1920s in Moscow, so Lukacs’s Hegelianised Marxism of a decade earlier seemed prescient or, rather, he had got to the same point as Marx had in his early neglected writings. Moreover, Lukacs argues that the commodity fetishism Marx set out in Capital was, under more primitive economic systems, merely episodic. Now, by contrast, it pervades society entirely. Lukacs wrote:
With the modern ‘psychological’ analysis of the work-process (in Taylorlsm) this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker’s soul: even his psychological attributes are separated from his total personality and placed in opposition to it so as to facilitate their integration into specialised rational systems and their reduction to statistically viable concepts.
As a result revolution was less likely than ever, especially in an advanced, rationally administered society like Germany.
Lukacs (in his masterpiece of 1922 History and Class Consciousness) posited that the proletariat, once conscious of its historic role, would destroy capitalist society. Class consciousness was understood by Lukacs as a result of the proletariat being the product of the contradictions of history, chief among which is the exploitation of its labour under capitalism. But then Lukacs made a key distinction between the ascribed and actual consciousness of the proletariat- the higher ascribed consciousness was embodied in the revolutionary party, while actual consciousness may not be able to grasp its historic role. The party, in a sense, knows what is good for the proletariat- how it must act, and what the historic significance of its suffering under capitalism is. Into this gap between ascribed and actual consciousness, too, the Frankfurt School, as we will see, would insert itself, trying to understand what it was about capitalism’s oppressed that stopped them rising up to end their bondage to be delighted, rather, with the very chains that bound them.
Revolutionary leaders such as Lenin didn’t suffer from such false consciousness- they were adepts at revolution and understood the historic role of the proletariat which, as Lukacs put it in Hegelian terms, was to be the subject-object of history, by which he meant that instead of the proletariat being, as it currently was, in a mode of contemplation or passivity, it became an active subject engaged in the production of the world in which it could flourish. But why was there a gap between actual and ascribed class consciousness? Lukacs’s answer to that is what made his book revolutionary in Marxist theory and go on to have a profound influence on the Frankfurt School. To account for the gap, Lukécs developed the notion of reification, extending Marx‘s analysis of the ‘fetishism of the commodity form’ in Capital. The problems of society, perhaps even the reason the German Revolution had failed, could be traced to a riddle of the commodity form that Marx wrote about at the start of his master work.
Lukacs’s book discussed a new form of alienation that confronted industrial workers in the 1920s. Industrial nations such as Germany, Britain and the United States were now entering what became known as the Fordist era, a period of mass production. In 1913, Henry Ford had installed the first moving assembly line for the mass production of motor cars in Detroit, reducing the time it took to build a Model T Ford from twelve hours to two and a half. Fordism’s new industrial revolution changed production, consumption, culture and thereby what it was to be human. At the level of production, by training his workers to specialise in one of the eighty-four discrete steps necessary in the car production, and by deploying motion-study expert Frederick Taylor to make those jobs even more efficient, Ford raised output, enabling him to cut the prices of the finished cars and, crucially, change the relationship between workers and the product of their labour. For philosophers as far back as Spinoza and, in particular, for Karl Marx, humans were productive beings, who were only alive to the extent that they grasped the world outside themselves in the act of expressing their own specific powers. Mass production, through division of labour, increasingly thwarted the possibility of such fulfilment. The idea of personally fulfilling labour, sanely remunerated and manifesting artisanal skills, was the stuff of William Morris’s anti-machine-age socialist-medievalist fantasies.
Assembly lines sped up the production processes but diminished workers: they increasingly became cogs in a machine, or, worse, rendered obsolete by machines. For example, Henry Ford’s car factories included machines that could stamp out parts automatically far faster than mere humans. Humans were becoming unlit for productive purpose, a fact that, for Marxists who deemed humans to be essentially productive beings, might have seemed existentially tragic were such terms part of their theoretical vocabulary. ‘When I’m through' Ford said of his cars, ‘about everybody will have one.’ Humans weren’t just becoming machines or being replaced by them,
but were becoming desiring machines their identities defined through their more or less passive consumption of mass-produced goods.
