[gallery] Paul Nash’s Landscape of the Megaliths, featured in Adam Thorpe’s On Silbury Hill. Image: Lauren McLean/V&A Images, via the New Statesman
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Poster for a 1917 production of Caliban by the Yellow Sands, a play written for Shakespeare’s tercentenary by Percy MacKaye. An outgrowth of MacKaye’s belief in community theater, it was first performed in St. Louis in 1914 with a cast of 7,000.Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University
Not long ago an enterprising professor at the Harvard Business School named Mike Norton persuaded a big investment bank to let him survey the bank’s rich clients. (The poor people in the survey were millionaires.) In a forthcoming paper, Norton and his colleagues track the effects of getting money on the happiness of people who already have a lot of it: a rich person getting even richer experiences zero gain in happiness. That’s not all that surprising; it’s what Norton asked next that led to an interesting insight. He asked these rich people how happy they were at any given moment. Then he asked them how much money they would need to be even happier. ‘All of them said they needed two to three times more than they had to feel happier,’ says Norton. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that money, above a certain modest sum, does not have the power to buy happiness, and yet even very rich people continue to believe that it does: the happiness will come from the money they don’t yet have. To the general rule that money, above a certain low level, cannot buy happiness there is one exception. 'While spending money upon oneself does nothing for one’s happiness,’ says Norton, 'spending it on others increases happiness.’
‘Social justice’ is an awkward term for an immensely important project, perhaps the most important project, which is to make the world a more equitable, fair, and compassionate place. But the project for social justice has been captured by an elite strata of post-collegiate, digitally-enabled children of privilege, who do not pursue that project as an end, but rather use it as a means with which to compete, socially and professionally, with each other. In that use, they value not speech or actions that actually result in a better world, but rather those that result in greater social reward, which in the digital world is obvious and explicit. That means that they prefer engagement that creates a) outrage and b) jokes, rather than engagement that leads to positive change. In this disregard for actual political success, they reveal their own privilege, as it’s only the privileged who could ever have so little regard for actual, material progress. As long as they are allowed to co-opt the movement for social justice for their own personal aggrandizement, the world will not improve, not for women, people of color, gay and transgender people, or the poor.
I would put that problem in somewhat different terms. I would say that people who habitually traffic in symbolic manipulation — which includes pretty much everyone who spends a great deal of time, vocationally or avocationally, on the internet — tend to overestimate quite dramatically the power of symbolic manipulation. These people are so scrupulously attentive to how symbols (images and words, above all) are being handled in their corner of the online world that they can scarcely be brought to think about the quite concrete suffering and injustice that happen away from their (and everyone else’s) screens. And Freddie is right in saying that this digital myopia limits the possibility of achieving a more just society, especially for people who are too poor to be online all the time.
In his latest speech, Archbishop Welby acknowledged for the first time that the Lambeth conference—a once-in-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops—might never happen again. Nor, he made clear, was it even certain whether the basis existed for convening another “primates’ meeting"—a global gathering of slightly lesser status which would normally take place every couple of years. In any case, he was no longer prepared to take sole responsibility for deciding such matters; instead there should be a "collegial model of leadership” with Anglican leaders from around the world deciding which meetings were worthwhile. Despite all this, the archbishop gallantly insisted, reports of the global club’s death were exaggerated. “The Anglican Communion exists and is flourishing in roughly 165 countries.”That may be sort-of true as far as it goes, but it is rather like the Queen saying that the Commonwealth exists. Of course it does, in the sense that nobody has abolished it, and not many people have left it. But post-imperial arrangements can lose salience very very gradually, to the point where the boundary between existence and non-existence becomes almost imperceptible.
[gallery] smithsonianlibraries:
“not compatible with iOS devices”from Animal mechanism: a treatise on terrestrial and aerial locomotion (1874)
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David Hockney, on his favorite drawing:There’s a drawing by Rembrandt, I think it’s the greatest drawing ever done. It’s in the British Museum and it’s of a family teaching a child to walk, so it’s a universal thing, everybody has experienced this or seen it happen. Everybody. I used to print out Rembrandt drawings big and give them to people and say: “If you find a better drawing send it to me.”And:“I used to say to people, ‘I have a reproduction of the best drawing ever made in my pocket’ and I would pull it out and I would convince them, within a minute, that it was the best. It is a Rembrant from the British Museum of a little family teaching a little girl to walk. Everybody at home has a picture like that. The Rembrant, for me, tells me about who you are. I’m looking at the marks and I can feel his arm. That wouldn’t be possible with a photograph – it would be a performance. Rembrant was not intervening in any way, meaning it is the greatest work of art. You don’t see it at first. It is a virtuoso drawing but it doesn’t shout out.”And:When I look at these marks, I know a Chinese master of the seventeenth century would recognise instantly that this drawing was the work of a master. Very few people could get near this… The tenderness this drawing shows is not possible with photography.
To all of us, I believe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Roman Empire is like a mirror in which we see reflected the brutal, vulgar, powerful yet despairing image of our technological civilization, an imperium which now covers the entire globe, for all nations, capitalist, socialist, and communist, are united in their worship of mass, technique and temporal power. What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash but that … it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth or hope.
[gallery] From this collection of optical illusions. Look at the hi-res version to get the full effect.
