Many of us feel that our societies are a little – or even plain totally – ‘unfair’. But we have a hard time explaining our sense of injustice to the powers that be in a way that sounds rational and without personal pique or bitterness.

That’s why we need John Rawls (1921-2002), a twentieth-century American philosopher who provides us with a failproof model for identifying what truly might be unfair – and how we might gather support for fixing things.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA in 1921, Rawls—nicknamed Jack—was exposed, and responded, to the injustices of the modern world from a very young age. As a child, he witnessed at first hand shockingly deprived areas of Maine, where many of his fellow Americans were evidently being denied the opportunities and support his loving attorney father and social activist mother were able to give him. Rawls also saw the arbitrariness of suffering when two of his brothers died from infections unwittingly contracted from him. If this was not enough, he saw the horrors and lawlessness of the Second World War in the final stages of the European campaign. All this inspired him to go into academia with a far from arcane mission: he wanted to use the power of ideas to change the unjust world he was living in.

Rawls shone academically at Harvard and Cornell and gravitated towards the more worldly philosophers of his day, including Isaiah Berlin, H.L.A. Hart and Stuart Hampshire: all were out to change the world through their work and all became his friends. It was the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971 that properly made Rawls’s name – and is why we continue to revere him now. Having read and widely discussed his book, Bill Clinton was to label Rawls ‘the greatest political philosopher of the twentieth century’– and had him over to the White House for dinner on a regular basis. 

Success never affected Rawls personally. He was a humble and kind man, who took the concerns of others seriously at a political and personal level. He did social work with children and deprived young adults in Boston where he lived. He looked after the financial interests of the children of a colleague who had died prematurely. He had exquisite manners. During a doctoral viva, an elderly Rawls once repositioned himself directly in front of the sun to ensure that one of his nervous young candidates would be spared any glare and so could best focus on the defence of her thesis. 

What, then, does this exemplar of fairness have to tell the modern world? 

1. Things as they are now are patently unfair

The statistics all point to the radical unfairness of society. Comparative charts of life expectancy and income projections direct us to a single overwhelming moral. And yet day-to-day, it can be hard to take this unfairness seriously, especially in relation to our own lives.

That’s because so many voices are on hand telling us that, if we work hard and have ambition, we can make it. Rawls was deeply aware of how the American Dream seeped through the political system and into individual hearts – and he knew its corrosive, regressive influence. Sure enough, there seem to be lots of people who bear out the morality tale to perfection; presidents who came from nothing, entrepreneurs who were once penniless orphans… The media parades them before us with glee. How then can we complain about our lot when they were able to get to the pinnacle?

Rawls never accepted this. Certainly he was aware of the extraordinary success stories, but he was also a statistician who knew that the rags-to-riches tales were overall so negligible as not to warrant serious attention by political theorists. Indeed, to keep mentioning them was merely a clever political sleight of hand designed to prevent the powerful from undertaking the necessary task of reforming society.

As Rawls forcibly reminds us, in the modern United States and many parts of Europe too, if you are born poor, the chances of you remaining poor (and dying young) are simply overwhelming and incontestable. 

But what can we do about this? Rawls was politically canny. He understood that debates about unfairness and what to do about it often get bogged down in arcane details and petty squabbling which mean that year after year, nothing quite gets done.

What Rawls was therefore after was a simple, economical and polemical way to show people how their societies were unfair and what they might do about it – in ways that could cut through the debate and touch people’s hearts as well as minds (for he knew that emotion mattered a lot in politics).

2. Imagine if you were not you

A lot of the reason why societies don’t become fairer is that those who benefit from current injustice are spared the need to think too hard about what it would have been like to be born in different circumstances. They resist change from ingrained bias and prejudice, from a failure of the imagination.

Rawls intuitively understood that he had to get these people on board first – and somehow manage to appeal to their imaginations and their innate moral sense.

So he devised one of the greatest thought experiments in the history of political thought, easily the equal of anything in the work of Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. 

This experiment is called ‘the veil of ignorance’ and through it Rawls asks us to imagine ourselves in a conscious, intelligent state before our own birth, but without any knowledge of what circumstances we were going to be born into; our futures shrouded by a veil of ignorance. Standing high above the planet, we wouldn’t know what sort of parents we’d have, what our neighbourhoods would be like, how the schools would perform, what the local hospital could do for us, how the police and judicial systems might treat us and so on…

The question that Rawls asks us all to contemplate is: if we knew nothing about where we’d end up, what sort of a society would it feel safe to enter? In what kind of political system would it be rational and sane for us to take root – and accept the challenge laid down by the veil of ignorance?

Well, for one thing, certainly not the United States. Of course, the US has a great many socioeconomic positions it would be truly delightful to be born into. Vast swathes of the country enjoy good schools, safe neighbourhoods, great access to colleges, fast tracks into prestigious jobs and some highly elegant country clubs… To be generous, at least 30 per cent of this vast and beautiful nation has privilege and opportunity. No wonder the system doesn’t change: there are simply too many people, millions of people, who benefit from it.

But that’s where the ‘veil of ignorance’ comes in handy: it stops us thinking about all those who have done well and draws our attention to the appalling risks involved in entering US society as if it were a lottery, behind the veil of ignorance – without knowing if you’d wind up the child of an orthodontist in Scottsdale, Arizona or as the offspring of a black single mother in the rougher bits of eastern Detroit. Would any sane birth-lottery player really want to take the gamble of ending up in the 70 per cent of people who have substandard healthcare, inadequate housing, poor access to a good legal structure and a sloppy system of education? Or would the sane gambler not insist that the rules of the entire game had to be changed to maximise the overall chances of a decent outcome for any single player?

3. What you know needs to be fixed

Rawls answers the question for us: any sane participant of the veil of ignorance experiment is going to want a society with a number of things in place: they’ll want the schools to be very good (even the public ones), the hospitals to function brilliantly (all of them, even the free ones), they’ll want the standard access to the law to be unimpeachable and fair and they’ll want decent housing for everyone.

The veil of ignorance forces observers to accept that the country they’d really want to be born randomly into would be a version of Switzerland or Denmark – that is to say, a country where things are pretty good wherever you end up, where the local transport system, schools, hospitals and political systems are decent and fair whether you’re at the top or bottom. In other words, you know what sort of a society you want to live in. You just hadn’t focused on it properly until now.

Rawls’s experiment allows us to think objectively about what a fair society looks like in its details. When addressing major decisions about the allocation of resources, to overcome our own bias, we need only ask ourselves: ‘how would I feel about this issue if I were stuck behind the veil of ignorance?’ The fair answer emerges directly when we contemplate what we would need in order still to be adequately positioned in the worst case scenario.

4. What to do next

A lot will depend on what’s wrong with your society. In this sense, Rawls was usefully undoctrinaire – he recognised that the veil of ignorance experiment would throw up different issues in different contexts: in some, the priority might be to fix air pollution, in others, the school system.

But when he addressed the US of the late twentieth century, Rawls could see some obvious things that needed to be done: education would have to be radically improved. The poor as well as the rich would have to be able to run for election. Healthcare would have to be made attractive at all levels.

Rawls provides us with a tool to critique our current societies based on a beautifully simple experiment. We’ll know we finally have made our societies fair when we will be able to say in all honesty, from a position of imaginary ignorance before our births, that we simply wouldn’t mind at all what kind of circumstances our future parents might have and what sort of neighbourhoods we might be born into. The fact that we simply couldn’t sanely take on such a challenge now is a measure of how deeply unfair things remain – and therefore how much we still have left to achieve.

The 19th-century designer, poet and entrepreneur William Morris is one of the best guides we have to the modern economy – despite the fact that he died in 1896 (while Queen Victoria was still on the throne), never made a telephone call and would have found the very idea of television utterly baffling.

Morris was the first person to understand two issues which have become decisive for our times. Firstly: the role of pleasure in work. And, secondly: the nature of consumer demand. The preferences of consumers – what we collectively appreciate and covet and are willing to pay for – are crucial drivers of the economy and hence of the kind of society we end up living in. Until we have better collective taste, we will struggle to have a better economy and society. It’s a huge idea. 

William Morris was born in 1834 into a well-off family. His father was a financier in the City of London and they lived in a large house near Walthamstow in Essex. His father died young (Morris was only 13) and it turned out he had been involved in a range of highly speculative – and only just legal – ventures. A great deal of the family fortune was lost – although a few secure investments remained which gave young Morris a comfortable (though by no means huge) income for life.  

The fact that he was always reasonably well-off did not blunt his empathy for financial hardship. Personally and politically Morris was an instinctively warm and generous man. But it did bring a useful perspective: he was acutely aware that there are some key problems which are not caused by shortage of money and which more money won’t solve. So he could never be persuaded that financial growth in and of itself could be the sure sign of improvement – whether in an individual or a national – life. 

When he was 18, Morris went to university. He didn’t do much of the work he was supposed to but he had a wonderful time. Almost the first day he made friends for life with a fellow student called Edward Burne-Jones, who went on to become one of the most successful artists of the era. 

After graduating Morris spent some time training as an architect. But at this stage, a conventional career wasn’t his main concern. He saw himself as an artist and a poet. He was simply interested in making things for his own satisfaction and maybe for the enjoyment of a few friends. He was not seeking to sell his paintings or be paid for writing poems. Morris’s friends used to call him ‘Topsy’ – because of his volatile, occasionally fiery, temper.  

His favourite model was a young actress with a dramatically beautiful face, Jane Burden. She posed as Iseult in his best picture. 

William Morris, La Belle Iseult, 1858

A year later they got married. Morris became obsessed with the project of building and furnishing a family house at Bexleyheath, in south-east London. It was called the Red House and pretty much everything in it – chairs, tables, lamps, wallpaper, wardrobes, candlesticks, glasses – were designed from scratch either by Morris himself or by his close friend and architectural collaborator Philip Webb. Artistic friends painted murals on the walls.

The experience of building and fitting out his house taught Morris his first big lesson about the economy. It would have been simpler (and maybe cheaper) to have ordered everything from a factory outlet. But Morris wasn’t trying to find the quickest or simplest way to set up home. He wanted to find the way that would give him – and everyone involved in the project – maximum satisfaction. And it fired Morris with an enthusiasm for the medieval idea of craft. The worker would develop sensitivity and skill; and enjoy the labour. It wasn’t mechanical or humiliating. 

He spotted that craft offers important clues to what we actually want from work. We want to know we’ve done something good with the day. That our efforts have counted towards tangible outcomes that we actually see and feel are worthwhile. And Morris was already noticing that when people really like their work, the issue of exactly how much you get paid becomes less critical. (Though Morris always believed, in addition, that people deserved honourable pay for honest work.) The point is you can absolutely say you are not doing it purely for the money. 

Textile printing at Merton Abbey, c.1890

Labour could be dignified. It was a timely insight. This was an era of massive industrialisation; workers were pouring into the new factories – even though the conditions were often horrendous. The status of working with your hands, of making physical things was low. It was then (as now) more prestigious to sit at a desk than to stand at a forge or by a kiln. 

The problem, though, was that Morris was not only a craftsman and a labourer at the Red House. He was also the client. Of course – sceptics might point out – he could have a great time because this was basically just pursuing a hobby.  

Yet this was precisely what Morris didn’t want to do. He was determined to show that the principles of craft and satisfying work (for the worker) could and should be at the heart of the modern world. And that – he realised – meant making them into a business. 

So, in 1861 – still in his mid twenties – Morris started a decorative arts business: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.; which they like to call simply ‘the Firm’. His colleagues included Burne-Jones, the brilliant poet, painter and charismatic personality Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the architect Philip Webb.

The Attainment tapestry, Morris and Company, 1890

They set up a factory making wallpaper, chairs, curtains and tables. They were very proud not only of the elegant designs but of the quality of the workmanship that went into all their products. They believed that factories should be attractive places, and they were keen for clients and others to come and take a tour and see for themselves the healthy pleasant environment in which the goods were produced. 

The firm soon encountered a very instructive problem. If you make high quality goods and pay your workers a fair and decent wage, then the cost of the product is going to be higher. It will always be possible for competitors to undercut the price and offer inferior goods, produced in less humane ways, for less money. 

If you ask a comparatively high price – to ensure the dignity of work and quality of materials and so make something that will last – you really risk losing customers. 

The factories and machines of the Industrial Revolution had brought mass production. Prices were lower, but there was a loss of quality and a dependence on routine, deadening labour in depressing circumstances. It can seem as if it is inevitable that the low price must triumph. Surely, the logic of economics dictates that the lower price will necessarily win. Or does it? 

Design for Trellis wallpaper, 1862

For Morris the key factor is, therefore, whether customers are willing to pay the just price. If they are, then work can be honourable. If they are not, then work is necessarily going to be – on the whole – degrading and miserable.  

So, Morris concluded that the lynchpin of a good economy is the education of the consumer. We collectively need to get clearer about what we really want in our lives and why, and how much certain things are worth to us (and therefore how much we are prepared to pay for them). 

An important clue to good consumption, Morris insisted, is that you ‘should have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’. This is a crucial attitude. It doesn’t involve renunciation, it’s not an invitation to bleak renunciation, he’s not trying to make anyone feel guilty or ashamed. 

Rather than reaching for lots of quick fixes and items of fleeting use and charm, Morris wished for people to see their purchases as investments and buy items sparingly. He would have preferred for someone to spend £1000 on an intricate, hand-made dining set that would last for decades and grow to become a family heirloom, than for each generation to buy its own cheap alternative, just to be thrown away when fashions changed. This way, people could take pride in and really enjoy the things they bought. There is some sense of satisfaction and pride in buying something you know will last and which can be handed down to future generations.

A room at Kelmscott, the home of William Morris, c. 1880

For Morris himself, the business did not work out terribly well. There was healthy demand from the well-to-do. The Morris lines of furniture, wallpaper, fabrics and lamps continued to sell for many years. But he didn’t manage to break into the wider, bigger markets that he aspired to. The point wasn’t to provide more elegance and luxury for the rich. The big idea was to bring solid, well-designed, finely produced articles to the mass consumer. Morris wanted to transform the ordinary – not the elite – experience of buying things. 

One of his last creations was a utopian story called News from Nowhere. In it he imagines how, ideally, a society would develop. He learns a lot from Marxism: this is a society with strong social bonds, in which the profit motive is not dominant. But he pays equal attention to the beauty of life: the expansive woodlands, the lovely buildings, the kinds of clothes people wear, the quality of the furniture, the charm of the gardens. Morris’s health declined in his sixties. In the summer of 1896, he took a health cruise to Norway. But the fjords didn’t work and he died of tuberculosis a few weeks after he got home.  

Morris directs our attention to a set of centrally important tests that a good economy should pass.

How much do people enjoy working?

Does everyone live within walking distance of woods and meadows? 

How healthy is the average diet? 

How long are consumer goods expected to last? 

Are the cities beautiful (generally, not just in a few privileged parts)?  

The economy can (with fatal ease) feel as if it is governed by abstract, complex laws concerning discounted cash flows and money supply. His point is that, nevertheless, the economy is intimately tethered to our preferences and choices. And that these are open to transformation. It may not be necessary (as Marx thought) to bring factories and banks and all the corporations into public ownership; and it may not be necessary (as Milton Friedman and others claimed) to wind back government impact on markets. The true task in creating a good economy, Morris shows us, lies much closer to home. 

There’s a belief that philosophy, when properly done, should sound dense, forbidding, a little confusing, as if it might have been awkwardly translated from the German. But at the dawn of the modern age lived a French philosopher who trusted in a very different way of presenting his thoughts, a man who wrote a very slim book, barely 60 pages long, that can deservedly be counted as one of the true masterpieces of philosophy, a compendium of acerbic, melancholy observations about the human condition, each of them only a sentence or two long, that retains an exceptional number of timely, wise and oddly consoling lessons for our morally confused and distracted age.

The Duc de La Rochefoucauld was born in Paris in 1613 and, despite his many initial advantages (wealth, connections, good looks and a very beautiful and ancient name), he had a thoroughly difficult and often miserable life. He fell in love with a couple of duchesses who didn’t treat him well, he ended up in prison after some bungled but honourable political manoeuvering, he was forced into exile from his beloved Paris on four occasions, he never advanced as far as he wanted at court, he got shot in the eye during a rebellion and almost went blind, he lost most of his money and some enemies published what they falsely purported to be his memoirs, full of insults against people whom he liked and depended upon – who then turned against him and refused to believe in his innocence.

After all this – betrayal, imprisonment, impoverishment, injury, plagiarism and libel – La Rochefoucauld can readily be forgiven when he declared that he’d had enough of the active life and would henceforth retreat to quieter contemplative pursuits instead. So he hung up his sword and spent his time in the living rooms of two leading intellectual figures of his day, the Marquise de Sablé and the Comtesse de Lafayette, who regularly invited writers and artists to sit with them in their Parisian salons in order to discuss the great themes of existence – often over lemonade and light snacks.

The salons rewarded wit and spark. They were not lecture halls or seminar rooms, there was no tolerance for leadenness or pomposity here, so winning over listeners required particular skills that came to shape La Rochefoucauld’s mind and work.

It was in the salons that La Rochefoucauld developed the literary genre for which he has become known: that of the maxim or aphorism, a pithy statement that deftly captures a dark insight into the human soul, reminding us of a wise and often uncomfortable truth. In good hands, an aphorism should deliver its punch in less than three seconds (one might be competing with the arrival of an asparagus tart).

In the salons, La Rochefoucauld perfected and honed the 504 aphorisms which made his name. He watched how his fellow guests reacted and tweaked his work accordingly. His aphorisms covered all manner of psychological topics, though issues of envy, vanity, love and ambition were recurring themes. A typical La Rochefoucauld aphorism begins by addressing the reader with a ‘we’ or ‘one’, inviting consent with gentle coercion. The aphorism then subverts an accepted piety about human nature in a cynical or sceptical direction. It’s in the last third of the sentence that the sting is generally delivered, and it often makes us laugh, as can happen when we are forced to acknowledge the falsity of a previous sentimental or hypocritical position.

Perhaps the most classic and perfect of all La Rochefoucauld’s aphorism is:

‘We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others.’