At the level of culture, Fordism made the world modern. Those mass-produced goods included not just Model T Fords, but also Charlie Chaplin films. Mechanisation didn’t just revolutionise industry but also industrialised art, speeding up the possibilities of production and distribution, making new art forms cinema, photography possible and making old ones -novels, painting, theatre seem sluggish. Speed, economy, the ephemeral and the entertaining were the hallmarks of mass-produced culture. While Italian Futurists eulogised on the machine age’s unleashing of velocity, and while, as we will see, Walter Benjamin saw revolutionary potential in new art forms, others bemoaned the pace of cultural production. ‘In all the arts the output of trash is both relatively and absolutely greater than it was’, wrote Aldous Huxley in 1934.
But it wasn’t only conservative dystopians who worried about mass-produced culture. For Frankfurt School thinkers like Horkheimer and Adorno, if not Benjamin, this output of trash had a function: to pacify the masses. Even Benjamin could write of these times: ‘Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into a bottomless abyss.’ Weber’s iron cage of capitalism had subdued humans during working hours; now the culture industry subdued them at their leisure changing them increasingly from productive beings to consumers, from the Marxist dream of creatively vital humans to stupefied moviegoers all giggling at the same thing.
What it was to be human was changing radically in this Fordist modern age. Like an importunate lover, monopoly capitalism had come on too quickly in its flashy new motor promising all kinds of ruinous temptations to the masses. ‘A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and beneath these clouds, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body’, wrote Benjamin. To be human under such conditions was to find oneself, as Lukacs put it in 1920, transcendentally homeless, longing nostalgically for what was lost.
To be human involved being alienated from the machine-like, functional replaceable thing one had become.
In Capital in 1867 Marx wrote about the fetishism of commodities, how human consciousness becomes reified and how the class consciousness necessary for proletarian revolution can be thwarted. The Marxists gathering at Ilmenau were living under a more advanced form of capitalism than the one Marx had described. Why was socialist revolution increasingly unlikely in the 1920s? Because the reified structure of society, the alienation of workers and the commodity fetishism of the modern world were so complete that they militated against the class consciousness necessary for such a revolution.
But what do these terms mean? Alienation? Reification? Class consciousness? Commodity fetishism? Think of the chair you’re sitting on, or the iPhone to which you’re umbilically linked. A chair is a commodity not because you can sit on it, but because it was produced by humans to be traded. It has value, that is to say, not because value is a natural property of the chair, but because each commodity has a use value, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. This is all very sensible and straightforward, but hold on to your hat (also a commodity) because we’re going into a spectral realm. Under capitalism, the things that humans make take on phantasmagoric lives of their own. Marx’s Capital is not just a forbidding tome of philosophical and economic thought, but a racy gothic novel, a Frankenstein-like tale of how we created a monster (capitalism) from which we are alienated and which, by means of class struggle, we will slay
The crack humans opened in the world that allowed all these monstrous things in is the gap between use value and exchange value. Through that gap came the corrupting flood of commodities. Here comes one now: it’s Apple launching a fatuous new iPhone minimally different from its predecessor. When a chair or an iPhone is sold, it is exchanged for another commodity (money for instance). The exchange takes no account of the labour that went into the chairs making, still less that, for example, of Apple’s overstressed and underpaid workers, some of whom have contemplated suicide in order to escape the penal servitude of manufacturing ostensibly must-have gizmos for you and me.
But that’s only one part of the ghost story. The other has to do with what happens when the worker is paid wages for her labour. For Marx, the wage relationship between capitalist and worker takes no account of their respective social positions or of their social relations. The labour that produced the value in the form of a coat is treated as an abstract commodity that is equivalent to any other commodity, just as the exchange value of the chair detaches the chair from its use value. This is what Marx calls commodity fetishism.
Strikingly, both Marx and later psychoanalytical thinkers derived their accounts of fetishism from nineteenth-century European attitudes to African religions.‘ Just as, in some religions, an object invested with supernatural powers becomes a fetish for those who worship it, so commodities under capitalism are accorded magical powers and illusory autonomy. The strange illusions unleashed under capitalism, for Marx, aren’t just one but many: sometimes the relations between humans become a relation between things; sometimes value appears as what is not a natural property of the thing; sometimes the commodity takes on a life of its own and becomes personified. But, Lukécs argued, such commodity fetishism, which existed in Marx’s day, has become all-pervasive in the modern age. Under capitalism the properties of objects, subjects and social relations become reified or ‘thinglike’ in a particular way. According to Lukacs, the mechanisation and specialisation of industrial work processes fragments human experience, leading to an attitude of ‘contemplation’ where one passively adapts to a law-like system of social ‘second nature’ and to an objectifying stance towards one’s own mental states and capacities. The commodity form, he wrote:
stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of ’ like the various objects of the external world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic ‘qualities’ into play without their being subjected increasingly to this reifying process.“
Reification affects relations between persons, and even within the person: one becomes an object to oneself, self-alienated as well as alienated from other humans, particularly those With whom we should be expressing class solidarity. .
