the wilde ones

The archetype of the socialist intellectual. The keen eyed observer, but missing a few pieces that would temper an interest in the problems of society with a less poetic palette of sweeping verse. Nonethless, there are some profound insights here and it raises the issue of whether socialism is fundamentally confused and contradictory. In fact, after reading Oscar Wilde’s Socialism essay, his mantras in favor of the option can be regarded as more cautionary tales concerning its implementation. The claims of utopian conditions for all is pie in the sky fantasy, but the assumption of one day machines performing mostly unpleasant sorts of labor is pertinent today in the wake of technological unemployment and software decision making processes.

Ultimately though, it is not macro economics and fiscal policy that concern Wilde, but the issues facing the artist which remain central to Wilde’s writing here. His theory hinges on the socialism as a source of individualism, and end to the Charles Baudelaire fixation of the poet as prostitute ; Wilde affirms  every person’s ability to achieve their own artistic goals without debasing their work through a submission to what he termed the  “tyranny of want,” the degrading process of catering the sentimental, the pretense and kitsch to put manna in the mouth. Agree of not, Wilde’s writing is an art form in itself…

Oscar Wilde:Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

John Steuart Curry.---This thirty-one foot by eleven-and-a-half foot mural, a depiction of abolitionist John Brown, hangs in the east wing of the Kansas State Capitol.--- Read More:http://www.squidoo.com/johnsteuartcurry?utm_source=google&utm_medium=imgres&utm_campaign=framebuster

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins….


Thomas Hart Benton. ---1948 Poker Night (from “A Streetcar Named Desire”) tempera & oil on canvas 91 x 122 cm---Read More:http://poulwebb.blogspot.com/2011/10/thomas-hart-benton-part-2.html

…The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted. We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it….

Florine Stettheimer.---Hitchens:In the abstract, why has socialism been so appealing to so many people over the last 150 years? This is not in his rather beautiful essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, but Oscar Wilde does say somewhere that a map of the world that doesn't have a Utopia on it isn't worth glancing at. And I don’t in fact think that that's true. And I wouldn't have thought so at the time. Utopianism was a word we used rather in disparagement. But, there is in human beings an ability to see beyond existing conditions or to always ask why they are the way that they are and to conclude that it's not because of God or nature that some people are rich and some are poor. Some are free and some are not. And believe these are very substantially manmade conditions and can be man-unmade. Read More:http://www.pbs.org/heavenonearth/interviews_hitchens.html image:http://reasonandsqualor.tumblr.com/

…As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid. I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance….

---Ingres. 1845. Hitchens:In other words, humans were born free and equal and thus it was decided only later and only by humans who was to be boss. The opening words of Rousseau, "man is born free but everywhere in chains"; some of the work of William Morris, the myth of a golden past; it's very common, very strong also in the Protestant revolution which becomes the English and I think eventually the American revolution, too. Marxism rather despises that as mere idealism and says no one has to take the forces and relatio


f production as something that brings about progress. We don't want a vanished agricultural Eden where you have to share everything because there's very little to go around and where there's no real development in human society. No, and to the contrary, Marxism succeeded in the way it did because it thought capitalism was a brilliant idea. Read More:http://www.pbs.org/heavenonearth/interviews_hitchens.html image:http://reasonandsqualor.tumblr.com/

…Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation. Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or even any express desire on their part that they should be free. It was put down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really. It was, undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began the whole thing. And it is curious to note that from the slaves themselves they received, not merely very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the slaves found themselves free, found themselves indeed so absolutely free that they were free to starve, many of them bitterly regretted the new state of things. To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendee voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism…. Read More:http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1017

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