It is closely followed by the equally effective:

‘There are some people who would never have fallen in love, if they had not heard there was such a thing.’

And the no less accomplished:

‘He that refuses praise the first time it is offered does it because he would like to hear it a second.’

Voltaire said that La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims was the book that had most powerfully shaped the character of the French people, giving them their taste for psychological reflection, precision and cynicism. Behind almost every one of the maxims lies a challenge to an ordinary, flattering view of ourselves. La Rochefoucauld relishes revelations of the debt that kindness owes to egoism and insists that we are never far from being vain, arrogant, selfish and petty – and in fact, never nearer than when we trust in our own goodness.

Having suffered unduly in its name, he was particularly suspicious of romantic love:

‘The reason lovers never tire of one another’s company is because they never talk of anything but themselves.’

‘If one were to judge of love according to the greatest part of the effects it produces, it might very justly pass for hatred rather than kindness.’

‘To say that one never flirts is in itself a form of flirtation.’

It only looks easy. Nietzsche, who was deeply inspired by La Rochefoucauld, wrote aphorisms (collected in his book Human, All Too Human), which sorely lack the Frenchman’s mixture of darkness and good sense:

‘A few men have sighed because their women were abducted; most, because no one wanted to abduct them.’

La Rochefoucauld wrote as he did because he wanted his ideas to persuade people whom he knew had little time and would not necessarily be on his side. If most philosophers since have (with the odd exception) felt no need to write with his elegance, wit and concision, it is because they have trusted (fatefully) that, so long as one’s ideas are important, the style in which one delivers them is of no issue.

La Rochefoucauld knew otherwise. Most of us are so distracted, if someone wants to get a point across to us, they must use all the devices of art to seize our attention and cauterise our boredom for the necessary span. The history of philosophy would have been very different if its practitioners had all imagined themselves to be writing for an impatient non-professional audience with meandering minds in the midst of a chatty Parisian salon. The 140 characters of our own digital salons now offer us a second chance to try to put La Rochefoucauld’s inspiring principles to work.

Virginia Woolf was a writer concerned above all with capturing in words the excitement, pain, beauty and horror of what she termed the Modern Age. Born in 1882, she was conscious of herself as a distinctively Modernist writer, at odds with a raft of the staid and complacent assumptions of 19th-century literature.

She realised that a new era – marked by extraordinary developments in urbanism, technology, warfare, consumerism and family life – would need to be captured by a different sort of writer. Along with Joyce and Proust, she was relentlessly creative in her search for new literary forms that would do justice to the complexities of modern consciousness. Her books and essays retain a power to convey the thrill and drama of the 20th century.

Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen

Virginia Woolf was born in London: her father was a famous author and mountaineer, and her mother a well-known model. Her family hosted many of the most influential and important members of Victorian literary society. Woolf was largely cynical about these grand types, accusing them of pomposity and narrow-mindedness. Woolf and her sister weren’t allowed to go to Cambridge like their brothers, but had to steal an education in their father’s study.

Woolf as a child playing cricket with her sister

After her mother died when she was 13, Woolf had the first of a series of mental breakdowns that were to plague her for the rest of her life – partly caused by the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her half-brother George Duckworth.

Despite her illness, she became a journalist and then a novelist – and a central figure in the Bloomsbury group, which included John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey. She married one of the members, the writer and journalist Leonard Woolf.

The two Woolfs

She and Leonard bought a small hand-printing press, named it The Hogarth Press, and published books from their dining room. They printed Woolf’s radical novels and political essays when no one else would; and produced the first full English edition of Freud’s works.

In just four short years between World Wars I and II, Woolf wrote four of her most famous works:

Mrs Dalloway (1925)

To the Lighthouse (1927)

Orlando (1928)

and the essay

A Room of One’s Own (1929)

In March 1941, feeling the onset of another bout of mental illness, she drowned herself in the river Ouse.

Her work has many vital things to teach us.

1. Notice Everything

Woolf is one of the great observers of English literature. Perhaps the finest short piece of prose she ever wrote was the essay, “The Death of the Moth,” published in 1942. It contains her observations as she sits in her study watching a humble moth trapped by a pane of glass. Rarely have so many profound thoughts been eked out from such an apparently minor situation (though for Woolf, there were no such things as minor situations):

“One could not help watching him. One was, indeed, conscious of a queer feeling of pity for him. The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the full, pathetic. He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and, after waiting there a second, flew across to the other. What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a fourth? That was all he could do, in spite of the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea.”

Woolf at Monk’s House

Woolf noticed everything that you and I tend to walk past: the sky, the pain in others’ eyes, the games of children, the stoicism of wives, the pleasures of department stores, the interest of harbours and docks… Emerson (one of her favourite writers) may have been speaking generally, but he captured everything that makes Woolf special when he remarked: “In the work of a writer of genius, we rediscover our own neglected thoughts.”

In another great essay, “On Being Ill,” Woolf lamented how seldom writers stoop to describe illness, an oversight that seemed characteristic of a snobbery against the everyday in literature:

“English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

This would be her mission: Woolf tried throughout her life to make sure language would do a better job at defining who we really are, with all our vulnerabilities, confusions and bodily sensations.

Woolf raised her sensitivity to the highest art form. She had the confidence and seriousness to use what happened to her – the sensory details of her own life – as the basis for the largest ideas.

2. Accept the Everyday

Woolf was always profound, but never afraid of what others called trivial. She was confident that the ambitions of her mind – to love beauty and engage with big ideas – were completely compatible with an interest in shopping, cakes and hats, subjects on which she wrote with almost unique eloquence and depth.

In another particularly good essay of hers, called “Oxford Street Tide,” she celebrates the gaudy vulgarity of this huge London shopping street.

“The moralists point the finger of scorn at Oxford street… it reflects, they say, the levity, the ostentation, the haste and the irresponsibility of our age. Yet perhaps they are as much out in their scorn as we should be if we asked of the lily that it should be cast in bronze, or of the daisy that it should have petals of imperishable enamel. The charm of modern London is that it is not built to last; it is built to pass.”

Oxford Street in the 1930s

In an accompanying essay, equally open to the unprestigious side of modern life, Woolf goes to visit the giant docks of London:

“A thousand ships with thousand cargoes are being unladen every week. And not only is each package of this vast and varied merchandise picked up and set down accurately, but each is weighed and opened, sampled and recorded, and again stitched up and laid in its place, without haste, or waste, or hurry, or confusion by a very few men in shirt-sleeves, who, working with the utmost organisation in the common interest… are yet able to pause in their work and say to the casual visitor, “Would you like to see what sort of thing we sometimes find in sacks of cinnamon? Look at this snake!”.

3. Be a Feminist

Woolf was deeply aware that men and women fit themselves into rigid gender roles, and as they do so, overlook their fuller personalities. In her eyes, in order to grow, we need to do some gender-bending; we need to seek experiences that blur what it means to be “a real man” or “a real woman.”

Woolf had a few lesbian affairs in her life, and she wrote a magnificently bold queer text, Orlando, a portrait of her lover Vita, described as a nobleman who becomes a woman.

Vita Sackville-West in her twenties

“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.” (A Room of One’s Own).

In her anti-war tract, Three Guineas, Woolf argued that we will only ever end war by rethinking the habit of “pitting of sex against sex… all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority… belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are ‘sides,’ and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster a highly ornamental pot.”

Woolf wished desperately to raise the status of women in her society. She recognised that the problem was largely down to money. Women didn’t have freedom, especially freedom of the spirit, because they didn’t control their own income: ‘Women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry.’

Her great feminist rallying cry, A Room of One’s Own, culminated in a specific, political demand: in order to stand on the same intellectual footing as men, women needed not only dignity, but also equal rights to education, an income of “five hundred pounds a year” and “a room of one’s own.” 

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Woolf was probably the best writer in the English language for describing our minds without the jargon of clinical psychology. The generation before her, the Victorians, wrote novels focused on external details: city scenes, marriages, wills… Woolf envisioned a new form of expression that would focus instead on how it feels inside to know ourselves and other people.

The Dreadnought hoaxers in Abyssinian regalia; Woolf is the bearded figure on the far left

Books like Woolf’s—which aren’t overly sarcastic, caught up in adventure plots, or cradled in convention—are a contract. She’s expecting us to turn down the outside volume, to try on her perspective and to spend energy with subtle sentences. And in turn, she offers us the opportunity to notice the tremors we normally miss, and to better appreciate moths, our own headaches and our fascinating and fluid sexualities.

The world of fashion can seem very silly.

It can come across as intensifying vanity and encouraging snobbery; it distributes prestige in unhelpful ways.

This skittish, narcissistic side of fashion is unfortunate, for at its best, fashion circles round important territory. Clothes convey ideas about what is admirable or exciting, they influence mood and help define identity. Fashion is potentially a very serious part of life – but it has largely been abandoned to pretension, eccentricity and foolishness.

The person who did the most to realise the positive potential of fashion – and direct it to its true task – was the French designer Coco Chanel. She was born on 19 August 1883 in Saumur in the Loire valley. Her mother died when she was a child; she grew up poor and isolated. She was educated by charitable nuns. She was called Gabriel until her early twenties, when she was trying to make it as a cabaret performer and changed her name to the more distinctive ‘Coco’.

She started out as a designer of hats, made a lot of influential friends and had several liaisons with British and Russian dukes – perhaps in compensation for her early very fragile social status.

Although we don’t often give the fact a great deal of attention, clothes are instruments of communication. We are very much open to being influenced by what a person wears. Before Chanel, stylish clothes were complicated and very expensive. They were designed to stress the delicate, passive characteristics of their wearers.

These garments put forward an image of delicacy and refinement. The wearer was presented as poetic, perhaps a little dreamy and sensitive. They looked like they wouldn’t have much of an appetite for dinner. This wasn’t meant to be an actual accurate portrait of any particular person. The clothes signalled an aspiration. The Victorian woman might be insecure, have a raucous laugh and be keen on eating meringues; yet the clothes provided an idealised portrait of the desired direction of travel: a picture of what this person would ideally like to be like.

What Coco Chanel did was invent a new and better destination. In 1926 she introduced a very simple garment: the little black dress.

It spoke of a different vision of existence: a different ideal. The dress spoke of being energetic and focused; the wearer would be sharp-witted, engaged in how the world works; they might have spent the day running a business or working at the finance ministry – or writing an experimental novel.

She was also making this ideal much more widely accessible. The dress was a fraction of the price of its more splendid rivals. It was designed to be long-lasting. Not just in sheer physical durability but in the psychological sense of not feeling dated. So the dress you bought in 1926 would do just as well in 1927 or 1937. In fact, it was intended to last for years and years – which radically changed the economics of being chic.

Another side of Coco’s proposal was to limit options. The dress only came in black – so you didn’t have to put your mind to considering and deciding. She was making the idea of being stylish simpler and easier. The little black dress was designed to make it easy and inexpensive to look elegant.

The little black dress was conceived as the clothing equivalent of the Model-T Ford (which – not by chance – also came only in black). The Model-T had revolutionised the automobile industry by bringing cars, for the first time, within the budget of many more people. Instead of being a luxury for the few, personal transport began to become widespread – and, eventually, normal. Coco shared a similar noble ambition: to make her vision of elegance simple, timeless and – most importantly – widespread.

Most people see themselves as very individualistic. Because we’ve given up hope that the crowd could be impressive, toeing the line or just conforming to the convention are, understandably, viewed as negatives.

But we might want re-evaluate the idea of looking like everyone else. There isn’t anything structurally wrong with the notion of a uniform, so long as the uniform is a good one. Chanel was searching – as Vogue put it in a perceptive article from 1926 – for ‘the uniform for the woman of taste’.

Finding a good uniform might be more important than emphasizing uniqueness.

The uniform of the Chanel dress – or something less costly inspired by it – stresses a range of admirable virtues: the idea that you can be efficient, organised, serious and in control – without becoming puritanical or dour.  Such clothes stress the long-term, they hint that we should care about things which last, and not chop and change our enthusiasms at every turn. They argue that elegance is a key concern in a crowded and busy world: it means efficiency without loss of grace.

Over her long and very successful career, many of Coco Chanel’s efforts were devoted to developing a distinctive brand. She didn’t just stick with clothes. She also designed jewellery and handbags. And – most importantly from a commercial point of view – her Chanel No.5 scent. 

The Catholic Church had long used scents to promote religious devotion.

They had good uniforms as well.

They recognised that scents influence mood. The smell of burning incense could encourage the congregation to concentrate, to feel that something special was occurring.

Coco wanted her scent to summon up associations of a particular kind of person – confident, strong, attractive and independent.

A good identity, in a bottle.

The aim wasn’t simply to expand her business empire. It was to take a good experience from one part of life, where it might already be familiar, and apply it more widely. Coco loved beaches and bathing costumes, she liked the clothes people wore when playing sports. She wasn’t at all unusual in that. The kind of move she made always seems obvious in retrospect – but never was at the time. She took the pleasure of the beach very seriously and sought to extract the general, reusable essence from a local, particular kind of happiness.

Coco: a desire to institutionalise certain feelings around summer, confidence and androgynous sailors’ clothes .

Chanel was far from admirable in all respects.

During the second World War, when Paris was occupied by the Third Reich, she lived in the Ritz and spent a lot of time around senior Nazis. She was more than friendly and eventually worked as an agent, though exposure of her conduct did not occur until much later. Like many artists, her work was better than she was herself. She died in Paris, aged 87, in 1971.

In the Utopia, there would still be fashion, but it would differ from what we are currently most familiar with. It would take up Chanel’s attitude to classic style.

A classic isn’t just something that is famous or distinctive from a past era. It’s something that continues to be relevant and useful outside of the specific time it was first made. The true task of fashion isn’t to chop and change every year. Clothes are not emblems of vanity or clutter (as our fears sometimes suggest); they have a potential to be aids and prompts, friends, in our quest to become more mature, focused, sane and balanced versions of ourselves.

In the end, Chanel didn’t do all that could be done with her brand. But she’s inspiring in how she teased out some of what can be most serious about clothes. In the ideal world, a clothing company would – with the help of in-house philosophers – define what really matters most in life and then set out make clothes that constantly support and amplify these ethical and moral commitments. Nice clothes would be honoured for what they really are: embodiments of good ideas.

How do you build a better world? There are so many well-known, urgent places you might start: malaria, carbon emissions, tax evasion, the drug trade, soil erosion, water pollution…

Donald Winnicott deserves his place in history because of the dramatic simplicity of his approach. He proposed that the happiness and future satisfaction of the human race depended ultimately not so much on external political issues, but on something far closer to home: the way parents bring up their children. All the sicknesses of humanity were, in his view, in essence consequences of a failure of parental provision. Fascism, delinquency, rage, misogyny, alcoholism, these were only the symptoms of poor childhoods that the collective would have to pay for. The road to a better society begins in the nursery.

Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) was an English paediatrician, who early on in his career became passionate about the then new field of psychoanalysis. He was analysed by James Strachey, who had translated Freud into English, and became Britain’s first medically-trained child psychoanalyst. He worked as a consultant in children’s medicine at the Paddington Green Children’s Hospital in London, and also played a crucial role in public education around child-rearing, delivering some 600 talks on the BBC, tirelessly lecturing around the country and authoring 15 books, among which the bestselling Home is Where We Start From.

It must have felt very odd, in 1954, to tune into BBC Radio at prime time and hear someone with a gentle, intelligent voice arguing incisively against the idea that babies cry ‘to get attention’ or that sending seven year olds to boarding school might be a good idea so as to ‘toughen them up.’

It was rather strange, too, that Winnicott should even have been English, given that his country was notorious, then as now, for its lack of tenderness and its resistance to introspection (and its commitment to irony, detachment and sarcasm instead). As he pointed out: ‘The Englishman does not want to be upset, to be reminded that there are personal tragedies all over the place, that he is really not happy in himself; in short, he refuses to be put off his golf.’

And yet Winnicott’s brand of psychoanalysis was, on closer inspection, peculiarly English. He wrote pragmatic, homespun prose, expressing the deepest ideas in plain, unadorned language. There was no German incomprehensibility or abstraction here. There was also a characteristic English modesty about what he saw as the point of child psychoanalysis. He wanted to help people to be, in his famous formulation, ‘good enough’ parents; not brilliant or perfect ones (as other nations might have wished), but just OK. And that was because he displayed, to a high degree, the downbeat, modest, realistic, temperament which is the particular glory of the English mind.

In an early paper, he announced his project as such: ‘I find it useful to divide the world of people into two classes. There are those who were never ‘let down’ as babies and who are to that extent candidates for the enjoyment of life and of living. There are also those who did suffer traumatic experiences of the kind that result from environmental letdown, and who must carry with them all their lives the memories of the state they were in at moments of disaster. These are candidates for lives of storm and stress and perhaps illness.’

It was this second category that he wanted to save and spare in the next generation. So what would it take, in his eyes, to encourage the ‘good enough’ parent? Winnicott put forward a number of suggestions:

Remember that your child is very vulnerable

Winnicott begins by impressing on his audience how psychologically fragile an infant is. It doesn’t understand itself, it doesn’t know where it is, it is struggling to stay alive, it has no way of grasping when the next feed will come, it can’t communicate with itself or others. It is an undifferentiated, unindividuated mass of competing drives. It isn’t a person. The early months are hence an immense struggle. Winnicott’s work never loses sight of this, and he therefore repeatedly insists that it is those around the infant who have to ‘adapt’, adapt so as to do everything to interpret the child’s needs and not impose demands for which the child is not ready.

A child who has adapted to the world too early, or who has had inappropriate demands made upon it, will be a prime candidate for mental problems, just as health is the result of an environment that can respond appropriately to the child, which can keep elements of reality at bay, until the small creature is ready.

At worse, a depressed mother might prematurely force an infant to be ‘cheerful’, to be together because she was not; a child of very angry, unstable parents might be terrified from expressing any of its darker emotions; or a child of intrusive parents might be prevented from developing a capacity to be alone.

Let a child be angry

Winnicott knew what violence, what hate there could be in a healthy infant. Referring to what happens if a parent forgets a feed, he cautioned: ‘If you fail him, it must feel to him as if the wild beasts will gobble him up.’