This implies that objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor. Hypostatisation, a term that runs through Frankfurt School writing like a thread, refers to an effect of reification which results from the fallacy of supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist. It’s a word that crops up many, many times in the Frankfurt School’s writings, as a jibe to thinkers of lesser stamp. The concept is related to, but distinct from, other terms in Marx’s technical arsenal. Alienation is the general condition of human estrangement. Reification is a specific form of alienation. Commodity fetishism is a specific form of reification.”
The result of all this, for the Frankfurt School thinkers, is that under capitalism we don’t so much inhabit a world as a phantasmagoria, a world turned upside down in which things become persons and persons things, and things (both human and non-human) take on a spectral life of their own. It was this spectral life of things that haunted the writings of Walter Benjamin. It helps explain the shift from his first attempt at memorialising his childhood in his Berlin Chronicle of the 1920s to the obsessively reworked Berlin Childhood of the 19305. In the process, as we saw earlier, Benjamin’s remembrance becomes increasingly depopulated, his attention focusing on things rather than people. But the point here is that in a phantasmagoric society dominated by commodity fetishism, things could stand in for persons and vice versa; perhaps even that things, bearing the Proustian imprint of pasts painfully recalled, could serve better as fetish guides to our lost childhoods than mere remembered humans.
But what Benjamin draws attention to again and again, particularly in his long laboured-over but at his death incomplete Arcades Project, is how the endless substitutability of commodities (both things and humans), and our immersion, under capitalism, in a fantasy world of material well-being, ensure that we lose sight of the class struggle that underpins this phantasmagoria. It is as though capitalism, having rubbed out the true nature of class struggle and airbrushed historical contingency, had covered up the tracks of its murder and diverted us from our detective work with the captivating allure of commodities. But that seeming heaven is exposed by Benjamin as a kind of unwitting damnation a ring of hell in which the consumerist faithful endlessly buy and sell, eternally deluded in believing that this activity will bring fulfilment.
This was, indeed, the hell that Benjamin explored in the Arcades Project, a Paris that, for him, created the modern world by erasing the conditions of its existence. The Arcades Project is throughout bent on contrasting alluring appearance with Marxist reality. The nineteenth-century Paris he described in this book was not so much a city as a beguiling phantasmagoria akin to the one he had witnessed in the Kaiserpanorama in Berlin as a child. Paris, to Benjamin, itself a ‘conse~ quence of the reifying representation of civilisation’. What would the world be like if there wasn’t commodity fetishism? If goods were made for use rather than for sale? It had become almost impossible even to imagine because capitalism had made the way in which it functioned seem natural or immutable. As Slavoj Ziiek later wrote: ‘the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own mad dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people’. For Lukacs, the madness was such that real people didn’t know their real needs: hence the difference between actual and ascribed consciousness.
Classical economists such as Smith and Ricardo saw nothing mad in the free-market capitalist economy; rather, they treated prices, profits and rents, the law of supply and demand, as natural phenomena. Marx’s incendiary point was that these were historically specific features of a particular economic system. They had not existed under feudalism; nor, moreover, would they under communism.
The Marxist article of faith, then, is that the horror story must end. Thus, for instance, in his preface to Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, Eric Hobsbawm suggested that Marx was right to argue that the contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment: a system of exploitation and of ‘endless accumulation’ can never be overcome: that at some point in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of this essentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described as capitalism.
But when? That is the $64,000 question. Henryk Grossman, Widely held as the Frankfurt School thinker who theorised when that the (sic) mad dance would end, argued in The Law of Accumulation and Collapse of the Capitalist System (1929) that because capitalism increases the productivity of human labour and accelerates the production of use values, there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall and, ultimately, for capitalism to create the conditions of its own demise.
