"Someone needs to reflect on the sources of human unhappiness and strife. The most basic of these -- mortality -- is not likely to be affected by the advent of a classless society. Neither would classlessness cure broken hearts and failure in love, grief at loss of children, parents or other loved ones -- not just through death (I am struggling with the fact that my daughter has just left for college); illness and diminishment of physical and mental power, failure to accomplish one's own goals, frustration at dealing with people in cooperative situations -- very far from always being a source of joy! And about ten million other things that make life hard. Mental illness -- depression, manic depression, the whole panoply of the DSM. It will not cure loneliness . ."
Andie: I know all these things. I was questioning if they are the material of great art, as we know it in the western tradition I dont love art before everything else, and am not putting it ahead of social justice. And I am not calling into question the value of a classless society. I was merely responding to some what I felt to be bland statements about artists doing art just for the personal satisfaction of it. The compulsion to create seems to come from darker sources, and I was wondering whether people on this list thought those sources would wither away in a classless society. Over the years I have heard a lot of writers called "bourgeois writers", because they wrote about things like adultery, alcoholism, social conformity, competitiveness, as if these were peculiar to bourgeois society. I was just questioning whether people thought those kinds of things would go away in a classless society, and if so, what would art be about.
I thought that among people who are prettty clear about their preference for a classless society, and not apt to have their beliefs shaken by a question about it, it would be ok to ask a question about it.
BobW
The following is childish:
I can't imagine what the "other
> scenarios" or motives of conflict would be in a
> harmonious classless society. Would envy,
> loneliness, vengefulness, insecurity, will to power,
> still exist? If so, that would bring in question
> the hope of a classless society, that a better human
> being would result from it.
Someone needs to reflect on the sources of human unhappiness and strife. The most basic of these -- mortality -- is not likely to be affected by the advent of a classless society. Neither would classlessness cure broken hearts and failure in love, grief at loss of children, parents or other loved ones -- not just through death (I am struggling with the fact that my daughter has just left for college); illness and diminishment of physical and mental power, failure to accomplish one's own goals, frustration at dealing with people in cooperative situations -- very far from always being a source of joy! And about ten million other things that make life hard. Mental illness -- depression, manic depression, the whole panoply of the DSM. It will not cure loneliness for those who find it hard to make friends and it willnot cure the oppression of enforced socializing. It will not cure envy: it will sharpen it, like as not, less envy for things but for accomplishments, since one's failures cannot be not be excused by the unfairness of class. And it's not clear that it would affect vengefulness, or that it would be a good thing to attempt to root out that basic impulse to justice rather than to channel it, but we can disagree about retribution some other time.
Abolition of classes would get rid of several major sources of suffering -- inequality of a degree that allows a few in power to ignore even the basic needs of the many; inequality to a degree that produces disparities of power and wealth that are damaging to self-esteem and self respect; to some degree it would reduce alienation and meaninglessness labor, insofar as necessary labor might be reduced or made or pleasant (some empirical research on coops suggests that we should not be overoptimistic about this); it would do lots of good things. Even the on the very narrowest construction, where ll it would do is enhance democratic control over the economy and reduce absolute poverty, it would be worth having and fighting for.
But to say that if the abolition of classes does not put us on cloud nine, in the Big Rock Candy Mountain or the Land of Cockaigne where all contradictions are resolved and the skies are not cloudy all day, and that it's not worth having or not real if it does do that -- that's childish. It's utopian in the very worst sense.
It's politically destructive to say such a thing, it's shows a certain shallowness of sensibility to even think it. Our lives are determined by luck and randomness, limited by the frail and temporary physical embodiments that give them shape and meaning, and grownups learn the truth in a tragic sense of life. "Call no man happy until he is dead," says Aristotle, and he doesn't mean it's better not to be born.
One would have hoped we might have learned that class oppression is not the only even or the only source of evil, and that some sources of unhappiness and suffering -- whether you can them evils or not -- are just part of the framework of human existence. Read Sophocles and Thucydides and learn. In the Marxist tradition, Sebastiano Timpanario, not coincidentally a classical philologist like Nietzsche (another good source on this) is quite good about these questions. See his On Materialism.
If I seem impatient, it's because I am. We are running out of time to be idiots.