But though the infant might sometimes want to kill and destroy, it is vital for the parents to allow rage to expend itself, and for them not in any way to be threatened or moralistic about ‘bad’ behaviour: ‘If a baby cries in a state of rage and feels as if he has destroyed everyone and everything, and yet the people round him remain calm and unhurt, this experience greatly strengthens his ability to see that what he feels to be true is not necessarily real, that fantasy and fact, both important, are nevertheless different from each other.’

Winnicott interpreted violent feelings against parents as a natural aspect of the maturational process: ‘For a child to be brought up so that he can discover the deepest part of his nature, someone has to be defied, and even at times hated, without there being a danger of a complete break in the relationship.’

This is why he appreciated and spoke out for difficult adolescents, the sort that scream at their parents and try the odd bit of stealing from their purses. They were proof of children who had been properly loved and could hence dare to defy and test the adult world: ‘A normal child, if he has confidence in mother and father, pulls out all the stops. In the course of time, he tries out his power to disrupt, to destroy, to frighten, to wear down, to waste, to wangle, and to appropriate. Everything that takes people to the courts (or to the asylums for that matter) has its normal equivalent in childhood… If the parents can stand up to all the child can do to disrupt the parents’ world, things will settle down.’ (Winnicott is almost always deeply encouraging in his tone).

Make sure your child isn’t too compliant

Parents are delighted when infants and children follow their rules. Such children are called good. Winnicott was very scared of ‘good’ children. He had a messier view of childhood. The point of the early years was to be able to express freely a lot of ‘bad’ feelings without consequences, and without fear of retribution.

However, there might be parents who could not tolerate too much bad behaviour and would demand compliance too early and too strictly. This would lead, in Winnicott’s formulation, to the emergence of a ‘False Self’ – a persona that would be outwardly compliant, outwardly good, but was suppressing its vital instincts; who was not able to properly balance up its social with its destructive sides and that couldn’t be capable of real generosity or love, because it hadn’t been allowed fully to explore selfishness and hate. Only through proper, attentive nurture would a child be able to generate a ‘True Self’.

In Winnicott’s scheme, adults who can’t be creative, who are somehow a little dead inside, are almost always the children of parents who have not been able to tolerate defiance, parents who have made their offspring ‘good’ way before their time, thereby killing their capacity to be properly good, properly generous and kind (for the compliant personality is in truth only a fake version of a responsible, giving self).

Let your child be

Every failure of the environment forces a child to adapt prematurely. For example, if the parents are too chaotic, the child quickly tries to over-think the situation. Its rational faculties are over-stimulated (it may, in later life, try to be an intellectual).

A parent who is depressed might unwittingly force the child to be too cheerful – giving it no time to process its own melancholy feelings. Winnicott saw the dangers in a child who, in his words, has to ‘look after mother’s mood’.

Winnicott had a special hatred for ‘people who are always jogging babies up and down on their knees trying to produce a giggle.’ This was merely their way of warding off their own sadness, by demanding laughter from a baby who might have very different things on its mind.

The primordial act of parental health for Winnicott is simply to be able to tune out of oneself for a time in the name of empathising with the ways and needs of a small, mysterious, beautiful fragile person whose unique otherness must be acknowledged and respected in full measure.

Realise the gravity of the job you’ve taken on

Many of the parents Winnicott saw were worn down by their labours. Winnicott tried to bolster them by reminding them of the utmost importance of what they were doing. They were, in their own way, as significant to the nation as the Prime Minister and the Cabinet: ‘The foundation of the health of the human being is laid by you in the baby’s first weeks and months. This thought should help when you feel strange at the temporary loss of your interest in world affairs. It is not surprising. You are engaged in founding the mental health of the next generation.’ Winnicott called parenting: ‘the only real basis for a healthy society, and the only factory for the democratic tendency in a country’s social system.’

Of course, there will be errors. Things go wrong in childhood. And that’s what psychoanalysis is for. In Winnicott’s eyes, the analyst in later years acts as a substitute parent, a proxy ‘good enough’ figure who ‘is in a position of the mother of an infant’. Good analysis has things in common with those early years. Here too, the analyst should listen without forcing the patient to get ‘better’ ahead of time. She shouldn’t force a cure down his or her throat, she should provide a safe place where bits of childhood that weren’t completed or went awry can be recreated and rehearsed. Analysis is a chance to fill in the missing steps.

In his descriptions of what parents should do for their children, Winnicott was in effect referring to a term which he rarely mentioned directly: love. We often imagine love to be about a magical intuitive ‘connection’ with someone. But, in Winnicott’s writings, we get a different picture. It’s about a surrender of the ego, a putting aside of one’s own needs and assumptions, for the sake of close, attentive listening to another, whose mystery one respects, along with a commitment not to get offended, not to retaliate, when something ‘bad’ emerges, as it often does when one is close to someone, child or adult.

Since Winnicott’s death, we’ve collectively grown a little better at parenting. But only a little. We may spend more time with our children, we know in theory that they matter a lot, but we’re arguably still failing at the part Winnicott focused on: adaptation. We still routinely fail to suppress our own needs or stifle our own demands when we’re with a child. We’re still learning how to love our children – and that, Winnicott would argue, is why the world is still full of the walking-wounded, people of outward ‘success’ and respectability who are nevertheless not quite ‘real’ inside and inflict their wounds on others. We’ve a way to go until we get to be ‘good enough.’ It’s a task – Winnicott would have insisted – that’s in its own way as important as curing malaria or slowing global warming.

Matthew Arnold was the most important educational reformer of the 19th century. He realised that, in the modern world, education would be one of the keys to a good society. But it had to be education of a special kind – and not one that we nowadays necessarily recognise or strive for. Instead of saying that schools should teach more trigonometry or improve the literacy rates in particular socio-economic percentiles, Arnold advocated a strange sounding, but deeply sane and necessary, agenda. Schools should promote – as he put it – ‘Sweetness and Light’. It was a turn of phrase calculated to irritate his contemporaries, but it neatly captured what he was trying to do – and what we might be inspired to try in turn.

In his lifetime, Arnold was a laughing stock for some of the newspapers of Britain. The Daily Telegraph in particular constantly teased him for being pretentious: ‘an elegant Jeremiah’ as they put it. Whenever there was a strike or a riot, they imagined Arnold earnestly telling people not to fuss so much about vulgar, practical things like unemployment or low wages, and instead to raise their minds to higher ideals and concentrate on ‘Sweetness and Light’. It was a deeply unfair criticism (as we shall see) but there was just enough in Arnold’s character to make it stick. It reveals just how easy it is to come across as fey, out of touch and inconsequential when one is trying to stand up for fragile, slightly complicated things.

Matthew Arnold was born in 1822. His father, Thomas Arnold, was a major intellectual celebrity of his times: a tireless, immensely active and stern headmaster of Rugby public school, who had a starring role in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, one of the bestselling novels of the era.

Matthew’s father, Thomas Arnold, 1840

Matthew was a disappointment, and a puzzle, to his father. He liked to read in bed in the morning, he enjoyed strolling through woods and meadows, he was charmed by young women in Paris, he wrote poetry, he neglected his studies and published – to the world’s indifference – a couple of slim volumes of verse. Eventually, he fell in love with a woman called Frances Lucy Wightman – his pet name for her was Flu – the daughter of a judge. But to get married he needed a solid career, so he took up a senior post in the Department of Education as an Inspector of Schools. For years, he travelled the length and breadth of Victorian England, checking whether children were being properly taught. He earned a very respectable salary; the family grew, they went on interesting holidays and lived comfortably and happily in the West End of London – though Arnold was never quite on top of his finances.

Arnold didn’t write a great deal of poetry in these years but his charm (and his late father’s many influential friends) got him elected to the highly prestigious position of Professor of Poetry at Oxford. There was no money attached to the role – but it meant he got to give a series of lectures each year to the opinion formers of the nation. It was to prove the making of him, for it was thanks to his post that he matured into a profound social critic. His best lectures were gathered together into his most important and influential book, Culture and Anarchy (1869).

There was a lot that bothered Arnold about the modern world – as it was just beginning to reveal itself. But he summed it up in one embracing idea: Anarchy. By ‘anarchy’, he didn’t mean people in black balaclavas breaking shop windows. Rather he meant something much more familiar and closer to home: a toxic kind of freedom. He meant a society where market forces dominate the nation; where the commercial media sets the agenda and coarsens and simplifies everything it touches; where corporations are barely restrained from despoiling the environment, where human beings are treated as tools to be picked up and put down at will; where there is no more pastoral care and precious little sense of community, where hospitals treat the body but no one treats the soul, where no one knows their neighbours any more, where romantic love is seen as the only bond worth pursuing – and where there is nowhere to turn to at moments of acute distress and inner crisis. It’s a world we’ve come to know well.

Arnold believed that the forces of anarchy had become overwhelming in Europe in the second half of the 19th century. Religion was in terminal decline. Business reigned triumphant. A practical, unpsychological money-making mentality ruled. Newspaper circulation was growing exponentially. And politics was dominated by partisanship, conflict and misrepresentation.

In the past, religion might have served to reign in these anarchic tendencies. But in his best poem, Dover Beach, Arnold described how ‘the sea of faith’ had ebbed away, like a tide from the shore, leaving only a ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.’

What could replace the function that religion had once played in society? What forces might constrain anarchy and civilise, guide, inspire and humanise instead? Arnold proposed one resounding solution: Culture. It must be Culture, he proposed, that would overcome the forces of anarchy inadvertently unleashed by Capitalism and Democracy.

But to play such a role, by Culture one could not simply continue to mean what a lot of people then (as today) understood by the term: namely, an interest in going to art galleries on holiday, watching an occasional play and writing some essays about Jane Austen at school.

A contemporary cartoon of Matthew Arnold, showing him balancing adroitly between poetry and philosophy

By Culture, Arnold meant a force that would guide, educate, console and teach, in short, in the highest sense, a therapeutic medium. The great works of art weren’t to be thought of as mere entertainment, they contained – when interpreted and presented properly (and this is where Arnold thought his society had gone so wrong) – a set of suggestions as to how we might best live and die, and govern our societies according to our highest possibilities.

Arnold’s goal was therefore to try to change the way the elite establishment (the museums, the universities, the schools, the learned societies) were teaching works of Culture, so that they could become what he felt they had it in their power to be: a proper bulwark against modern Anarchy and the agents to deliver appropriate doses of those important qualities, ‘Sweetness and Light’.

By ‘Light’, Arnold meant ‘understanding.’ The great works of culture have it in their power to clear mental confusion, they give us words for things we had felt but had not previously grasped, they replace cliche with insight. Given their potential, Arnold believed that schools and the mass media had a responsibility to help us get to know as many of these light-filled works as possible. He wanted a curriculum that would systematically teach everyone in the land: ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world,’ so that through this knowledge, we might be able to ‘turn a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.’

But Arnold was conscious of how the teaching of works of Culture in fact needlessly distances us from their power. Academic commentary grows like ivy around masterpieces, choking the majesty and interest of their message to us. Museums for their part make art sound immensely complicated, abstract and peculiar. As for the big and insightful thoughts that may lie in philosophy, they have frequently been formulated in ways that make it exceptionally difficult to understand them and see their personal import (Arnold had academic culprits like Hegel in mind). So, Arnold tried to impress upon his intellectual contemporaries a project which remains urgent to this day: that of ‘carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge and the best ideas of the time; labouring to divest knowledge of all that is harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned.’

To make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned. Note how this ostensibly rarefied and impractical commentator had something deeply practical and very democratic in mind. He recognised that, in a populist, market driven society, it was no use keeping culture for the few,  writing books that only a hundred people could understand. The real task was to know how to popularise. If Culture was to be properly powerful, it would have to learn to be popular first.

By ‘sweetness,’ Arnold meant that he wanted works of Culture to be presented to the audience in sweet ways. He saw the absolute necessity of sugar-coating things. In a free society, cultural authority could no longer be strict and demanding – people would simply turn away or vote for something less severe. Anyone who wanted to advocate serious (but potentially very beneficial) things would have to learn the art of sweetness. They would have to charm and amuse and please and flatter. Not because they were insincere but precisely because they were so earnest. In Arnold’s ideal world, the lessons of advertising – which in his day discovered how to sell expensive watches and fire tongs and special knives for boning chickens – would have to be used by intellectuals and educators. Instead of wondering how to persuade middle-income people to purchase potato peelers or soup dishes, they would ponder how to make Plato’s philosophy more impressive or how to find a larger consumer base for the ideas of St Augustine.

By sweetness, Arnold also meant kindness and sympathy. He wanted a world where people would – in the public realm – be nicer to one another. Enough of the brutality and coarseness of the Daily Telegraph, a publication that every day took pleasure in gunning down new victims and turning personal tragedies in to the stuff of mockery. He wished Culture to help foster a spirit of kind-hearted enquiry, a readiness to suppose that the other person might have a point, even if one didn’t quite see it yet. He wanted to promote a tenderness to people’s failings and weaknesses. He saw sweetness as an essential ingredient of a good, humane society.

Culture and Anarchy remains filled with eminently valid answers to the problems of the modern world. With religion gone, it really is only Culture that can prevent Anarchy. But we still have a way to go before Culture has been divested of, to use Arnold’s words, all that is ‘harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive’ about it.

This project is – in its own way – a small contribution to fulfilling Arnold’s magisterial vision.

Emile Durkheim is the philosopher who can best help us to understand why Capitalism makes us richer and yet frequently more miserable; even – far too often – suicidal.

He was born in 1858 in the little French town of Epinal, near the German border. His family were devout Jews. Durkheim himself did not believe in God, but he was always fascinated by, and sympathetic to, religion. He was a clever student. He studied at the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, travelled for a while in Germany, then took a university job in Bordeaux. He got married. There were two children: Marie and André. Before he was forty, Durkheim was appointed to a powerful and prestigious position as a professor at the Sorbonne. He had status and honours, but his mind remained unconventional and his curiosity insatiable. He died of a stroke in 1917.

Camille Pissarro, The Boulevard Montmartre at Night, 1897

Durkheim lived through the immense, rapid transformation of France from a largely traditional agricultural society to an urban, industrial economy. He could see that his country was getting richer, that Capitalism was extraordinarily productive and, in certain ways, liberating. But what particularly struck him, and became the focus of his entire career, were the psychological costs of Capitalism. The economic system might have created an entire new middle class, but it was doing something very peculiar to people’s minds. It was – quite literally – driving them to suicide in ever increasing numbers.

This was the immense insight unveiled in Durkheim’s most important work, Suicide, published in 1897. The book chronicled a remarkable and tragic discovery: that suicide rates seem to shoot up once a nation becomes industrialised and Consumer Capitalism takes hold. Durkheim observed that the suicide rate in the Britain of his day was double that of Italy; but in even richer and more advanced Denmark, it was four times higher than in the UK. Furthermore, suicide rates were much higher amongst the educated than the uneducated; much higher in Protestant than in Catholic countries; and much higher among the middle classes than among the poor.

Edouard Manet, The Suicide, 1877

Durkheim’s focus on suicide was intended to shed light on a more general level of unhappiness and despair at large in society. Suicide was the horrific tip of the iceberg of mental distress created by Capitalism.

Across his career, Durkheim tried to explain why people had become so unhappy in modern societies, even though they had more opportunities and access to goods in quantities that their ancestors could never have dreamt of. He isolated five crucial factors:

1. Individualism

In traditional societies, people’s identities are closely tied to belonging to a clan or a class. Their beliefs and attitudes, their work and status follow automatically from the facts of their birth. Few choices are involved: a person might be a baker, a Lutheran, and married to their second cousin – without ever having made any self-conscious decisions for themselves. They could just step into the place created for them by their family and the existing fabric of society.

But under Capitalism, it is the individual (rather than the clan, or ‘society’ or the nation) that now chooses everything: what job to take, what religion to follow, who to marry… This ‘individualism’ forces us to be the authors of our own destinies. How our lives pan out becomes a reflection of our unique merits, skills and persistence.

Gustave Caillebotte, Young Man at his Window, 1875

If things go well, we can take all the credit. But if things go badly, it is crueller than ever before, for it means there is no one else to blame. We have to shoulder the full responsibility. We aren’t just unlucky any more, we have chosen and have messed up. Individualism ushers in a disinclination to admit to any sort of role for luck or chance in life. Failure becomes a terrible judgement upon oneself. This is the particular burden of life in modern Capitalism.

2. Excessive hope

Capitalism raises our hopes. Everyone – with enough effort – can become the boss. Everyone should think big. You are not trapped by the past – Capitalism says – you are free to remake your life. Advertising stokes ambition by showing us limitless luxury that we could (if we play our cards right) secure very soon. The opportunities grow enormous…as do the possibilities for disappointment.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Hangover, 1889

Envy grows rife. One becomes deeply dissatisfied with one’s lot, not because it is objectively awful but because of tormenting thoughts about all that is almost (but not quite) within reach.

The cheery, boosterish side of Capitalism attracted Durkheim’s particular ire. In his view, modern societies struggle to admit that life is often quite simply painful and sad. Our tendencies to grief and sorrow are made to look like signs of failure rather than, as should be the case, a fair response to the arduous facts of the human condition.

3. We have too much freedom

One of the complaints against traditional societies – strongly voiced in Romantic literature – was that people needed more ‘freedom’. Rebellious types complained there were far too many social norms: telling you what to wear, what you were supposed to do on Sunday afternoons, what parts of an arm it was respectable for a woman to reveal…

Edouard Manet, The Luncheon on the Grass, 1862-3

Capitalism – following the earlier efforts of Romantic rebels – relentlessly undermined social norms. States became more complex, more anonymous and more diverse. People didn’t have so much in common with each other any more. The rules or norms that one had internalised stopped applying.

What kind of career should you have? Where should you live? What kind of holiday should you go on? What is a marriage supposed to be like? How should you bring up children? Under Capitalism, the collective answers get weaker, less specific. There’s a lot of reliance on the phrase: ‘whatever works for you.’ Which sounds friendly but also means that society doesn’t much care what you do and doesn’t feel confident it has good answers to the big questions of your life.