It happens like this: what Marx calls labour power (roughly, the ability to work) yields surplus value to the capitalist over and above the costs in wages. Capitalists reduce commodity prices to undercut rivals, often by introducing new technology or machinery to increase labour productivity. But as output expands, constant capital (machinery, equipment, raw materials) expands more rapidly than variable capital (invested in wages to labour). So what? Well, as a greater share of investment goes into machinery and plant, rather than the living labour that produced surplus value, which under Marxist economics is the source of capitalist profits, the rate of profit to the total capital invested declines. Grossman apparently used to lecture at Frankfurt wearing white gloves and carrying a cane. One can imagine him with a flourish of the cane and a magician’s ‘Abracadabra!’ on clinching the ramifications of this equation.
But, of course, as you’ll have noticed, capitalism hasn’t ended. Why? Because capitalists found other means of staving off the calamitous decline of p and thereby their doom such as exporting loan capital or the crazed speculation that Ziiek mentions. Such speculations could defer capitalist oblivion to the long term, that functionally irrelevant prospect in which we are all, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, dead. Indeed, in The Law of Accumulation Grossman argued against Rosa Luxemburg’s account of the necessary collapse of capitalism, in which she proposed that only when there are no non-capitalist markets left to be exploited will capitalism founder.
That, he thought, could take ages. For Grossman, her proof or the absolute economic limits to capitalism comes close to the idea that the end of capitalism is a distant project because the capitalisation of non-capitalist countries is the work of centuries’. Centuries? Only the most laid-back Marxists could wait that long.
In the same year as Henryk Grossman’s masterpiece appeared, perhaps the biggest crisis for capitalism in the twentieth century occurred when the speculative bubble burst on the New York stock exchange, starting a world economic crisis and undermining what Iohn Kenneth Galbraith called the ‘faith of Americans in quick, effortless enrichment in the stock market’.“1 But capitalism didn’t fall. Instead, capitalists dusted themselves down, renewed their faith in quick, effortless enrichment and started the mad dance again.
Grossman did not specify when capitalism would end. Rather, he is most bracing in The Law of Accumulation not for dating the revolution but for exploding the myths that suggested capitalism could carry on in principle forever and that it was not prone to crises that would ultimately destroy it that the economic disruption was just a problem of disproportionality between different parts of the economy, or that workers’ consumer spending was insufficient to buy overproduced goods. The barrier to capitalist accumulation, as Marx explained and as Grossman elaborated, was capital itself.
In such circumstances, it’s a great shame that Grossman’s analysis has been derided as predicting the automatic collapse of capitalism. ‘The full ramifications of his argument, whose predictions have obviously failed to come true’, writes Martin Jay, ‘need not detain us here. Let it be said, however, that the quietistic implications of his thesis, similar to those of all Marxist interpretations that stress objective forces over subjective revolutionary praxis, were not lost on some of his contemporaries.“ That seems a particularly unfair charge to throw at the one Frankfurt School scholar who, unlike his colleagues philsophising from their armchairs, had seen active service in the socialist struggle. Rather, the truth of the matter is that Grossman adhered to the Leninist notion that the revolutionary process was dialectical and that capitalism’s fall was one in which workers were actors in history rather than spectators observing the economic forces.
True, much of Grossman’s work was directed against those who thought that the revolution could be successfully launched irrespective of the propitiousness of the circumstances. He wrote in 1928, for example, that for a revolution to break out, it is usually insufficient for the lower classes ‘not to want [to live in the old way], it is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable [to live in the old way], that it becomes objectively impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their domination in unchanged form’. Rather, Grossman was arguing, in a non-quietist manner, that revolution could only take place when the objective conditions could be exploited by a revolutionary party conscious of the historic role of the proletariat. The revolutionary process he envisaged was dialectical: capitalism created the working class, and the circumstances in which it was compelled to struggle against capitalism. It was during struggle that the proletariat could become aware that the destruction of capitalism was necessary for its self-liberation.