--- Robert Wrubel wrote:
>
>
> John Thornton wrote:
>
> "to imagine that class conflict inspires greater
> artistic passion than personal conflict seems
> to me to miss what makes an artist make art. '
>
> (and)
>
> "In a classless society we would then call upon a
> host of other scenarios
> nearly unimaginable to our mind today."
>
> Precisely, John. I can't imagine what the "other
> scenarios" or motives of conflict would be in a
> harmonious classless society. Would envy,
> loneliness, vengefulness, insecurity, will to power,
> still exist? If so, that would bring in question
> the hope of a classless society, that a better human
> being would result from it. The issue here seems to
> be whether human drives and conflicts, as indicated
> in Freud, for example, are more fundamental than
> class relations in forming character.
>
> I havent really thought this through at all. An
> answer to me might be "yes, human beings would still
> be "fallen", misguided, the source of laughter and
> tragedy, but there would be an overall air of
> justice and reasonableness which would soften
> conflict. But that too seems rather abstract. A
> lot of art arises out of feelings of alienation from
> the majority culture (e.g. Joyce and Ireland; Kafka;
> James Baldwin.) Will there be feelings of
> alienation in the harmonious classless society?
>
> BobW
>
> Robert Wrubel wrote:
> > joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> > >
> > "I've heard this argument lots: that in a
> classless society there would
> > be no motive for art. But I don't buy it.
> Classless society is not a
> > frictionless society -- the frictions would just
> be more interesting:
> > life and death; order and chaos; male and female;
> the cyclical and the
> > linear, the natural and the artificial......all
> the stuff that art loves
> > to deal with.
> >
> > I mean, do people only sing because they're
> oppressed? Have you ever
> > walked through a grove at dusk and heard the avian
> symphonies? Have you
> > ever experienced enough darkness to really see the
> stars at night? Have
> > you ever been in the middle of the ocean with no
> land in sight? Have you
> > ever been transfixed by a beautiful woman? We live
> amidst a lot of
> > jaw-dropping stuff. Great food for Art!"
> >
> > Yes, you could still have a lot of Wordsworth, but
> not all of it:
> >
> > (The commune is too much with us, late and soon,
> > Taking and planning, we lay waste our powers,
> > Little we see in Nature that is ours. . .)
> >
> > There couldnt be tragedy in Aristotle's sense,
> which requires someone of elevated stature, but more
> than that, someone whose fall questions the
> established order.
> >
> > Everything you've mentioned falls into the
> gee-whizz category, which isnt the usual stuff of
> art. The issue may be that art requires conflict
> (inner or outer or both), and where would that come
> from in a perfectly harmonious rational society?
> >
> > But I wasnt trying to make a general argument,
> only that some works like the Marriage of Figaro, or
> Hamlet, wouldnt be possible. The answer to me though
> would be: but all the Sonatas, ensembles, concertos
> and symphonies would. I was almost about to change
> my mind about Marriage, because there is really only
> minor conflict there, and the general atmosphere is
> happy -- but there would still have to be a trivial
> leisured class to laugh at.
> >
> > BobW
>
> Personal conflict is just as important and
> inspirational as class
> conflict if not more so.
> To worry that a classless society would be either
> devoid of great art
> and contain only gee-whizz art or else suffer from
> some notable
> reduction in great art seems to me a worry with no
> foundation.
> People make art because they want to make art and to
> imagine that class
> conflict inspires greater artistic passion that
> personal conflict seems
> to me to miss what makes an artist make art.
> Using The Marriage of Figaro an an example, it is
> only the personal
> aspects of the story that make it interesting. The
> class issues serve as
> a backdrop primarily for the storyteller to use to
> call upon certain
> archetypes. Different archetypes could be used for a
> similar story in a
> classless society that should be just as
> entertaining. To imagine we
> need to be able to laugh at the buffoonery of elites
> because that is
> somehow an irreplaceable type of laughter seems an
> odd argument. Maybe
> that is not what you intend. If not, what exactly
> are you saying?
> In a classless society we would then call upon a
> host of other scenarios
> nearly unimaginable to our mind today.
> Since we no longer believe in the gods of the Greeks
> their tragedy's in
> all probability do not mean the same thing to us as
> they did to them.
> This neither limits our appreciation of them nor
> does it require us to
> gain their specific knowledge to understand them.
> Which is a good thing
> since gaining that episteme is impossible.
>
> John Thornton
>
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