In very confident moments we like to think of ourselves as fully up to the task of reinventing life, or working everything out for ourselves. But, in reality, as Durkheim knew, we are often simply too tired, too busy, too uncertain – and there is nowhere to turn.

4. Atheism

Durkheim was himself an atheist, but he worried that religion had become implausible just as its communal side would have been most necessary to repair the fraying social fabric. Despite its factual errors, Durkheim appreciated the sense of community that religion offered: “Religion gave men a perception of a world beyond this earth where everything would be rectified; this prospect made inequalities less noticeable, it stopped men from feeling aggrieved.”

Marx had disliked religion because he thought it made people too ready to accept inequality. It was an ‘opiate’ that dulled the pain and sapped the will. But this criticism was founded on a conviction that it would not actually be too difficult to make an equal world and therefore that the opiate could be lifted without trouble.

Durkheim took the darker view that inequality would be very hard to eradicate (perhaps impossible), so we would have to learn, somehow, to live with it. This led him to a warmer appreciation of any ideas that could soften the psychological blows of reality.

Camille Pissarro, The Fair by the Church of Saint-Jacques, Dieppe, 1901

Durkheim also saw that religion created deep bonds between people. The king and the peasant worshipped the same God, they prayed in the same building using the same words. They were offered precisely the same sacraments. Riches, status and power were of no direct spiritual value.

Capitalism had nothing to replace this with. Science certainly did not offer the same opportunities for powerful shared experiences. The Periodic Table might well possess transcendent beauty and be a marvel of intellectual elegance – but it couldn’t draw a society together around it.

Durkheim was especially taken with elaborate religious rituals that demand participation and create a strong sense of belonging. A tribe might worship its totem, men might undergo a complex process of initiation. The tragedy – in Durkheim’s eyes – was that we had done away with religion at precisely the time when we most needed its collective consoling dimensions and had nothing much to put in its place.

5. Weakening of the nation and of the family

In the 19th century, it had looked, at certain moments, as if the idea of the nation might grow so powerful and intense that it could take up the sense of belonging and shared devotion that once had been supplied by religion. Admittedly there were some heroic moments. In the war against Napoleon, for instance, the Prussians had developed a dramatic all-encompassing cult of the Fatherland. But the excitement of a nation at war had, Durkheim saw, failed to translate into anything very impressive in peacetime.

Family might similarly seem to offer the experience of belonging that we needed. But Durkheim was unconvinced. We do indeed invest hugely in our families, but they are not as stable as we might hope. And they do not provide access to a wider community.

John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882

Increasingly, the ‘family’ in the traditional expansive sense has ceased to exist. It boils down to the couple agreeing to live in the same house and look after one or two children for a while. But in adulthood these children do not expect to work alongside their parents; they don’t expect their social circle to overlap with their parents very much and don’t feel that their parent’s honour is in their hands.

Our looser, more individual sense of family isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just means that it’s not well placed to take up the task of giving us a larger sense of belonging – of giving us the feeling that we are part of something more valuable than ourselves.

Conclusion

Durkheim is a master diagnostician of our ills. He shows us that modern economies put tremendous pressures on individuals, but leave us dangerously bereft of authoritative guidance and communal solace.

He didn’t feel capable of finding answers to the problems he identified but he knew that Capitalism would have to uncover them, or collapse. We are Durkheim’s heirs – and still have ahead of us the task he accorded us: to create new ways of belonging, to take some of the pressure off the individual, to find a correct balance between freedom and solidarity and to generate ideologies that allow us not to take our own failures so personally and sometimes so tragically.

Melanie Klein (1882-1960) was a highly creative and original Viennese Jewish psychoanalyst who discovered the work of Freud at the age of 26 and devoted her life to enriching and nuancing it in intriguing and valuable ways. She is perhaps best remembered today for an unlikely-sounding but inherently sensible theory, advanced in her book The Psychoanalysis of Children (1932), about a ‘good breast’ and a ‘bad breast’ – of which more in a minute.

Freud had achieved renown by evoking for us just how deeply unacceptable many of our desires are in their raw, undisguised forms. Beneath the civilised surface, in our unconscious minds, we are motivated by what the inventor of psychoanalysis called ‘the pleasure principle,’ which incites us to want a shifting array of surprising, anarchic and (from an everyday point of view) simply shocking things. We want to kill, castrate and maim our enemies, be the most powerful people on earth, have sex with unusual body parts of men, women and children, pair off with members of our own families and become immortal.

So explosive, peculiar and dangerous are these wishes, they must be overruled by the rational mind, or ego, if we are to get on in the world. But this process can go more or less well, depending on how our conscious minds emerge from the vagaries of childhood. At worst, in our attempts to quash these impossible unconscious demands, we fall prey to rigid neuroses and inhibitions, which defend us from what we want, but only at a high cost: we become uncreative and severely hampered in daily life. For example, we might become unable to leave the house (so afraid is a part of us that we could try to murder someone); we might become impotent (for we’re somewhere deep down terrified of the aggression of a father figure in relation to our potency); or we might fail at everything we do (to make sure we don’t rival a sibling we secretly envy and yet dread). It is these sort of neuroses that psychoanalysis was designed to help us understand and patiently unpick, so that we might eventually make more flexible, less inhibited adjustments to reality.

Melanie Klein discovered psychoanalysis in 1914 and was at once captivated by its ambition and wisdom. A highly intelligent woman, she had been held back by her father from her desire to become a doctor and had been pushed by her family into a loveless marriage with a coarse, unpleasant man with whom she had nothing in common. She was bored, sexually frustrated and mentally unwell. Psychoanalysis saved her. She left her husband, read everything she could, attended lectures, and started publishing papers of her own. She soon departed from Freud in an area that most other analysts had overlooked: the analysis of children. Freud had been sceptical that children could ever be analysed properly, their minds being in his view too unformed to allow for a perspective on the unconscious. But Klein now argued that an analyst could get a useable view into a child’s inner world through studying how they played with toys in his or her presence. She therefore equipped her consulting room with small horses, figurines and locomotives and made the observation of how children played with them a centrepiece of her clinical work. She was to establish herself as a child psychoanalyst, first in Berlin and then in London, where she settled in 1926 and remained for the rest of her life (becoming a star among the Bloomsbury group and particular friends with Virginia and Leonard Woolf).

In her work with children, Klein wanted to understand how human beings evolve from the primitive pleasure seeking impulses of early infancy to the more mature adaptations of later life – and in particular, she wanted to know what might go wrong on this journey, giving rise to the neurotic adaptations of adults.

She was first and foremost struck by the difficulty of the young infant’s situation (in the words of the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, Klein described the newborn’s days and nights ‘with the horror of a Hieronymus Bosch painting’). Weak, utterly at the mercy of adults, unable to grasp what is happening, the infant cannot – in Klein’s description – grasp that people around it are in fact people, with their own alternative reality and independent points of view. In the early weeks, the mother is not even ‘a mother’ to her child, she is – to come to the crux of the issue – just a pair of breasts which appear and disappear with unpredictable and painful randomness. In relation to this mother, all the infant experiences are moments of intense pain and then, for reasons it can’t understand, moments of equally intense pleasure. When the breast is there and the milk flows, a primordial calm and satisfaction descends upon the infant: it is suffused with feelings of well-being, gratitude and tenderness (feelings that will, in adulthood, be strongly associated with being in love, a moment where breasts continue to play a notable role for many). But when the breast is desired and yet for whatever reason it is missing, then the infant is thrown into unfathomable panic: it feels starving, enraged, terrified and vengeful. 

This, thought Klein, leads the infant to adopt a primitive defence mechanism against what would otherwise be intolerable anxiety. It ‘splits’ the mother into two very different breasts: a ‘good breast’ and a ‘bad breast’. The bad breast is hated with a passion; the infant wants to bite, wound and destroy this object of unholy frustration. But the good breast is revered with an equally thorough though more benign intensity. 

With time, in healthy development, this ‘split’ heals. The child will gradually perceive that there is in truth no entirely good and no entirely bad breast, both belong to a mother who is a perplexing mixture of the positive and the negative: a source of pleasure and frustration, joy and suffering. The child (for, by now, we are talking of someone aged around 4 years old) discovers a key idea in Kleinian psychoanalysis: the concept of ambivalence. To be able to feel ambivalent about someone is, for Kleinians, an enormous psychological achievement and the first marker on the path to genuine maturity. 

But it isn’t inevitable or assured. The grey area is hard to reach. Only slowly can a healthy child grasp the crucial distinction between intention and effect, between what a mother may have wanted for it and what the child might have felt at her hands nevertheless. While no sane mother would ever want to frustrate and scare her own child, this child might nevertheless have been badly hurt and confused by her. These complicated psychological realisations belong to what Klein called ‘the depressive position,’ a moment of soberness and melancholy when the growing child takes on board (unconsciously) the idea that reality is more complicated and less morally neat than it had ever previously imagined: the mother (or other people generally) cannot be neatly blamed for every setback; almost nothing is totally pure or totally evil, things are a perplexing, thought-provoking mixture of the good and bad… This is hard to take and – for Klein – explains the serious faraway look that may sometime enter the eyes of children during daydreams. These small beings look oddly wise and grave at such moments; they are, somewhere deep inside, cottoning on to the moral ambiguity of the real world.

Unfortunately, in Klein’s analysis, not everyone makes it to the depressive position, for some get stuck in a mode of primitive splitting she termed (somewhat dauntingly) the ‘paranoid-schizoid position’. For many years, even into adulthood, these cursed people will find themselves unable to tolerate the slightest ambivalence: keen to preserve their sense of their own innocence, they must either hate or love. They must seek scapegoats or idealise. In relationships, they tend to fall violently in love and then – at the inevitable moment when a lover in some way disappoints them – switch abruptly and become incapable of feeling anything anymore. These unfortunates are likely to move from candidate to candidate, always seeking a vision of complete satisfaction, which is repeatedly violated by an unwitting error on the lover’s part.

We don’t have to believe in the literal truth of Klein’s theory to see that it has value for us as an unusual but useful representation of maturity. The impulse to reduce people into what they can do for us (give us milk, make us money, keep us happy), rather than what they are in and of themselves (a multifaceted being with their own often elusive centre of gravity), can be painfully observed in emotional life generally. With Klein’s help, we learn that coming to terms with the ambivalent nature of all relationships belongs to the business of growing up (a task we’re never quite done with) – and is likely to leave us a little sad, if not for a time quite simply depressed.

Some of the statues in this video are by Gert Germeraad: www.gertgermeraad.eu

Most of the time, successful modern life involves lots of technology, constantly being connected with other people, working very hard for as much money as possible, and doing what we are told. These elements are almost a conventional prescription for success. So it may come as a surprise that some of the best advice about modern life comes from an unemployed writer who lived alone in the woods and refused to pay his taxes. Henry David Thoreau (originally David Thoreau, 1817-1862) reminds us about the importance of simplicity, authenticity, and downright disobedience.

Thoreau in his 30s

He was born in 1817, in Concord, an unassuming town west of Boston. His father was a pencil-maker and his mother took in boarders. He attended Harvard College in 1833 and graduated in 1837 with good marks. Yet he rejected the ordinary career paths like law, medicine, or the church. He took up teaching for a period, but failed to settle into a job at the local school because he couldn’t stand their practice of corporal punishment. He was, in short, dissatisfied with every obvious trajectory.

Then Thoreau struck up a remarkable friendship with the American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). Emerson believed in transcendentalism, an outlook that holds that the world is divided into two realities: material reality and spiritual reality. Transcendentalists emphasise the importance of the spiritual over the material when it comes to leading a fulfilling life.

Emerson and his transcendentalism had a huge influence on Thoreau. Moreover, Emerson inspired Thoreau to work seriously towards becoming a writer. Thoreau’s house was busy and noisy, and he found working at the pencil business tiring and uninspiring. But Emerson owned a plot of land in the woods surrounding the nearby Walden Pond, and in 1845 he allowed Thoreau to build a small cabin (3 by 4.5 metres) there. It had three chairs, one bed, a table, a desk, and a lamp.

The inside of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond

Thoreau moved in on the Fourth of July with two aims: to write a book, and to ascertain whether it was possible to work one day a week and devote six to his philosophical work.

In his two years in the cabin, Thoreau penned his most notable work: Walden; or, Life in the Woods, which was eventually published in 1854. It was a modest commercial and literary success at the time, but it would become an inspirational text about self-discovery. Thoreau argued that his escape to Walden Pond was not simply a relaxing retreat to the forest. He settled there to “live deep and suck out the marrow of life,” as he put it:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Thoreau believed that people often ‘miss’ life—they remain so stuck in their ways that they fail to see that other approaches to fulfilment exist: “it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left.” After some time in the cabin, Thoreau discovered a different, more conscious lifestyle.

To begin with, Thoreau concluded that we actually need very few things. He suggested that we think about our belongings in terms of how little we can get by with, rather than how much we can get. Money, he believed, is largely superfluous, for it does not help us to develop our soul. Work, in the traditional sense, is also unnecessary: “As for work we haven’t any of any consequence.” Thoreau aimed to labour for only one day a week, and found this was entirely possible. He pointed out that walking the distance of a 30-mile train journey took a day, but working to earn the money to pay for the same journey would take more than a day. Best of all, walking allows us to view nature and gives us time for contemplation—and that, in Thoreau’s view, was what time was for: “I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study.”

Self-reliance and solitude: Thoreau turned this commercially-made chair into a rocking-chair himself during his time at Walden Pond. “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,” he wrote in his journals.

Like his friend Emerson, Thoreau deeply valued what he called self-reliance. He distrusted society and the “progress” it seemed to make. “The civilised man has built a coach,” he said “but has lost the use of his feet.” He felt that economic independence from other people and from the government was crucial, and while he understood that we need the company of other people from time to time, he felt that too often we use the company of other people to fill gaps in our inner life that we are afraid to confront ourselves. The task of learning to live alone was, for Thoreau, not so much about carrying out daily chores as it was about becoming a good companion for oneself, relying first and foremost on oneself for companionship and moral guidance: “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.” Most of all, one should change oneself before seeking to change the world.

Thoreau also saw technology as an often unnecessary distraction. He saw the practical benefits of new inventions, but he also warned that these innovations could not address the real challenge of personal happiness: “our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things…We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” What we need to be happy isn’t work or money or technology or even lots of friends, but time.

Thoreau also believed we should look to nature, which is full of deep spiritual significance.  He sought “to be always on the alert to find God in nature.” He thought of animals, forests, and waterfalls as inherently valuable both for their beauty and their role in the ecosystem. He said he would be very happy “if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state,” for we are likely to find that “nature is worth more even by our modes of valuation than our improvements are.” We can best understand ourselves as a part of nature; we should see ourselves as “nature looking into nature,” rather than an external force or the master of nature.

Yellow Warbler and Red-Tailed Hawk eggs that Thoreau found and then gifted to the Boston Society of Natural History

Most of all, nature provides the meaning that money and technology and other people’s opinions cannot, by teaching us to be humble and more aware, by fostering introspection and self-discovery. Thoreau believed that with the right kind of consciousness, human beings could transcend their previous limitations and ideas. This mental state—and not money or technology—would provide real progress. He optimistically declared, “only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” If we clear our lives of distractions and make time for a little contemplation, new discoveries await us.

***

Perhaps the best testament of the value of Thoreau’s individual contemplation and personal authenticity is that his ideas lead him to powerful political conclusions. He believed that people should behave in a way that would make their governments more moral, prioritising their moral conscience over the dictates of law. In ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ (1849), Thoreau argued that people are morally obliged to challenge a government that upholds hypocritical or flagrantly unfair laws. The American government of Thoreau’s day had, in his view, bullied Mexico into war in 1846 to expand its territory; it also upheld slavery. So Thoreau turned to what he called ‘civil disobedience’—peacefully resisting immoral laws—in protest. In July 1846, he withheld payment of his poll tax duty to avoid paying for the Mexican-American war and slavery. He spent a night in prison for his troubles, an adventure that led to the writing of his essay ‘Resistance to Civil Government’. “There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognise the individual as a higher and independent power, from with all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly,” he wrote. “I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.”

It was not until it was picked up by subsequent reformers that ‘Civil Disobedience’—as it was later called—became one of the most influential pieces of American political philosophy in history. Mohandas Gandhi adopted Thoreau’s idea of nonviolent disobedience as a model for his fight against British Colonialism, and referred to Thoreau as “one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced.” In the Second World War, a number of people in Denmark adopted the methods of ‘Civil Disobedience’ to resist the Nazi movement, and Thoreau became a hero there. Furthermore, Martin Luther King famously used Thoreau’s ideas in his fight for equality for African-Americans. King’s first exposure to nonviolent methods of protest came when he read Thoreau’s work in 1944; it convinced him that “noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.”

Lunch counter protestors against racial segregation in the American South (here being harassed by racist opposition) are inspired by Thoreau’s idea of civil disobedience

Despite his time as a hermit, Thoreau teaches us how to approach our frighteningly vast, highly interconnected and morally-troubling modern society. He challenges us to be authentic not just by avoiding material life and its distractions, but by engaging with the world, and withdrawing our support for the government when we believe it is acting unjustly. This might make us feel uncomfortable: how many of us want to risk our liberty or possessions on one act of defiance? Yet civil disobedience has become one of the most powerful forms of doing ‘nothing’ (avoiding certain actions) the world has ever seen.

Thoreau remains highly relevant, for we are not far from the problems he sought to address. His emphasis on frugality and turning one’s back on the material world is a fresh insight in a world of economic trouble. Indeed, interest in Thoreau peaks around economic crises: during the depression in the 1930s, his philosophy became especially popular in America. Yet—as Thoreau would probably argue—it should not take a severe crisis for us to question a materialistic life.

We can also continue to learn from his appreciation for nature and the psychological possibilities it offers. Thoreau later became a patron saint of the environmental movement; the Sierra Club—one of the largest environmental organisations in America—uses Thoreau’s slogan, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” as their guiding mantra.

After he left Walden, Thoreau travelled widely, spent time working as a surveyor, and published many more essays, especially about the environment. He had struggled with tuberculosis since his college years, and fell ill with it yet again after an outing to count tree rings. He died three years later in 1862, aged only 44. However, his works endure, and remind us of just how important it is to remove the distractions of money, technology, and other people’s views in order to live according to our inner nature.