The chastening words here are ‘could become’, and they take us back to what worried the Marxists gathered in Ilmenau in 1923. Lukacs had argued in the previous year’s History and Class Consciousness that capitalist society is reified. It was the reification of capitalist society that shifted Marxism from the firebrand optimism of The Communist Manifesto to the melancholy resignation seeping through the Frankfurt School: it was as if, under the modern capitalism that confronted Marxists in 19205 Germany, the proletariat had become the gravediggers not of the bourgeoisie but of their own hopes and aspirations, so alienated from their labour and from themselves that they couldn’t remember what it was they were burying.
To understand this alienation, Lukacs and the Frankfurt School read Marx’s early account of it in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. There Marx draws on the notion of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) in which an alienated soul is divided and whose aspirations to universality are thwarted. Hegel’s unhappy consciousness is the ‘consciousness of self as a dual natured, merely contradictory thing’. For the early Marx, the worker is similarly alienated, finding not joy in her work but slavery before a commodity system that exploits and denies what labour could have been, joyful and fulfilling. ”This Hegelian theme of self-division and alienation wasseized on by Marx‘s predecessor Feuerbach who, in his Essence Of Christianity, came to the view that the Christian God was a projection of an essence otherwise denied to humanity. For Feuerbach, what we were alienated from as human beings, we turned into an object and called God. For Marx, by contrast, alienation was the necessary consequence of capitalism, distancing the worker from herself and her work. She becomes part of a system that exploits her and her fellow workers. As a result, instead of the working Class being capable of changing the conditions under which it lives, it becomes passive in the face of the apparently autonomous exchanges of commodities. It becomes, in extremis, unable to create the conditions for its own self-liberation.
But if all these thoughts about alienation, commodity fetishism and reification are in Marx already, why was Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness so influential, especially for the Frankfurt School? For one thing, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in which Marx developed that theory of alienation were not published until the late 1920s in Moscow, so Lukacs’s Hegelianised Marxism of a decade earlier seemed prescient or, rather, he had got to the same point as Marx had in his early neglected writings. Moreover, Lukacs argues that the commodity fetishism Marx set out in Capital was, under more primitive economic systems, merely episodic. Now, by contrast, it pervades society entirely. Lukacs wrote:
With the modern ‘psychological’ analysis of the work-process (in Taylorlsm) this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker’s soul: even his psychological attributes are separated from his total personality and placed in opposition to it so as to facilitate their integration into specialised rational systems and their reduction to statistically viable concepts.
As a result revolution was less likely than ever, especially in an advanced, rationally administered society like Germany.
Fanny T slumming in Cincinnati
"Are any of you ill? our landlord asked.
No. We are all quite well.
"Then madam; I must tell you, that I cannot accomodate you on these terms; we have no family tea-drinkings here, and you must live either with me and my wife or not at all in my house.”
This was said with an air of authority that almost precluded reply, but I ventured a sort of apologetic hint that we were strangers, and unaccustomed to the manners of the country.
"Our manners are very good manners, and we don't wish any changes from England,” rejoined our sturdy landlord, with an aspect that assuredly did not indicate any very affectionate partiality to the country he named. I thought of mine host of the Washington afterwards, when reading Scott’s Anne of Geierstein; he, in truth, strongly resembled the innkeeper therein immortalised, who made his guests eat, drink, and sleep, just where, when, and how he pleased. I made no further-remonstrance but determined to hasten my removal. This we achieved the next day to our great satisfaction. We were soon settled in our‘new dwelling, which looked neat and comfortable enough; but we speedily found that it was devoid of nearly all the accommodation that Europeans conceive necessary to decency and comfort. No pump, no cistern, no drain of any kind, no dustman s cart or any other visible means of getting rid of the rubbish, which vanishes with such celerity in London that one has no time to think of its existence; but which accumulated so rapidly at Cincinnati that I sent for my landlord to know in what manner refuse of all kinds was to be disposed of. ‘ Your help will just have to fix them all into the middle of the street; but you must mind, old woman, that it is the middle. I expect you don't know as we have got a law what forbids throwing such things at the sides of the streets; they must all be cast right into the middle, and the pigs soon takes them off."
In truth the pigs are constantly seen doing Herculean Service in this way through every quarter of the City: and though it is not very agreeable to live surrounded by herds of these unsavoury animals, it is well they are so numerous, and so active in their capacity of scavengers; for without them the streets would soon be choked up with all sorts 'of substances, in every stage of decomposition'.
We had heard so much of Cincinnati, its beauty, wealth, and unequalled prosperity, that when we left Memphis to go thither... for three dreary months we beheld no other architecture than what our ship furnished, and except at New Orleans, hardly a trace of human habitations. The sight of bricks and mortar was really refreshing, and a house of 3 stories looked splendid.
and
The “ simple ” manner of living in Western America was more distasteful to me from its levelling effects on the manners of the people, than from the Personal privations that it rendered necessary; and yet, till I was without them, I was in no degree aware of the many pleasurable sensations derived from the little elegances and refinements enjoyed by the middle classes in Europe. There were many circumstances, too trifling even for my gossiping pages, Which pressed themselves daily and hourly upon us, and which forced us to remember painfully that we were not at home. It requires an abler pen than mine to trace the connection which I am persuaded exists between these deficiencies and the minds and manners of the people. All animal wants are supplied profusely at Cincinnati, and at a very easy rate; but, alas! these go but a little way in the history of a day's enjoyment. The total and universal want of good, or even pleasing, manners, both in males and females, is so remarkable, that I was constantly endeavouring to account for it. It certainly does not proceed from want of intellect: have Iistened to much dull and heavy conversation in America, but rarely to any that I could strictly call silly (if I except the everywhere privileged class of very young ladles). They appear to me to have clear heads and active intellects-to be more ignorant on subjects that are only of conventional value, than on such as are of intrinsic importance; but there is no charm, no grace in their conversation. I very seldom, during my whole stay in the country, heard a sentence elegantly turned, and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American.
There is always something either in the expression or the accent that jars the feelings and shocks the taste.
and
But the fate of the more dignified personages, who are left In the other room, is extremely disrnal. The gentlemen spit, talk of elections and the price of produce, and spit again, The ladies look at each other’s dresses till they know every pin by heart; talk of Parson Somebody’s last sermon on the day of judgment, on Dr. T’otherbody's new pills for dyspepsia, till the “tea” is announced, when they all console themselves together for whatever they may have suffered in keeping awake, by taking more tea, coffee, hot cake and custard, hoe cake, johnny cake, waffle cake, and dodger cake, pickled peaches and preserved cucumbers, ham, turkey, hung beef, apple-sauce, and pickled oysters, than ever were prepared in any other country of the known world. After this massive meal is over, they return to the drawing-room, and it always appeared to me that they remained together as long as they could bear it, and then they rise en masse, cloak, bonnet, shawl, and exit.
and
Perhaps the most advantageous feature in Cincinnati is its market, which, for excellence, abundance, and cheapness, can hardly, I should think, be surpassed in any part of the world, if I except the luxury of fruits, which are very inferior to any I have seen in Europe. There are no butchers, fishmongers, or indeed any shops for eatables, except bakeries, as they are called, in the town; everything must be purchased at market.
and
Cincinnati boasts two museums of natural history; both of these contain many respectable specimens, particularly that of Mr. Dorfeuille who has moreover, some highly interesting Indian antiquities. He is a man of taste and Science, but a collection formed strictly according to their dictate would by no means satisfy the western metropolis. The people have a most extravagant passion for wax figures and the two museums vie with each other in displaying specimens of this barbarous branch of art. As Mr Dorfeuille cannot trust to his science for attracting the citizens, he has put his ingenuity into requisition, and this has proved to him the surer aid of the two. He has constructed a pandemonium in an upper story of his museum, in which he has congregated all the images of horror that his fertile fancy could devise; dwarfs that by machinery grow into giants before the eyes of the spectator; imps of ebony with eyes of flame; monstrous reptiles devouring youth and beauty; lakes of fire, and mountains of ice; in short, wax, paint, and springs have done wonders. “ To give the scheme some more effect ”, he makes it visible only through a grate of massive iron bars, among which are arranged wires connected with an electrical machine in a neighbouring chamber; should any daring hand or foot obtrude itself within the bars, it receives a smart shock, that often passes through many of the crowd, and the cause being unknown, the effect is exceedingly comic; terror, astonishment, curiosity, all are set in action, and all contribute to make "Dorfeuille’s Hell ” one of the most amusing exhibitions imaginable.
and
I never saw any people who appeared to live so much without amusement as the Cincinnatians. Billiards are forbidden by law so are cards. To sell a pack of cards in Ohio subjects the seller to a penalty of fifty dollars. They have no concerts. They have no dinner parties.