Modern architecture produces truly innovative work: glittering, staggeringly tall buildings, opera houses that look like folded origami, even museums that look like spaceships. However, in turning towards everything new, architectural modernism also dogmatically left behind much of what makes buildings lovely. The best architects of the modern age have managed to avoid this pitfall, discarding older, dull conventions while retaining the meaningful and beautiful aspects of tradition. Perhaps one of the most successful architects at finding this balance was a whimsical, absent-minded American named Louis Kahn.

Kahn was born in 1901. As a young man he studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, but his career truly blossomed in the 1950s after a trip to Rome led him to a new appreciation of ancient designs. Kahn’s important contribution to modern architecture was to include these older and even ancient elements in his work without losing the innovation and clarity of modernism.

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, built in 1960

One example of this successful rehabilitation of old ideas was Kahn’s affection for symmetry, which modern architects usually saw as unimaginative and conformist. Kahn designed the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California as a complex of buildings, identical on either side of a central fountain. Such symmetry was characteristic of the Beaux-Arts style, but Kahn was unperturbed by this apparent regression. “If people want to see Beaux-Arts it’s fine with me,” he said. “I’m [as] interested in good architecture as anybody else.”

Kahn used the identical rows of buildings to draw the viewer’s eye to the centre of his design, and to the sea beyond it. The fountain that runs through the centre of the institute aligns with the path of the sun on both the autumnal and vernal equinox. Thus Kahn used symmetry not as an aesthetic default but instead with great intentionality, to provide one with a sense of balance, focus, and momentum.

The Institute during the vernal equinox

Kahn also managed to create a sense of grandeur in his designs rarely seen in modern architecture. We might gape at the height of a skyscraper, but it rarely instils the sense of awe that a great cathedral does.

The Yale Centre for British Art, built in New Haven, Connecticut in 1969

Yet Kahn managed to reintroduce this sense of wonder and magnificence to modern works. In the Yale Centre for British Art, he draws the viewer’s eyes upward to the high windowed ceiling, much as though it were the dome of a church. The building’s wide column is imposing; even the staircases create a sense of lofty space and height. The effect is that the viewer feels reverence and appreciation not only for the art on display, but for buildings, museums and the idea of culture itself.

Most modern architects have relied mainly on steel, concrete, and glass, but Kahn sought a wide variety of sensory materials. He regularly brought consultants into his office to find new uses for ceramic, copper, and other unusual substances, and once he had his class at Yale think of as many possible uses for clay as they could manage. Most of all, he rejected the idea that architects should always use the most efficient and modern building materials. Instead, he instructed his students to ask the materials for advice: “You say to a brick, ‘What do you want, brick?’ And brick says to you, ‘I like an arch.’ And you say to brick, ‘Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.’ And then you say: ‘What do you think of that, brick?’ Brick says: ‘I like an arch.’” In short, the brick should have its way.

A striking combination of wood and concrete in the Phillips Exeter Academy Library, built in 1965 in Exeter, New Hampshire

Kahn especially liked to cleverly juxtapose unexpected materials like concrete and oak, as he did in his Esherick house, built in 1959. Usually, we associate oak wood with Victorian smoking rooms and dusty, ancient libraries, while concrete reminds us of impersonal factories and remote, futuristic buildings. But together, the two mediums demonstrate strikingly different, yet remarkably complementary virtues. The wood gives the space a warmth and domesticity that makes the house a good place for a bookworm, while the concrete provides a sense of strength and stability that lends it a reassuring feeling of refuge from the outside world. This combination of materials subtly suggests that we can find comfort and strength together.

Wooden shelves and warm beige concrete in The Esherick House in Philadelphia

Finally, Kahn is remembered as a monumental architect—in both senses—during a time when most modern architects firmly rejected monuments as useless and sentimental. In 1938 the architectural critic Lewis Mumford firmly declared, “if it is a monument it is not modern; if it is modern it cannot be a monument.” But Kahn liked monuments. After his important trip to Rome, he wrote, “I finally realize that the architecture of Italy will remain as the inspirational source of the works of the future…those who don’t see it that way ought to look again. Our stuff looks tiny compared to it.” The marble Kahn used in his Kimbell Arts Museum, in Fort Worth, Texas is, for example, a clear reference to the ancient buildings that Kahn so admired.

The Kimbell Arts Museum built in 1972

When Kahn died in 1974, he was perhaps the most famous architect in the United States, and he remained deeply influential. Kahn’s importance lay in his ability to transcend dogmatic modernism and return beautiful traditional elements of architecture to their rightful place in the canon of design, where they could continue to bring gravitas, elegance, and splendour to buildings for future generations. 

One of the most depressing aspects of travel is finding that the world often looks the same in many different places. The towers of downtown Tokyo are indistinguishable from those of Frankfurt or Seattle. That’s no coincidence. Modern architecture was founded on the idea that buildings should logically look the same everywhere. The early figures of Modernism were united in their bitter opposition to any kind of ‘regionalism’, which they saw as reactionary, folkloric and plain mediocre. If bicycles, telephones and planes (all harbingers of the new age) weren’t going to be done up in a local style, why should buildings? Down with chalets, wigwams and gargoyles.

The Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer began his career as an orthodox modern architect, subscribing thoroughly to this universalist credo. He was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1907 – and developed a passion for architecture in his early teens. When he went to study at the National School of Fine Arts, he fell in with a group that venerated the great European Modernist architects, especially Le Corbusier – who had insisted with particular vehemence on making sure buildings made no concession whatever to the culture in which they were located.

Niemeyer’s professional ambitions were realised when, in 1936, Le Corbusier was commissioned to come to Rio to design the new Ministry of Education and Health. Niemeyer was invited to join the team of Brazilian architects charged with helping the European to realise his scheme on this large and prestigious building.

While working with him, Niemeyer retained the utmost respect for Le Corbusier, but at the same time, he couldn’t help but observe how blind his guest was to the particularities of Brazilian culture and climate. With what would become his legendary charm, Niemeyer managed to persuade Le Corbusier to abandon some of his more hard-edged ‘universalist’ intentions for the building and to make some concessions to local conditions. Under his influence, the building’s windows acquired ‘louvres’ against the sun and, most spectacularly of all, Niemeyer persuaded Le Corbusier to commission an enormous traditional Portuguese piece of tile work, done up with abstract motifs, for the public areas on the ground floor.

Emboldened by his success with the building, Niemeyer felt ready to break free from European Modernism. He is to be celebrated for being perhaps the first architect anywhere in the world to practice a regional kind of Modernism: in his case, a Brazilian-infused modernism.

His first wholly original work was completed in 1943 (when he was 36), and was commissioned by the local mayor of Belo Horizonte, the future president of Brazil, Juscelino Kubitschek. It was a building complex that included a casino, a restaurant, a dance hall, a yacht club and most famously, a place of worship, now known as the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, in Belo Horizonte. 

Though the local clergy hated it (Archbishop Antonio dos Santos Cabral called it a “devil’s bomb shelter unfit for religious purposes”), it was quickly recognised as a masterpiece. 

The complex had no straight lines on any plane, for Niemeyer now judged these to be European and (it was the heyday of Fascism) appallingly authoritarian. Architecture had in theory been liberated from oppressive structural conventions by the invention of reinforced concrete – and Niemeyer proposed that one should use the new freedom in more creative ways.

Niemeyer was henceforth to include curves in all his buildings, and saw them in a nationalistic light as being particularly Brazilian in nature. “It is not the right angle that attracts me, nor the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man,” he said. “What attracts me is the free and sensual curve—the curve that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers and in the bodies of its beautiful women.” The latter point is telling. Niemeyer was deeply responsive to female beauty throughout his life. He was famous around Rio for his affairs, many with people dramatically younger than he was. At 92, he acquired a girlfriend who had just turned 25. 

As in the Ministry of Health, the Pampulha Church had tiles across it. They reminded viewers that Brazil could be both modern and recall its heritage – that a church might nod towards the forms of a futuristic airplane hanger, and yet could at the same time accommodate a depiction of Saint Francis and some (distinctly charming) chickens. 

The sensuality that Niemeyer enjoyed in his life also came to infuse many of his buildings. His Casa das Canoas (1951) repositions sensuality as part of a sophisticated, mature life. Instead of suggesting that it might be the special province of the young, the carefree, the louche or the pretty, he creates a home where one imagines you can be an accountant or work in the Ministry of Infrastructure (be a responsible, hard working person much concerned with technical and administrative problems) and relish your body. You can have a conversation that stretches your mind and also be gently exploring the back of your lover’s knee; or you might kiss in the warm shadows before taking a conference call about worrying regional sales projections.

The house is a bit like a confident and encouraging friend who makes reassuring murmurs at the right time. One could imagine a couple feeling safe enough in this house to be sexually adventurous in a way that felt impossible for years in their normal home.

Niemeyer’s most audacious attempt to use architecture to define Brazilian identity came with his designs for the new capital, Brasília. In 1956, Kubitschek asked Niemeyer to help create a wholly planned city in the centre of the country, free from the corruption of the old capital in Rio. Niemeyer drew up the National Congress, a cathedral, a cultural complex, many ministries and commercial and residential buildings. The atmosphere was dignified, hopeful, and in touch with the native environment. Apartment buildings were lifted on stilts to allow vegetation to grow beneath them, maintaining a connection with the local ecology and tropical climate. 

Of course, Niemeyer’s works depicted Brazil not as it was, but as he believed and hoped it might one day be. He knew that architecture can point hopefully and encouragingly in a good direction. Brazil is a country of frenetic economic activity, of rainforest and Amazonian villages, favelas, soccer, beaches and intense disagreement about political priorities … none of which is apparent from contemplation of the National Congress in Brasilia. Instead the building imagines the Brazil of the future; it is a glass and reinforced concrete ideal for the country to develop towards. In the future, so the building argues, Brazil will be a place where rationality is powerful; where order and harmony reign; where elegance and serenity are normal. Calm, thoughtful people will labour carefully and think accurately about legislation; in offices in the towers, efficient secretaries will type up judicious briefing notes; the filing systems will be perfect – nothing will get lost, overlooked, neglected or mislaid; negotiations will take place in an atmosphere of impersonal wisdom. The country will be perfectly managed. The building, therefore, could be seen as an essay in flattery. It hints that these desirable qualities are already to some extent possessed by the country and by its governing class. Ideals flatter us – because we experience them not merely as intimations of a far distant future but also as descriptions of what we are like. We are used to thinking of flattery as bad – but in fact it is rather helpful, for flattery encourages us to live up to the appealing image it presents. The child who is praised for his or her first modest attempts at humour, and called witty as a result, is being guided and helped to develop beyond what he or she actually happens to be right now. They grow into the person they have flatteringly been described as already being. This is important because the obstacle to our good development is not usually arrogance, but a lack of confidence.

Niemeyer enjoys the beautiful dream of a Brazilian carnival in 2012, the year of his death. His then girlfriend was 42.

Niemeyer was prolific until his very last years, teaching around the world, writing and designing sculptures and furniture. He died in 2012, when he was 104 years old. He was given a hero’s funeral and thousands joined the cortege. What his nation was honouring was an architect who had given it a workable yet ideal portrait of itself. He had enabled Brazil to break free from a sterile European modernism – and to create buildings that better reflected the nation’s uniqueness. Niemeyer remains an example to all architects who aspire to put up buildings that remember the distinctiveness of their locales – architects who may like their phones to be universal in design, but are as keen for their buildings to be culturally specific.

We generally think that philosophers should be proud of their big brains, and be fans of thinking, self-reflection and rational analysis.

But there’s one philosopher, born in France in 1533, with a refreshingly different take. Michel de Montaigne was an intellectual who spent his writing life knocking the arrogance of intellectuals. In his great masterpiece, the Essays, he comes across as relentlessly wise and intelligent – but also as constantly modest and keen to debunk the pretensions of learning. Not least, he is extremely funny…: ‘to learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing, we must learn a more ample and important lesson: that we are but blockheads… On the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.’ And, lest we forget: ‘Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies.’

Montaigne was a child of the Renaissance and the ancient philosophers popular in Montaigne’s day had believed that our powers of reason could afford us a happiness and greatness denied to other creatures. Reason allowed us to control our passions and temper the wild demands of our bodies, wrote philosophers like Cicero. Reason was a sophisticated, almost divine, tool offering us mastery over the world and ourselves. But this characterisation of human reason enraged Montaigne. After hanging out with academics and philosophers, he wrote, “In practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived more gentle, more equable and more constant lives than [Cicero].”

His point wasn’t that human beings can’t reason at all, simply that they tend to be far too arrogant about their brains. “Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom,” he wrote. “Whoever writes about it merely respectfully and by rule leaves more than half of it behind.”

Perhaps the most obvious example of our madness is the struggle of living with a human body. Our bodies smell, ache, sag, pulse, throb and age. Montaigne was the world’s first and possibly only philosopher to talk at length about impotence, which seemed to him a prime example of how crazy and fragile our minds are.

Montaigne had a friend who had grown impotent with a woman he particularly liked. Montaigne did not blame his penis: “Except for genuine impotence, never again are you incapable if you are capable of doing it once.” The problem was the mind, the oppressive notion that we had complete control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality that had left the man unable to perform. The solution was to redraw the portrait; it was by accepting a loss of command over the penis as a harmless possibility in love-making that one could pre-empt its occurrence – as the stricken man eventually discovered. In bed with a woman, he learnt to,

“Admit beforehand that he was subject to this infirmity and spoke openly about it, so relieving the tensions within his soul. By bearing the malady as something to be expected, his sense of constriction grew less and weighed less heavily on him.”    

Montaigne’s frankness allowed the tensions in the reader’s own soul to be relieved. A man who failed with his girlfriend and was unable to do any more than mumble an apology, could regain his forces and soothe the anxieties of his beloved by accepting that his impotence belonged to a broad realm of sexual mishaps, neither very rare nor very peculiar. Montaigne knew a nobleman who, after failing to maintain an erection with a woman, fled home, cut off his penis and sent it to the lady “to atone for his offence.” Montaigne proposed instead that:

“If [couples] are not ready, they should not try to rush things. Rather than fall into perpetual wretchedness by being struck with despair at a first rejection, it is better… to wait for an opportune moment… a man who suffers a rejection should make gentle assays and overtures with various little sallies; he should not stubbornly persist in proving himself inadequate once and for all. ”

Throughout his work, Montaigne took farts, penises, and shitting as serious topics for contemplation. He told his readers, for example, that he liked quiet when sitting on the toilet: “Of all the natural operations, that is the one during which I least willingly tolerate being disrupted.”

Ancient philosophers had recommended that one try to model oneself on the lives of certain esteemed people, normally philosophers. In the Christian tradition, one should model one’s life on that of Christ. The idea of modelling is attractive; it suggests we need to find someone to guide and illuminate our path. But it matters a lot what kind of portraits are around. What we see evidence for in others, we will attend to within, what others are silent about, we may stay blind to or experience only in shame. Montaigne is refreshing because he provides us with a life which is recognisably like our own and yet inspiring still – a very human ideal.

Academia was deeply prestigious in Montaigne’s day, as in our own. Montaigne was an excellent scholar but he hated pedantry. He only wanted to learn things that were useful and relentlessly attacked academia for being out of touch: “If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life,” he said. Only that which makes us feel better may be worth understanding.

Montaigne noted snobbery and pretension in many areas – and constantly tried to bring us back to earth.

“Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together gently and justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor being false to yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult. Whatever people may say, such secluded lives sustain in that way duties which are at least as hard and as tense as those of other lives.”

In this vein, Montaigne mocked books that were difficult to read. He admitted to his readers that he found Plato more than a little boring – and that he just wanted to have fun with books:

“I am not prepared to bash my brains for anything, not even for learning’s sake however precious it may be. From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime… If I come across difficult passages in my reading I never bite my nails over them: after making a charge or two I let them be… If one book wearies me I take up another.”

He could be pretty caustic about incomprehensible philosophers:

“Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment.”         

Montaigne observed how an intimidating scholarly culture had made all of us study other people’s books before we study our own minds. And yet, as he put it: “We are richer than we think, each one of us.”

We may all arrive at wise ideas if we cease to think of ourselves as so unsuited to the task because we aren’t two thousand years old, aren’t interested in the topics of Plato’s dialogues and have a so-called ordinary life.

“You can attach the whole of moral philosophy to a commonplace private life just as well as to one of richer stuff.”                            

It was perhaps to bring the point home that Montaigne offered so much information on exactly how ordinary his own life was – why he wanted to tell us,

That he didn’t like apples

“I am not overfond …of any fruit except melons.”

That he had a complex relationship with radishes

“I first of all found that radishes agreed with me; then they did not; now they do again.”

That he practised the most advanced dental hygiene

“My teeth…have always been exceedingly good… Since boyhood I learned to rub them on my napkin, both on waking up and before and after meals.”

That he ate too fast

“In my haste I often bite my tongue and occasionally my fingers.”

And liked wiping his mouth

“I could dine easily enough without a tablecloth, but I feel very uncomfortable dining without a clean napkin… I regret that we have not continued along the lines of the fashion started by our kings, changing napkins likes plates with each course.”

Trivia perhaps, but symbolic reminders that there was a thinking “I” behind this book, that a moral philosophy had issued – and so could issue again – from an ordinary, fruit-eating soul.

There is no need to be discouraged if, from the outside, we look nothing like those who have ruminated in the past.

In Montaigne’s redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one’s mind after a meal, get bored with book, be impotent and know none of the Ancient philosophers.

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

Montaigne remains the great, readable intellectual with whom we can laugh at intellectuals and pretensions of many kinds. He was a breath of fresh air in the cloistered, unworldly, snobbish corridors of the academia of the 16th century – and because academia has, sadly, not changed very much, he continues to be an inspiration and a solace to all of us who feel routinely oppressed by the pedantry and arrogance of so-called clever people.