They have a theatre, which is, in fact the only public amusement of this little town. It is very poorly attended. Ladies are rarely seen there, and by far the larger proportion of females deem it an offence against religion to witness the representation of a play. It is in the churches and chapels of the town that the ladies are to be seen in full costume: and I am tempted to believe that a stranger from the continent would be inclined, on first reconnoitering the city, to suppose that the places of worship were the theatres and cafés of the place.
No evening in the week but brings throngs of the young and beautiful to the chapels and meeting-houses, all dressed with care, ‘and sometimes with great pretension; it is there that all display is made, and all fashionable distinction sought. The proportion of gentlemen attending these evening meetings is very small, but often, as might be expected, a sprinkling of smart young clerks makes this sedulous display of ribbons and ringlets intelligible and natural. Were it not for the churches, indeed, I think there might be a general bonfire of best bonnets, for I never could discover any other use for them.
The ladies are too actively employed in the interior of that houses to permit much parading in full dress for morning visits. There are no public gardens or lounging shops of fashionable resort, and were it not for public worship, and private tea-drinkings, all the ladies in Cincinnati would be in danger of becoming perfect recluses.
No. We are all quite well.
"Then madam; I must tell you, that I cannot accomodate you on these terms; we have no family tea-drinkings here, and you must live either with me and my wife or not at all in my house.”
This was said with an air of authority that almost precluded reply, but I ventured a sort of apologetic hint that we were strangers, and unaccustomed to the manners of the country.
"Our manners are very good manners, and we don't wish any changes from England,” rejoined our sturdy landlord, with an aspect that assuredly did not indicate any very affectionate partiality to the country he named. I thought of mine host of the Washington afterwards, when reading Scott’s Anne of Geierstein; he, in truth, strongly resembled the innkeeper therein immortalised, who made his guests eat, drink, and sleep, just where, when, and how he pleased. I made no further-remonstrance but determined to hasten my removal. This we achieved the next day to our great satisfaction. We were soon settled in our‘new dwelling, which looked neat and comfortable enough; but we speedily found that it was devoid of nearly all the accommodation that Europeans conceive necessary to decency and comfort. No pump, no cistern, no drain of any kind, no dustman s cart or any other visible means of getting rid of the rubbish, which vanishes with such celerity in London that one has no time to think of its existence; but which accumulated so rapidly at Cincinnati that I sent for my landlord to know in what manner refuse of all kinds was to be disposed of. ‘ Your help will just have to fix them all into the middle of the street; but you must mind, old woman, that it is the middle. I expect you don't know as we have got a law what forbids throwing such things at the sides of the streets; they must all be cast right into the middle, and the pigs soon takes them off."
In truth the pigs are constantly seen doing Herculean Service in this way through every quarter of the City: and though it is not very agreeable to live surrounded by herds of these unsavoury animals, it is well they are so numerous, and so active in their capacity of scavengers; for without them the streets would soon be choked up with all sorts 'of substances, in every stage of decomposition'.
We had heard so much of Cincinnati, its beauty, wealth, and unequalled prosperity, that when we left Memphis to go thither... for three dreary months we beheld no other architecture than what our ship furnished, and except at New Orleans, hardly a trace of human habitations. The sight of bricks and mortar was really refreshing, and a house of 3 stories looked splendid.
and
The “ simple ” manner of living in Western America was more distasteful to me from its levelling effects on the manners of the people, than from the Personal privations that it rendered necessary; and yet, till I was without them, I was in no degree aware of the many pleasurable sensations derived from the little elegances and refinements enjoyed by the middle classes in Europe. There were many circumstances, too trifling even for my gossiping pages, Which pressed themselves daily and hourly upon us, and which forced us to remember painfully that we were not at home. It requires an abler pen than mine to trace the connection which I am persuaded exists between these deficiencies and the minds and manners of the people. All animal wants are supplied profusely at Cincinnati, and at a very easy rate; but, alas! these go but a little way in the history of a day's enjoyment. The total and universal want of good, or even pleasing, manners, both in males and females, is so remarkable, that I was constantly endeavouring to account for it. It certainly does not proceed from want of intellect: have Iistened to much dull and heavy conversation in America, but rarely to any that I could strictly call silly (if I except the everywhere privileged class of very young ladles). They appear to me to have clear heads and active intellects-to be more ignorant on subjects that are only of conventional value, than on such as are of intrinsic importance; but there is no charm, no grace in their conversation. I very seldom, during my whole stay in the country, heard a sentence elegantly turned, and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American.