We know very little for certain about the life of the Chinese philosopher Confucius (a westernised version of his name, which means ‘Master Kong’). He is said to have been born in 551 B.C. in China; he may have been a student of the Daoist master Lao Tzu. According to tradition, he began government service aged 32 and served many roles, including Minister of Crime under Duke Ding in the state of Lu. However, when Confucius was 56, he and the duke fell out over the duke’s excesses, and so Confucius left the court and wandered for 12 years.

Confucius presented himself as a ‘transmitter who invented nothing’, because he believed he was teaching the natural path to good behaviour passed down from older, divine masters. Around the second century B.C., Confucius’s works were collected into the Analects (Lunyu), a collection of sayings written down by his followers. These are not always commandments, because Confucius didn’t like prescribing strict rules. Instead, he believed that if he simply lived virtuously, he would inspire others to do the same. For example, one of the short passages in the analects is:

The stable burned down when Confucius was at court. On his return he said, ‘Has any man been hurt?’ He did not ask about the horses.

In this simple three-sentence story, we are able to contemplate the implied value of human lives over objects or horses, and to wonder if we would have done the same.

An image of Confucius travelling in a wheelchair from a Confucian children’s book c. 1680

Some of the morals Confucius taught are easily recognisable – most notably his version of the ‘Golden Rule’: ‘Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself’. But some of them also sound very strange or old-fashioned to modern ears (especially to western ones). We need his advice all the more for this; it serves as an antidote to the troubles we currently face. Here are a few examples of what Confucius helps us remember:

Ceremony is important

The Analects are a long and seemingly disorganised book of short events, filled with strange conversations between Confucius and his disciples, like this one:

‘Tsze-kung wished to do away with the offering of a sheep connected with the inauguration of the first day of each month.

The Master said, ‘Tsze, you love the sheep; I love the ceremony’.

At first this is baffling, if not also humorous. But Confucius is reminding Tsze—and us—about the importance of ceremony.

In the modern world we tend to shun ceremony and see this as a good thing—a sign of intimacy, or a lack of pretension. Many of us seek informality and would like nothing more than to be told ‘just make yourself at home!’ when visiting a friend. But Confucius insisted on the importance of rituals. The reason he loved ceremonies more than sheep is that he believed in the value of li: etiquette, tradition, and ritual.

This might seem very outdated and conservative at first glance. But in fact, many of us long for particular rituals—that meal mum cooked for us whenever we were sick, for example, or the yearly birthday outing, or our wedding vows. We understand that certain premeditated, deliberate, and precise gestures stir our emotions deeply. Rituals make our intentions clear, and they help us understand how to behave. Confucius taught that a person who combines compassion (‘ren’) and rituals (‘li’) correctly is a ‘superior man’, virtuous and morally powerful. 

A little girl at a ‘brush-opening’ ceremony at a Confucian temple, in celebration of the girl beginning her education

We should treat our parents with reverence

Confucius had very strict ideas about how we should behave towards our parents. He believed that we should obey them when we are young, care for them when they are old, mourn at length when they die and make sacrifices in their memory thereafter. ‘In serving his parents, a son may remonstrate with them, but gently’, he said. ‘When he sees that they do not incline to follow his advice, he shows an increased degree of reverence, but does not abandon his purpose; and should they punish him, he does not allow himself to murmur’. He even said that we should not travel far away while our parents are alive and should cover for their crimes. This attitude is known as filial piety (‘xiào’).

A detail from a 1795 eight-panel painting shows the Korean Confucian King Jeongjo’s yearly procession to his parents’ tomb

This sounds strange in the modern age, when many of us leave our parents’ homes as teenagers and rarely return to visit. We may even see them as strangers, arbitrarily thrust upon us by fate. After all, our parents are so out of touch, so pitifully human in their shortcomings, so difficult, so judgmental—and they have such bad taste in music! Yet Confucius recognised that in many ways moral life begins in the family. We cannot truly be caring, wise, grateful and conscientious unless we remember Mum’s birthday and meet Dad for lunch.

We should be obedient to honourable people

Modern society is very egalitarian. We believe that we’re born equal, each uniquely special, and should ultimately be able to say and do what we like. We reject many rigid, hierarchical roles. Yet Confucius told his followers, ‘Let the ruler be a ruler, the subject a subject, a father a father, and a son a son’.

This might sound jarring, but it is in fact important to realise that there are people worth our deep veneration, even our simple and humble obedience. We need to be modest enough to recognise the people whose experience or accomplishments outweigh our own. We also should practice peaceably doing what these people need, ask, or command. Confucius explained, ‘The relation between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend, when the wind blows across it.’ Bending gracefully is, in fact, not a sign of weakness but a gesture of humility and respect.

A second-century A.D. depiction of Confucius showing respect to the his elder, Lao Tzu

Cultivated knowledge can be more important than creativity

Modern culture places a lot of emphasis on creativity – unique insights that come to us suddenly. But Confucius was adamant about the importance of the universal wisdom that comes from years of hard work and reflection. He listed the aforementioned compassion (‘ren’) and ritual propriety (‘li’) among three other virtues: justice (‘yi’), knowledge (‘zhi’) and integrity (‘xin’). These were known as the ‘Five Constant Virtues’. While Confucius believed that people were inherently good, he also saw that virtues like these must be constantly cultivated just like plants in a garden. He told his followers, ‘At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.’ He spoke about moral character and wisdom as the work of a lifetime. (We can see now why he had such reverence for his elders!)

Scholars in a garden–a painting from between the 7th and 10th century A.D.

Of course, a burst of inspiration may well be what we need to start our business or redo our rough draft or even reinvent our life. But if we’re being very honest with ourselves, we’ll have to admit that we also need to devote more energy to slowly changing our habits. This, more than anything else, is what prevents us from becoming truly intelligent, accomplished, and wise.

***

After travelling for many years, Confucius returned to his homeland at the age of 68 and devoted himself to teaching. He is said to have died in 479 B.C. at the age of 72–an auspicious and magical number. He died without reforming the duke and his officials. But after his death, his followers created schools and temples in his honour across East Asia, passing his teachings along for over 2,000 years. (They also kept his genealogy, and more than two million people alive today claim to be his direct descendants!) At first, Confucian scholars were persecuted in some areas during the Qin dynasty (3rd century B.C). But in the later Han dynasty (3rd century B.C. to 3rd century A.D.), Confucianism was made the official philosophy of the Chinese government and remained central to its bureaucracy for nearly two thousand years. For a time, his teachings were followed in conjunction with those of Lao Tzu and the Buddha, so that Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism were held as fully compatible spiritual practices. Perhaps most importantly, Confucius’s thought has been a huge influence on eastern political ideas about morality, obedience, and good leadership.

Today millions of people still follow Confucius’s teachings as a spiritual or religious discipline, and even observe Confucian rituals in temples and at home. He is called by many superlatives, including ‘Laudably Declarable Lord Ni’, ‘Extremely Sage Departed Teacher’, and ‘Model Teacher for Ten Thousand Ages’. He is still a steadfast spiritual guide.

A visitor at a Confucius shrine in Nagasaki, Japan

We might find Confucian virtues a bit strange or old-fashioned, but this is what ultimately makes them all the more important and compelling. We need them as a corrective to our own excesses. The modern world is almost surprisingly un-Confucian – informal, egalitarian, and full of innovation. So we are conversely at risk of becoming impulsive, irreverent, and thoughtless without a little advice from Confucius about good behaviour and sheep.

Leo Tolstoy was a believer in the novel not as a source of entertainment, but as a tool for psychological education and reform.

It was, in his eyes, the supreme medium by which we can get to know others, especially those who might from the outside seem unappealling, and thereby expand our humanity and tolerance.

He was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, a huge family estate, a hundred miles south of Moscow. It was to be his home, on and off, for the rest of his life.

His parents died when he was young and he was brought up by relatives. He flopped at university. One lecturer described him as being “unable and unwilling to learn.”

Tolstoy at age 20, 1848

He spent a few years gambling and drinking and chasing gypsy women, before signing on as an artillery officer in the Crimean War.

He got married in his early thirties. His wife Sophia, who came from a sophisticated, high-cultured background, was only eighteen. They had thirteen children, nine of whom survived infancy.

Sophia and their daughter Alexandra

It was a difficult marriage; there were huge arguments about sex and bitterness on both sides. Leo grew a very long beard, became a fitness fanatic and spent most of his time in his study.

What he did there was to write several hugely successful books, among them, War and Peace, Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych.

Tolstoy with his family

Tolstoy did not believe in the idea of art for art’s sake. He was deeply invested in the belief that good art should make us less moralistic and judgemental and should be a supplement to religion in terms of developing our reserves of kindness and morality. This crusading moralistic side of Tolstoy has often been ignored by modern critics – who don’t wish to dirty art with a mission – but it is in fact the most important side of Tolstoy, and none of his efforts can properly be appreciated without keeping it in mind.

Tolstoy’s first great novel was War and Peace, published in 1869, when he was 41. In it, we meet Natasha Rostov, a delightful, free-spirited, young woman.

At the start, she is engaged to Andrey, a kind and sincere man who loves her deeply but is also rather emotionally remote and avoidant. While Andrey is away travelling in Italy, Natasha meets a handsome cynical waster called Anatole and falls under his spell. He almost manages to seduce her and persuades her to run away with him, though her family manage to stop her at the last minute. Everyone is appalled and furious with Natasha. This sort of madness wrecks her own prospects and deeply shames her family.

By the world’s standards, Natasha has failed terribly. If we encountered a news clip about such a person we might rapidly come to the conclusion that she lies beyond the range of normal sympathy. She had so much; she thought only of herself, she got what she deserved.

And yet Tolstoy’s view is that if we grasp what things are like for Natasha inside her mind, we can’t and won’t withdraw our sympathy. She isn’t in truth self-indulgent, frivolous or totally lacking in devotion. She’s just a sexually inexperienced young woman who feels abandoned by her preoccupied boyfriend. She is someone who has a deeply impulsive and warm nature and is easily carried away by joy and happiness. She is also acutely worried about letting other people down, which is what leads her into trouble with the scheming and manipulative Anatole.

Tolstoy keeps us on Natasha’s side and by doing so, he is getting us to rehearse a move he believes is fundamental to an ethical life: if we more accurately saw the inner lives of others, they couldn’t appear to us in the normal cold and one-dimensional was – and we would treat them with the kindness which they truly need and deserve. No one should be outside the circle of sympathy and forgiveness.

For Tolstoy, a particular task of the novel is to help us to understand the so-called ‘dislikeable’ characters. One of the most initially repellant characters in his fiction is the husband of Anna Karenina, the heroine of his great novel of the same name, the pompous and stiff Karenin. The novel, a tragedy, tells the story of the beautiful, clever, lively and very generous hearted married Anna, whose life falls apart when she falls in love with Vronsky – a splendid young cavalry officer.

Anna’s husband – Count Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin – is a fussy, status conscious, mannered high-ranking government official, who is often callous towards Anna and is unable to answer any of her emotional yearnings. As Anna’s affair with Vronsky develops, her husband’s main worry is that it might lead to social gossip which could undermine his public standing. He appears to have no feelings at all about the marriage itself. He comes across as simply cold and brutish.

But then Anna gives birth to her lover’s child, she is ill, and – in a highly touching scene – Karenin is deeply moved, weeps for the infant, for the mother, and forgives Anna:

‘No, you can’t forgive me!’ [says Anna]. And yet he suddenly felt a blissful spiritual condition that gave him all at once a new happiness he had never known: a glad feeling of love and forgiveness for his enemies filled his heart. He knelt down, and laying his head in the curve of Anna’s arm; he sobbed like a little child.’

The hitherto cold Karenin falls in love with Anna’s baby:

For the little newborn baby he felt a quite peculiar sentiment, not of pity only, but also of tenderness. At first, from a feeling of compassion alone, he had been interested in the delicate little creature… Now he would go into the nursery several times a day… Sometimes for half an hour at a stretch he would sit silently gazing at the downy, wrinkled face of the sleeping baby, watching the movements of the frowning brows, and the fat little hands, with clenched fingers, that rubbed the little eyes and nose.

Thanks to the judicious Tolstoy, we see entirely unexpected aspects of the man. His inner life is not at all what we would expect, judging from the outside. But Tolstoy’s point is that Karenin is not really an exceptional character in this respect. He is just the normal mixture of bad and very good. It is highly usual for rather off-putting people to have huge reserves of buried tenderness: to have dimensions to their characters very different from  and often much nicer than those that their forbidding appearance suggests.

We are invited on a comparable journey in relation to another character in Tolstoy’s fiction, the hero of the The Death of Ivan Illych (published in 1886). At the start of the novel, we meet Ivan, a high court judge at the pinnacle of society who appears selfish, vain and cynical. But one day, while helping hang some curtains, Ivan falls from a ladder and becomes aware of an inner pain which is the first sign of a disease which is soon diagnosed as fatal. He will have just a few months left to live. As his health declines, Ivan spends a lot of time sitting on the sofa at home.

His family, aware at just how inconvenient his death will be to their social and financial standing, begin to resent him and his illness. He’s short and ill-tempered back. And yet inside, Ivan is going through a range of epiphanies. He looks back over his life and atones for its shallowness. He becomes newly sensitive to nature – and to the ordinary kindness of his manservant, a humble uneducated man of peasant stock. He grows furious at the stupid way in which everyone avoids paying attention to the one really crucial fact about life: that we all die. He realises that our mortality should be constantly before our minds and should inspire continual kindness and sympathy. As he dies, Tolstoy imagines him finally feeling pity and forgiveness for all those around him.

As is typical in his writing, Tolstoy recounts in detail the vast philosophical and psychological dramas going on inside his hero’s head. All that those around him – the doctors and his family – get to see is a sullen man who spends a lot of time with his face to the wall, who is always saying ‘go away, leave me alone’ and who at times howls with misery, yet we can see a visionary, a prophet and a man of outstanding moral courage and generosity. In writing about Ivan, Tolstoy wanted us to see his life as representative of all human potential, if only we could wake up to it before it is too late.

**

When he was about seventy, Tolstoy pulled together his thinking about being a writer in a long essay, What is art?

It is one of his most important books. In it, Tolstoy proposes that art has a great mission. Through great art, he tells, us ‘Lower feelings – less kind and less needed for the good of humanity – are forced out and replaced by kinder feelings which better serve us individually and collectively. This is the purpose of art.’

As a supremely skilled and seductive writer, Tolstoy knew that novels need to be entertaining, or we simply won’t bother to read them. But he was also convinced that they have to aspire to be something else as well: key supports for our own stumbling path to maturity and kindness. And they can do this because they are able to get into a place we need but rarely have access to: the inner lives of other people.

In What is art?, Tolstoy was mostly writing about the works of other authors, but it is really his own achievement that he is, indirectly and modestly, summing up. Great writers shouldn’t ever be just helping their readers pass the time. Their writing must be a form of therapy, an attempt to educate us towards emotional health and ethical good sense.

As they aged, the tensions between Leo and and his wife Sophia grew. He complained that they had “totally opposite ideas of the meaning of existence”. Ye he insisted that even as Sophia  “grew more and more irritable, despotic and uncontrollable” he continued to love her, though he admitted that he had given up trying to express his feelings. “There is no greater tragedy than the tragedy of the marital bed”, he wrote. Finally, when he was past eighty, Tolstoy couldn’t take it any more, and deserted his wife and family. He ran away in the middle of a freezing November night, caught pneumonia and died at the nearby railway station, where he was waiting for a train.

Tolstoy’s funeral was a major public occasion. Thousands showed up from across Russia and the world.

This was fitting, for his central proposal has enormous social implications. He realised that our picture of what other people are like is a great driving force of relationships, economics and politics. He held up the tantalising idea that art could be the major vehicle for getting more accurate – and often much kinder – ideas about what is going on in the minds (and lives) of others.

His body was taken back to his house and buried in the garden, under some trees where he liked to play as a child.

Edward Hopper is a painter of gloomy-looking paintings which don’t make us feel gloomy. Instead, they help us to recognise and accept the loneliness that so often lies at the heart of sadness.

In his Automat, a woman sits alone drinking a cup of coffee. It is late and, to judge by her hat and coat, cold outside. The room seems large, brightly lit and empty. The decor is functional, and the woman looks self-conscious and slightly afraid. Perhaps she’s unused to sitting alone in a public place. Something appears to have gone wrong. She invites the viewer to imagine stories about her – of betrayal or loss. She may be trying not to let her hand shake as she moves the coffee cup to her lips. It may be eleven at night in February in a large dark North American city.

Automat, 1927

Automat is a picture of sadness – and yet it is not a sad picture. There can be something enticing, even charming, about anonymous diners. The lack of domesticity, the bright lights and anonymous furniture offer a relief from what can be the false comforts of home. It may be easier to give way to sadness here than in a cosy living room with wallpaper and framed photos. Home often appears to have betrayed Hopper’s characters; something has happened there that forces them out into the night and onto the road. The twenty-four-hour diner, the train station waiting room or motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for sound reasons, failed to find a place in the ordinary world of relationships and community.

A place for a special kind of anonymity

Nighthawks, 1942

Hopper’s ability to portray solitude grew from his own familiarity with it. He was born in 1882 in a shipbuilding town, Upper Nyack, New York, and had a comfortable, middle-class childhood as the son of merchant. Yet inside, Hopper often felt awkward, a bit like an outsider. An early self-portrait shows him gazing almost distrustfully at the viewer.

Self-Portrait, 1906

Hopper longed to be an artist, but his parents insisted he train in commercial art to stay afloat financially. He hated it, and to escape, he took several trips to Paris under the pretence of studying French art. But. in truth, he didn’t feel a connection to the art salons. He absorbed some of the Impressionists but forgot Picasso’s name. He preferred to be outdoors, watching the children playing in Luxembourg Gardens, listening to concerts in the Tuileries, and travelling up and down the Seine by boat.

Le Pont Royal, 1909

In 1913, when he was thirty-one, Hopper settled in Greenwich Village in New York City, where he remained for the rest of his life. There he discovered how crowded and yet isolated city life could be. The populations of American cities were skyrocketing, yet they were inhabited by passing strangers alienated from one another. Hopper would ride the L-train and look down at the “dark glimpses of office interiors that were so fleeting as to leave fresh and vivid impressions on my mind.” In each room, a separate drama was unfolding, an unnoticed, oblivious island in a sea of people.

Office at Night, 1940

Although Hopper painted in New York for over a decade, his works didn’t sell very well. He regularly struggled to find inspiration. Then, in his early forties, he met a beautiful, social painter named Josephine. Edward and Josephine took excursions to paint by the sea; they went to the movies and the theatre. Eventually, they married. Hopper was no longer so alone.

Summer Evening, 1947

But of course – as most of us discover in our relationships – Hopper’s marriage didn’t permanently end his feelings of isolation and woe. He was still lonely at times. He and his wife couldn’t quite figure out their sex life. She often seemed to prefer the company of her cat.

Hopper discovered that – even when others love us very much – some essential part of us is always alone.

Excursion into Philosophy, 1959

It is this recognition that makes his paintings so compelling. And indeed, it is by addressing loneliness that art can be most therapeutic: consoling us and reassuring us that estrangement and sorrow are normal, that we are neither very strange nor very shameful for experiencing them. Sad and lonely art allows us as viewers to witness an echo of our own griefs and disappointments, and thereby to feel less personally persecuted and beset by them.

Western Motel, 1957

Hopper’s art helps us notice the landscape of loneliness in our own lives. A side effect of coming into contact with any great artist is that we start to notice things in the world that the painter would have been receptive to. Nowadays, we’ve become sensitised to what one might call the Hopperesque, a quality found not only in the North American places Hopper himself visited, but anywhere in the developed world where there are motels and service stations, roadside diners and airports, bus stations and all-night supermarkets.

There are so many motels like this one

Service stations readily evoke Hopper’s famous Gas, painted thirteen years after Automat. In this painting, we see a petrol station on its own in the impending darkness. The isolation is made poignant and enticing. The darkness that spreads like a fog from the right of the canvas contrasts with the security of the station. Against the backdrop of night and the wild woods, in this last outpost of humanity, a sense of kinship seems easier to develop than in city daylight.

Gas, 1940

Hopper loved the introspective mood that often comes with travelling. He liked painting the atmosphere inside half-empty train carriages making their way across a landscape, when we can stand outside our normal selves and look at our lives in a way we don’t in more settled circumstances. We have all known the atmosphere in Hopper’s Compartment C, Car 293 – though we perhaps never recognise it as well as when Hopper holds a mirror up to it.

Compartment C, Car 293 1938

After Hopper’s marriage, his professional life suddenly began to improve as well. It was the era of the Great Depression, and yet his paintings began to sell. Critics raved, museums bought his paintings and he won awards. But despite his success, he remained deeply introverted. Instead of escaping solitude, he embraced it. For decades he turned down awards, rejected speaking opportunities, and lived simply out of the public eye. He died in 1967, yet his art continues to help us see the loneliness in our own lives from a wiser and more mature perspective.

Oscar Wilde once remarked that there had been no fog in London before Whistler had painted it. There was of course lots of fog, it was just that little bit harder to notice its qualities without the example of Whistler to direct our gaze. What Wilde said of Whistler, we may well say of Hopper: that there were far fewer interesting, strangely haunting and consolingly beautiful service stations, train carriages, motels and diners visible in the world before Edward Hopper began to paint.

The cultural elite gets nervous about cheerful or sweet art. They worry that pretty, happy works of art are in denial about how bad the state of the world is and how much suffering there is in almost every life.

Seated Woman, Back Turned to the Open Window, 1922

Look at this picture of sailing boats shooting about in the Med, beyond the palm trees, while a chinzy looking woman sits on a sofa. Has the artist forgotten that the world is filled with inequality, corruption and war? The fear is that we might be so absorbed in having a nice time that we forget about the bad things – and therefore won’t trouble ourselves to do anything about them. 

However, these worries are generally misplaced. Far from taking too rosy and sentimental a view, most of the time, we suffer from excessive gloom. We are only too aware of the problems and injustices of the world. Our problem is actually that we feel debilitatingly small and weak in the face of them. It’s because we feel overwhelmed and hopeless that we recoil into ourselves. 

Cheerfulness is an achievement and hope is something to celebrate. If optimism is important, it is because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of an elite view that skill is the primary requirement of a good life. Yet in many cases, the difference between success and failure can be determined by nothing more than one’s sense of what is possible and the energy one can muster to convince others of one’s due. One can be doomed not by a lack of talent, but by an absence of hope.

Rarely are today’s problems created by people taking too sunny a view of things; it is because the troubles of the world are so continually brought to our attention that we stand in need of tools which can preserve our more hopeful dispositions. 

What hope might look like. Dance (I), 1909

The dancers in Matisse’s Dance are not in denial of the troubles of this planet. But from within a normally imperfect and conflicted relationship with reality, one can look at their attitudes as an encouragement; they put one in touch with a blithe, carefree part of oneself which can help one in coping with the inevitable rejections and humiliations. The picture should not be seen as suggesting that all is well: and that, despite the evidence of experience, women always take delight in each other’s existence and bond together in mutually supportive networks.  

Matisse himself knew a huge amount about suffering (which builds our confidence in his pleasing, hopeful, charming work) – as a glance at one of his self-portraits shows. 

Self-Portrait in a Striped T-shirt, 1906

Matisse knew all about tragedy but his acquaintance with it made him all the more alive to its opposites. As he saw it, the real problem was that darkness and misery are so likely to overpower us that we actually need to make a deliberate effort to remind ourselves of cheerful and hopeful things.  

Matisse was born in 1869 into a relatively prosperous family. His father was a hardware and grain merchant. He wasn’t supposed to be an artist. His father was very keen that he should have a safe, respectable – and lucrative – career as a lawyer. In his twenties he became desperate to give up his day job in the law office but his father was strongly opposed. Eventually he relented and agreed that Matisse could study – but only so long as he kept to the most traditional and conservative style. 

Still Life with Books, 1890. (Message from his father: you keep on painting like this and I’ll keep paying your allowance)

In order to develop as a painter of joyful, bright and sensuous pictures, Matisse had to face down his father, embrace poverty (when all family support was cut off) and be reviled by his teachers and mentors. 

In the years before the outbreak of the First World War Matisse started to build up a successful career. He was selling a few pictures. He was getting well known in adventurous artistic circles. Just as he seemed to be making it, the whole world started to fall apart. 

In the year of the Battle of the Somme, he painted The Window.

The Window (Interior with Forget-Me-Nots), 1916

It’s not that Matisse didn’t care about the trenches, a day’s journey from Paris. It intensified his sense of the loveliness of the trunk of a tree just glimpsed through the gap in the curtains, or his delight in the pattern of the floorboards – and the overall freshness and charm of a bowl of flowers in an elegant, but unpretentious room in the city. It’s as if he is reminding himself (and us) that these things are still here. They haven’t been destroyed. It’s not the work of someone who is indifferent. It is created in recognition of how easily one could be paralysed with despair. And the hint of light green leaves through the window might speak kindly to us, even today, when we’re overburdened with our own sense of the weight of life.

Later, there were more private traumas. Matisse was diagnosed with duodenal cancer. He was involved in a protracted and very painful legal dispute with his estranged wife. 

Woman in Blue or the Large Blue Robe and Mimosas, 1937

In 1942 when Paris had fallen, and the German 6th Army was pushing through Russia towards the southern oilfields, Matisse painted a number of pictures of dancers, with fabulous legs, reclining in big, soft armchairs. 

Dancer and Rocaille Armchair on a Black Background, 1942

The most poignant of his cheerful, hopeful works were produced at the very end of his life, around about 1950 when he was in his eighties. He had been an invalid for years; mostly bedridden, occasionally able to get around in a wheelchair. He knew he was facing death.

The Tree of Life, 1948-51

The deep blue and yellow – and the simple pattern – of the stained glass seems to glow with delight in existence. But Matisse wasn’t expressing a cheerfulness he had recently experienced. The vulnerable, suffering great painter was attempting to ward off his own fears of gloom and despondency; he was reminding us through his genius that there is nothing quite as serious as knowing how to hope.

John Ruskin (1819-1900) was one of the most ambitious and impassioned English social reformers of the 19th century. He was also – at first sight – a deeply improbable reformer, because he seemed to care mostly about one thing – beauty – which has a reputation for being eminently apolitical and removed from ‘real life’. And yet the more Ruskin thought about beauty – the beauty of things humans make, ranging from buildings to chairs, paintings to clothes – the more he realised that the quest to make a more beautiful world is inseparable from the need to remake it politically, economically and socially. In a world that is nowadays growing not only ever more polluted and more unequal but also, though we seldom remark upon it, uglier, Ruskin’s emphasis on beauty and his understanding of its role in political theory make him an unusual yet timely and very necessary figure. Towards the end of his life, Tolstoy very accurately described Ruskin as, “one of the most remarkable men not only of England and of our generation, but of all countries and times.”

John Ruskin in 1863

Ruskin was born in London in 1819 into a wealthy and cosseted home. He was an only child of parents who devoted much of their energies to nurturing and developing his precocious talents in art and literature. His father was an immensely successful wine and sherry importer, with a taste for Byron, Shakespeare, Walter Scott and Turner. Ruskin’s parents decided to educate him at home, fearing that other children might encourage coarse habits in their son. He spent most of his days alone in his parents’ huge garden, drawing flowers. As a treat in the evening he would be allowed to sit quietly in the corner of the drawing room, sketching illustrations for scenes in the Bible. Every year, during his teens, he went with his parents on long tours of France, Switzerland and Italy. They travelled slowly in their own large coach, stopping at every town along the way.

Young Ruskin particularly liked the French Alps (and the delicious trouts which they often ate for dinner in Chamonix). But the place that most impressed him and changed the course of his life was Venice, which he first saw when he was 16 and to which he returned almost every year during long periods of his adult life. In Venice, he spent his days visiting churches, floating in gondolas and looking at paintings. He also loved to make highly accurate drawings of his favourite architectural details.

John Ruskin, Casa d’Oro, Venice, 1845

John Ruskin, North West Porch of St Mark’s Cathedral, Venice, 1877

Venice was, he said, ‘the paradise of cities’. And he declared the Doge’s Palace to be ‘the central building of the world.’ He was entranced by its beauty, its dignity and the splendour of its craftsmanship. ‘It would be impossible, I believe, to invent a more magnificent arrangement of all that is in building most dignified and most fair.’

John Ruskin, The Doge’s Palace, Venice, 1852

On his return to England, Ruskin was struck by the contrast between the glories of Venice and the often dingy realities of British urban life. It’s a familiar phenomenon. We too are liable to come back from the Grand Canal to Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow or Acton High Street and feel our spirits sink. And yet, although we may mutter a few disparaging remarks, on the whole, we leave it at that; feeling that the ugliness that surrounds us is some sort of inviolable phenomenon we would be best to resign ourselves to.

This wasn’t Ruskin’s way. The more he experienced the contrast between Venice and modern Britain, the more it broke and enraged his heart. He couldn’t get over the appalling realisation that, in one place, human effort had led to such delightful results and that elsewhere (in fact, in most places) the same quantity of labour, the same (or more) money and similar human beings had produced dismal and soul-destroying results. Why were modern humans so bad at creating liveable environments? Why was the contemporary world so dispiritingly, monstrously ugly?

Street of terraced houses in Loughborough, England

Ruskin had begun his career as an art critic, his ambition had been to open his audience’s eyes to the beauty of certain paintings and buildings, but in middle age, a more direct and urgent goal came into view. He realised that the ugliness of most things in Britain (from the factories to the railway stations, the pubs to the workers’ housing) was the clearest indication of the decadence, cruel economic ideology and rotten moral foundations of his society.

Attempting to change this was to be his life’s work. He devoted the remainder of his career to an urgent, vocal fight against the underlying principles of modern Capitalism. He attacked property developers for putting profit before the interests of the community. He lambasted industrialists for degrading the lives of their workers. And he laid into the whole of the Victorian bourgeoisie for neglecting their responsibilities towards the poor, for shortening their days and coarsening their spirits.

Partly his attacks were delivered as lectures. Ruskin spent a good part of every year giving talks up and down Britain. He was always off to harangue some group of industrialists in Birmingham or Sheffield about their crooked value systems and the immense heart-rending superiority of Venice to modern England – a fact which was all the more shocking to his audiences since Britain was, just then, getting into its stride as the workshop of the world.

But he was also interested in practical action. When his father died, he was left an enormous fortune, which he set about spending on good causes. In 1871, he founded The Guild of St George. He had long admired the medieval guild system, where workers were well-organised within trades that offered them both job security and pride in their work. Ruskin’s Guild was an attempt to reorganise economic life along pre-capitalist lines. He tried to set up a network of farms creating sustainable, unadulterated foodstuffs (for a time, he was a leading maker of apple juice). He built workshops to produce woollen and linen clothes. He encouraged businesses turning out high quality but affordable pottery, cutlery and furniture. And he wanted the Guild to act as a property development company that could be content with breaking even rather than aiming for the usual profit margins that he believed were incompatible with beauty. And finally, he wanted to set up a network of schools offering evening classes as well as a number of museums for workers, as an alternative to the numbing mass media otherwise pushed their way. Along with diverting the lion’s share of his wealth to the Guild, he also encouraged wealthy people around the country to contribute their riches to the project.

The Guild was in some ways a success. Quite a few industrialists gave Ruskin their surplus wealth. Some cottages were bought on the Welsh coast where a group of Ruskin’s devotees started a business making jumpers. Near Scarborough, a farm was bought which made a variety of jams. A museum was started in Sheffield. His most devoted disciple, William Morris, set up a highly influential furniture and interior decoration company, William Morris & Sons, whose chairs and wallpapers remain successful.

 William Morris, Sussex chair, 1865

And the Guild itself has survived today – it can be found at www.guildofstgeorge.org.uk – and still performs some of the work that Ruskin had championed.

But of course, Ruskin did not manage single-handedly to reform Capitalism. It seems a general law that people who can think well aren’t the most adept at organising change. They aren’t good with the accounts, they get impatient with meetings – and because of these procedural flaws, the world doesn’t change as much as it should. However, Ruskin is as close to a thinker-activist as the 19th century produced and he remains an inspiration to anyone who seeks not just to reflect on the world, but also to alter it in the direction of beauty and wisdom.

To zero in on only one of his schemes, in the mid 1870s while he was a professor at Oxford, Ruskin got increasingly bothered that his students didn’t understand the meaning and pleasure of work. They went to parties and wrote essays but never did anything very productive with their hands, which he believed had a detrimental effect on their characters. There was a road in a nearby village of Hinksey which had become so filled with ruts and potholes that it was more or less unusable. The carts had to avoid it and make their way over the village green, messing up the grass. The local children didn’t have anywhere to play.

So Ruskin got together sixty students and organised them to mend the road and tidy the green. Eyewitnesses described Ruskin on a wintry morning ‘wearing a blue cloth cap with the earflaps pulled about his ears, sitting cheerily by the roadside, breaking stones not only with a will, but with knowledge, and cracking jokes the while.’ Mending the road took them a long time and they made very imperfect progress. There were complaints from the local landlord and a general conviction that Ruskin was a touch unhinged.

But the underlying point is crucial. Out of fear of seeming ridiculous, we often end up not tackling the challenges around us. The road mending was a small instance of a larger idea that animated Ruskin’s life: that it is the duty of creative, privileged people to direct their efforts towards making the world more pleasing and tidy, more convenient and beautiful, not just for themselves, but for the greatest good of the greatest number. He also believed that we should not (cannot) leave this to the forces of the market, because they will never get round to planting wildflowers by the edges of roads and making sure that village greens are pretty.

Throughout his life, Ruskin contrasted the general beauty of nature with the ugliness of the man-made world. He set up a useful criterion for any man-made thing: was it in any way the equal of something one might find in nature? This was the case with Venice, with Chartres Cathedral, with the chairs of William Morris… but not with most things being turned out by the factories of the modern world.

So Ruskin thought it helpful for us to observe and be inspired by nature (he was a great believer that everyone in the country should learn to draw things in nature). He wrote with astonishing seriousness about the importance of looking at the light in the morning, of taking care to see the different kinds of cloud in the sky and of looking properly at how the branches of a tree intertwine and spread. He took immense delight in the beautiful structures of nests and beavers’ dams. And he loved feathers with a passion.

John Ruskin, drawing of a peacock feather, 1873

There was an urgent message here. Nature sets the standard. It provides us with particularly intense examples of beauty and grace. The plumage of a bird, the clouds over the mountains at sunset, the great trees bending in the wind – nature is ordered, beautiful, simple, effective. It is only with us that things seem to go wrong. Why can we not be as it is? There is a humiliating contrast between the natural loveliness of trees by a stream and the bleak, grimeyness of an average street; between the ever-changing interest of the sky and the monotony and dreariness of so much of our lives. Ruskin felt that this painful comparison was instructive. Because we are part of nature we have the capacity to live up to its standard. We should use the emotion we feel at the beauty of nature to energise us to equal its works. The goal of human society is to honour the dignity and grandeur of the natural world.

John Ruskin, drawing of the Mont Blanc, France, 1856

By championing beauty so intensely, Ruskin rescues bits of our own experiences that we rarely take too seriously. Most of us have at points felt that trees are lovely, that somewhere else (and it could be Venice) is far more beautiful than the place we live in day to day, that there are too many shoddy things in the world, that work really isn’t enjoyable enough, that often we are misemployed – but we tend to dismiss these thoughts as too personal, minor, not really of significance to anyone other than ourselves. Ruskin argues us into a more ambitious and more serious attitude. It is, he says, just such thoughts and experiences which need to be given proper weight, which need to be analysed and understood. They provide crucial clues as to what is really wrong with the world and can therefore lead us towards moves that may make it genuinely better.

Ruskin’s approach to politics was to hold resolutely on to a vision of what a really sane, reasonable, decent and good life would look like – and then to ask rigorously just how a society would need to be set up for that to be the average life, for an ordinary person, and not a rare piece of luck only for the very privileged. For this he deserves our, and posterity’s, ongoing interest and gratitude.