There is always something either in the expression or the accent that jars the feelings and shocks the taste.
and
But the fate of the more dignified personages, who are left In the other room, is extremely disrnal. The gentlemen spit, talk of elections and the price of produce, and spit again, The ladies look at each other’s dresses till they know every pin by heart; talk of Parson Somebody’s last sermon on the day of judgment, on Dr. T’otherbody's new pills for dyspepsia, till the “tea” is announced, when they all console themselves together for whatever they may have suffered in keeping awake, by taking more tea, coffee, hot cake and custard, hoe cake, johnny cake, waffle cake, and dodger cake, pickled peaches and preserved cucumbers, ham, turkey, hung beef, apple-sauce, and pickled oysters, than ever were prepared in any other country of the known world. After this massive meal is over, they return to the drawing-room, and it always appeared to me that they remained together as long as they could bear it, and then they rise en masse, cloak, bonnet, shawl, and exit.
and
Perhaps the most advantageous feature in Cincinnati is its market, which, for excellence, abundance, and cheapness, can hardly, I should think, be surpassed in any part of the world, if I except the luxury of fruits, which are very inferior to any I have seen in Europe. There are no butchers, fishmongers, or indeed any shops for eatables, except bakeries, as they are called, in the town; everything must be purchased at market.
and
Cincinnati boasts two museums of natural history; both of these contain many respectable specimens, particularly that of Mr. Dorfeuille who has moreover, some highly interesting Indian antiquities. He is a man of taste and Science, but a collection formed strictly according to their dictate would by no means satisfy the western metropolis. The people have a most extravagant passion for wax figures and the two museums vie with each other in displaying specimens of this barbarous branch of art. As Mr Dorfeuille cannot trust to his science for attracting the citizens, he has put his ingenuity into requisition, and this has proved to him the surer aid of the two. He has constructed a pandemonium in an upper story of his museum, in which he has congregated all the images of horror that his fertile fancy could devise; dwarfs that by machinery grow into giants before the eyes of the spectator; imps of ebony with eyes of flame; monstrous reptiles devouring youth and beauty; lakes of fire, and mountains of ice; in short, wax, paint, and springs have done wonders. “ To give the scheme some more effect ”, he makes it visible only through a grate of massive iron bars, among which are arranged wires connected with an electrical machine in a neighbouring chamber; should any daring hand or foot obtrude itself within the bars, it receives a smart shock, that often passes through many of the crowd, and the cause being unknown, the effect is exceedingly comic; terror, astonishment, curiosity, all are set in action, and all contribute to make "Dorfeuille’s Hell ” one of the most amusing exhibitions imaginable.
and
I never saw any people who appeared to live so much without amusement as the Cincinnatians. Billiards are forbidden by law so are cards. To sell a pack of cards in Ohio subjects the seller to a penalty of fifty dollars. They have no concerts. They have no dinner parties.
They have a theatre, which is, in fact the only public amusement of this little town. It is very poorly attended. Ladies are rarely seen there, and by far the larger proportion of females deem it an offence against religion to witness the representation of a play. It is in the churches and chapels of the town that the ladies are to be seen in full costume: and I am tempted to believe that a stranger from the continent would be inclined, on first reconnoitering the city, to suppose that the places of worship were the theatres and cafés of the place.
No evening in the week but brings throngs of the young and beautiful to the chapels and meeting-houses, all dressed with care, ‘and sometimes with great pretension; it is there that all display is made, and all fashionable distinction sought. The proportion of gentlemen attending these evening meetings is very small, but often, as might be expected, a sprinkling of smart young clerks makes this sedulous display of ribbons and ringlets intelligible and natural. Were it not for the churches, indeed, I think there might be a general bonfire of best bonnets, for I never could discover any other use for them.
The ladies are too actively employed in the interior of that houses to permit much parading in full dress for morning visits. There are no public gardens or lounging shops of fashionable resort, and were it not for public worship, and private tea-drinkings, all the ladies in Cincinnati would be in danger of becoming perfect recluses.
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