It seems, at first, weird that we might learn from him. Thomas Aquinas was a medieval saint, said in moments of high excitement to levitate and have visions of the Virgin Mary. He was much concerned with explaining how angels speak and move. And yet…

Thomas Aquinas, comforted by angels

He continues to matter because he helps us with a problem which continues to bedevil us: how we can reconcile religion with science and faith with reason. Aquinas was both a philosopher and a holy saint. Refusing either to lose his faith or mindlessly believe, he developed a new understanding of the place of reason in human life. Aquinas’s monumental contribution was to teach Western European civilisation that any human being – not just a Christian – could have access to great truths whenever they made use of God’s greatest gift to human beings: reason. He broke a logjam in Christian thinking, the question of how non-Christians could have both wisdom and at the same time no interest in, or even knowledge of, Jesus. He universalised intelligence and opened the Christian mind to the insights of all of humanity from across the ages and continents. The modern world, in so far as it insists that good ideas can come from any quarter regardless of creed or background, remains hugely in his debt.

Thomas Aquinas was born to a noble family in Italy in 1225. As a young man, he went to study at the University of Naples and there came into contact with a source of knowledge which was just then being rediscovered: that of the Ancient Greek and Roman authors, who had previously been shunned by Christian academics. At university, Aquinas also came under the influence of the Dominicans, a new order of monks who, unlike other groups, believed that they should live in the outside world, rather than a cloister.

Against the will of his family Aquinas decided to join the order. His family’s questionably pious response was to kidnap him and lock him in a tower they owned. Aquinas wrote desperate letters to the Pope, arguing his cause and pleading to be set free. However, the pope was busy with political matters, and so Aquinas stayed locked up, and passed the time writing letters to Dominican monks and tutoring his sisters. According to one legend, during this time Aquinas’ family even furnished him with a prostitute in a low-cut top in the hopes of seducing him away from his idea of being a monk, but Aquinas drove the young lady away with an iron bar.

Seeing they were getting nowhere, finally, his family unlocked the door and the (in their eyes) wayward Aquinas joined the Dominican order for good. Resuming his interrupted education, Aquinas went to study at the University of Paris, where he was a remarkably quiet student, but an exceptionally prolific author, writing nearly two hundred pieces about Christian theology in less than three decades. His books bear beautiful and strange titles the ‘Summa Theologica’ and ‘Summa contra Gentiles’. He also became a hugely popular and influential teacher, and was eventually allowed by the Dominican leadership to found his own school in Naples. Such was his devotion to knowledge, even at the moment of his death (at the age of forty-nine), he is reputed to have been in the middle of delivering an extended commentary on the Song of Songs. After he died, he was canonised in the Catholic Church and is now the patron saint of teachers.

One of Aquinas’s central intellectual ambitions was to understand how people could know what was right and wrong – a far from academic concern because, as a Christian, he wanted to know how a person could be sure that their actions would allow them to go to heaven. Aquinas was aware that many ideas which seemed extremely right were not the work of Christians. For example, he especially admired Aristotle: a man utterly unacquainted with the truths of the Gospels. It was in response to this dilemma that Aquinas made a highly important argument for the compatibility of religious belief and rational thought

Many great philosophers were pagans, Aquinas knew, but this did not bar them from insight because, as he now proposed, the world could usefully be explored through reason alone. To explain how this could work, Aquinas proposed that the universe and all its dynamics operated according to two kinds of law: ‘natural law’ and divine ‘eternal law’.

For Aquinas, many ‘laws’ could be worked out from our own experience of the world. We could find out for ourselves how to smelt iron, build an aqueduct or organise a just economy. These were the natural laws. But there were other revealed ‘eternal’ laws: that is, things which reason could not arrive at on its own. To know (as he thought) that after our deaths we would be judged by a merciful God or that Jesus was simultaneously human and divine we would have to depend upon revelation in sacred books: we’d have to take them on trust from a higher authority.

In a commentary he wrote on the Roman philosopher Boethius, Aquinas defined a then prevailing assumption: ‘the human mind cannot know any truth unless it is illuminated by light from God.’ This was the view that everything that it is important for us to understand has to come from the single approved source: God. But it was in opposition to this idea that Aquinas argued that ‘it is not necessary that the human mind should be endowed with any new light from God in order to understand those things which are within its natural field of knowledge.’ [Super Boethium De Trinitate question 1, part 1]

The radical move Aquinas was making was to allow important space for ‘natural law’ too. He was standing up for the importance of personal observation and experience. His worry was the Bible was such a prestigious source that it could swamp observation: people would be so impressed by revelation from authority that they would discount the power of observation and what we can discover on our own.

The point Aquinas made was that both natural and revealed eternal law are important. They are not – he argued – essentially opposed. The problems comes when we insist exclusively on either one. Which we need to develop depends upon the bias we currently have.

Today the tension between higher authority and personal experience remains, though of course the today ‘revelation’ by a higher authority doesn’t mean consulting the Bible. It means organised science. The modern version is the refusal of any kind of knowledge that doesn’t come with the the backing of experiments, data, mathematical modelling and peer-reviewed journal references.

The arts, literature and philosophy are today in the position Aquinas defined for natural law. They attempt to understand the world on the basis of personal experience, observation and individual thinking. They don’t come the stamp of higher authority (meaning, now, science rather than the Bible).

Baudelaire didn’t do experiments.

When Baudelaire declared that ‘Genius is childhood recalled at will’, he could easily be accused of intellectual deception. What research did he do to back this up? Did he consult all the available evidence (in diaries and biographical studies)? Did he look at studies of twins, one of whom was a genius and the other not in order to isolate the relevant factors?

Aquinas’s contemporaries were broadly aware of the Ancient Greeks and Romans but they took the view that ‘pagans’ simply could not have anything important to say on any topics that they felt really mattered to them. It wasn’t the fault of the ancients – they lived before Jesus. But they were  held to be in error on the single most important issue of life: religious belief. This seemed so terrible a flaw that nothing else the pagan philosophers thought could be in any way useful or important. Aquinas argued that people who are misguided on some fundamentally things can still have a lot to teach you. He was diagnosing a form of intellectual snobbery.  We have a tendency to dismiss a given idea because of its background : we feel we won’t listen unless it comes from the right place. We might define ‘the right place’ in terms of the labs at MIT rather than the Bible, but the impulse is the same.

So today, an atheistic modernist sitting in London might find it incredible that they could have anything at all to learn from reading The Gospel of St John. The Bible, they think, is so obviously in error on fundamental points. It contains primitive mistakes about the origins of the word, it is filled with supposed miracles.  Which is similar to the way medieval Christians felt about ancient pagan writers.

The key point for Aquinas is that natural law is a subsection of eternal law, and it can be discovered through the faculty of independent reason. Aquinas gave as an example Jesus’s injunction to ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. Jesus may have given this idea a particularly memorable formulation, but it has in fact been a cornerstone of moral principles in most societies at all times. How is this possible? The reason, Aquinas argued, is that natural law doesn’t need God’s direct intervention in order to make itself known to man. Just by reasoning carefully, one is intuitively following God’s intentions. Aquinas allowed that in a few situations God works simply through divine law, outside of the limits of human reason; and gave the example of prophetic revelations and the visits of angels. However, most useful knowledge could be found within the realm of natural law.

Aquinas’s ideas unfolded at a time when Islamic culture was going through very similar dilemmas as Christianity, in terms of how to reconcile reason and faith. For a long time, the Islamic caliphates in Spain, Morocco, and Egypt had flourished, generating a wealth of new scientific knowledge and philosophy. However, due to the increasing influence of rigid religious leaders, they had become more dogmatic and oppressive by the time Aquinas was born. They had, for example, reacted violently against the Islamic philosopher, Averroës (Arabic name Ibn Rushd). Like Aquinas, Averroës had been deeply influenced by Aristotle, and had argued that reason and religion were compatible. However, the caliphates – anxious never to depart from the literal words of God – had made sure Averroës’ ideas were banned and his books burned.

Aquinas read Averroës, and saw that he and the Muslim scholar were engaged on similar projects. He knew that the Muslim world’s increasingly radical rejection of reason was harming what had once been its thriving intellectual culture. It was partly thanks to Aquinas’ ideas that Christianity did not suffer the same process of stultification as Islam.

Though Aquinas was a man of deep faith, he therefore provided a philosophical framework for the process of doubt and open scientific inquiry. He reminds us that wisdom (that is, the ideas we need) can come from multiple sources. From intuition but also from rationality, from science but also from revelation, from pagans but also from monks: he’s sympathetic to all of these; he takes and uses whatever works, without caring where the ideas come from. That sounds obvious, until we notice just how often we don’t do this in our own lives: how often we get dismissive if an idea comes from an (apparently) ‘wrong’ source: someone with the wrong accent, a newspaper with a different political creed to ours, a prose style that seems too complicated, or too simple – or an old lady with a woolly hat.

‘Defensive’ behaviour is at the root of a lot of the trouble we have with ourselves and others. It leads us to direct blame inaccurately, to hear reasonable criticisms as cruel attacks and to resort to sarcasm and irony as an alternative to sincerity.

The finest guide to the origins of defensive behaviour was the psychoanalyst, and daughter of Sigmund, Anna Freud. Anna was the youngest of the family’s six children. She was born in Vienna in 1895 – when her father’s radical theories of sex and the mind were starting to make him famous across fin de siècle Europe. Anna was regarded as a ‘plain’ child and she struggled at school, where she acquired a dire nickname – ‘black devil’. But later she became a school teacher and then a psychoanalyst – and pioneered the treatment of children.

In 1934, she published The Ego and Mechanisms of Defence – the book that laid out for the first time the core idea that we instinctively try to protect our ‘ego’ (our acceptable picture of who we are) with a variety of defences. A defence mechanism is a method of response intended to spare us pain; the problem is that in the act of defending ourselves in the immediate term, we harm our longer-term chances of dealing with reality and therefore of developing and maturing as a result.

Anna Freud highlighted ten key types of defence mechanism.

One: Denial

We don’t admit there is a problem. We think things like: ‘I enjoy drinking very much and I sometimes get quite bad hangovers. But I don’t drink too much.’ Or; ‘I spend quite a lot of money. But no more than other people. I wouldn’t say I am a financially irresponsible person.’ If other people (relatives, friends, a partner) try to get us to admit there is a problem, we tend to react very badly. 

The immediate survival mechanism – the short term instinct to feel all right about oneself – is to refuse to recognise there is a problem because admitting it means we’re going to have to do all sorts of difficult and awkward things about it. But denial gets in the way of long-term coping.

Sometimes, pure denial doesn’t quite feel safe enough. One creates a bit of evidence on the other side. A nine-year-old boy – who’d sometimes very much like a cuddle from his mother but is reluctant to admit this to himself – might say that she’s mean and annoying. He’s ‘proving’ to himself that he doesn’t need her, so when he feels a bit weepy and lonely, it can’t possibly be because he needs his mummy. 

Denial isn’t a lie. This defence mechanism is like a smoke-screen that makes it very hard for us to see what’s going on in our own lives. 

Two: Projection

This involves recognising a negative feeling, but instead of seeing that it is one’s own dark emotion, the feeling is given to (or projected onto) someone else.  This can sound weird and complicated, but it happens a lot.

You get a note saying the boss wants to see you personally about something serious. Your first instinct might be to imagine that they are going to fire you, explain how they’ve found out some terrible facts about you. You’ve got a picture in your head of this person being cold, forceful and very angry. When you get to the meeting, you just hear some useful guidance about an important new contract that’s coming up. So, all the emotions – the terror, the coldness, the vindictive anger – are actually coming from you. You projected them onto your senior colleague. You have given the negative feelings, which you don’t want to recognise in yourself, to someone else.  

Or, you feel that your partner is going to be extremely critical if you don’t make more money this year than last year. You fret a lot about this; you imagine the cutting remarks they’re going to make, the withering looks. But in reality they don’t have these feelings. They may be genuinely understanding and sympathetic (though, yes, of course, it would be nice if your income was on the rise). The harsh, bitter thoughts are not in your partner. They are in you – and they came from your mother, let’s say. But you project them onto the nearest candidate. 

Therefore, instead of being very frustrated with yourself (a highly uncomfortable feeling), you can feel hard done by (a slightly easier feeling). After all, you’ve got – at least, in your head – such a pushy, never-satisfied partner. Instead of facing the painful and difficult question of why you can’t make more – or why it isn’t ok for you that you make what you do – you create a diversion: your ‘annoying’ partner. 

Three: Turning against the self 

We turn to defence mechanisms to protect ourselves from psychological suffering. So it sounds paradoxical to say (as Anna Freud insisted) that hurting oneself – being angry with, or loathing oneself could be a defence. It’s a matter of what we find most frightening. There may be many things which scare us much more than disliking ourselves. 

Defences can be traced back to childhood. And a child abandoned, or harmed by, a parent might well seek refuge in a thought which, though grim, is less awful than the alternatives. I (feels the child) must be bad and worthless, I’m an awful person – that’s why my parent is behaving this way. So, really – the thought goes – I still have a good parent. It’s painful – but may be less catastrophic than the truth: one is actually in the hands of someone who doesn’t care. 

Four: Sublimation

This involves redirecting unacceptable thoughts or emotions into ‘higher’ and ideally more constructive channels.

Many musicians have turned negative life experiences—drug addiction, social ills, family problems, and so on—into popular and resonating performances and songs, which have served to energise and inspire many people. Troubled artists such as Vincent van Gogh, who struggled with an absinth addiction that famously led him to cut off his ear, was able to channel his problems into his artwork and create intensely memorable images. 

Art gives us the most conspicuous examples of a more widespread possibility. An aggressive impulse to tell everyone what to do and to impose one’s will without restraint, may be sublimated into a determination to make one’s work accurate and impressive. A fascistic impulse may be redirected into a socially beneficial aspiration for order and coherence.

Five: Regression

Often enough childhood seems – in retrospect at least – a time of safety. As a child one was shielded from responsibility. One was not expected to understand, to take difficult decisions, to be consistent, to be good at explaining what the matter was. 

In regression – as a defence – one becomes childish in some crucial way. One might, for instance dither a great deal, rather than take a decision – and bear responsibility for the consequences. 

A core feature of regression is the conviction that troubles are always the fault of other people. It’s a strategic return to the child’s belief that the parents rule the world and can do anything, so if anything goes wrong they could and should put it right. And the one person who cannot possibly be blamed is, of course, the child.

A tantrum is a characteristic regressive defence mechanism. Rather than try to work out a solution to a problem, one tries (in the logic of childhood) to solve it by getting upset. In the adult world this can look crazy. But babies really do have to signal for help by crying, screaming and banging their fists. It’s absolutely the best they can do. So the tantrum means, in effect – I cannot be responsible for this situation: you must help me because I am only a baby. 

Six: Rationalisation

Rationalisation is a smart sounding excuse for our actions (or what happens to us). But it’s carefully tailored to get the conclusion we feel we need: that we are innocent, nice, worthy. 

One key type of rationalisation involves doing down the things one does not have but secretly would like. After being rejected for a job, the defensive rationaliser will say: “it was a boring company” or “I never wanted the job anyway”. They may have very much desired the job. But it can be agonising and deeply humiliating to admit this to oneself. So, a more acceptable sense of oneself is preserved by creating the reasonable, careful – rational – sounding fiction: it wasn’t actually a very good job, now I come to think of it more seriously. But it’s not the assessment of the merits of the job that leads to the conclusion; rather it’s the urgent psychological need to protect one’s self esteem. 

Seven: Intellectualisation 

Intellectualisation is similar. It involves ignoring something very painful and important by starting a highly plausible conversation inside one’s head about something entirely different. The scarring sense of loss,  guilt, betrayal and anger on breaking up with a partner might be neutralised by thinking about the history of the late Roman Empire or the government’s plan to raise interest rates. Many intellectuals are not merely thinking a lot. They are also guilty of ‘intellectualisation’; making sure their researches keep a range of more pertinent issues at bay.

Eight: Reaction formation

Reaction formation involves doing the opposite of our initial, unacceptable feelings. We might call it ‘over-compensating’. Someone who has a strong interest in sex with teenagers may, for instance, join a religion with a particular emphasis on abstinence among the young. We are often guilty of reaction formation in childhood. When we are embarrassed about being attracted to a classmate, we might be mean or aggressive towards them, instead of admitting our attraction.

Nine: Displacement

Displacement is the redirection of a (usually aggressive) desire to a substitute recipient. It is generally engendered by a frustrating person appearing to us as a threat and us reacting to it by directing our feelings towards someone/something else who is easier to blame.

So a classic case is someone who may feel threatened by their boss and comes home and shouts at their partner. 

Ten: Fantasy

Fantasy is another escapist mechanism. It avoids problems by imagining them away or disassociating oneself from reality. 

Fantasy manifests in a range of everyday scenarios—from daydreaming to reading literature to looking at porn. We use these moments to transport ourselves from the threatening world to find comfort elsewhere. After a bad day at work, for instance, you might sink into an action film, listen to psychedelic music or log on to youporn.com. Such activities enable us to escape our real problems or concerns. The travel industry relies on our need to fantasise.

**

In March 1938, four years after writing the book on defence mechanisms, Anna moved to London with her family, to escape the Nazi occupation of Vienna. After the war, with a friend, Kate Friedlaender, who specialised in juvenile delinquency, she set up child therapy courses at a nursery and clinic in Hampstead.  

She died in 1982. Her ashes were placed next to her parents in the Golders Green Crematorium in north London, in an ancient Greek funeral urn, together with those of her lifelong partner and colleague Dorothy Tiffany-Burlingham.  

Conclusions 

Anna Freud started from a position of deep generosity towards defence mechanisms. We turn to them because we feel immensely threatened. They are our instinctive ways of warding off danger and limiting psychological pain. 

Anna Freud keeps reminding us that the defences are not voluntary. They are not conscious deliberate choices. We don’t realise what we’re doing. We don’t think of ourselves as being defensive. We don’t see that we’re in denial, or that we’re rationalising. The role of a defence mechanism isn’t to get at a truth, but to ward off distress.

Anna Freud is teaching a lesson in modesty. For she reveals the extreme probability that defence mechanisms are playing a marked and powerful role in one’s own life – though without it being obvious to oneself that this is so. It’s a humbling thought – and one that should induce a little more gratitude to those who consent to live their lives in close proximity to us.