No True Wealth but Life

"Let the youth once learn to take a straight shaving off a plank, or draw a fine curve without faltering, or lay a brick level in its mortar, and he has learned a multitude of other matters which no lips of man could ever teach him." --John Ruskin, "Time and Tide", 1883

So what are those things that no lips of man could ever teach? Let's start with geometry, and the concepts straight and level. Without seeing or feeling by hand, concepts of math fall beyond the realm that words alone can convey. They are derived from the experience of the real world, shown to us by exercise and example.

Then, beyond that, what does one learn from what Ruskin suggests? I could make a list. Some has to do with the mechanics of our own body and our movement within the world, having to do with skeletal structures and gravity. Some has to do with our placement within human culture. Are we of those who serve others and the whole of life or not.

Finnish neurophysiologist Matti Bergstöm named a sociological and cultural syndrome, "finger blindness" referring to those who have not learned their sense of self from a true connection with reality... like that acquired through the making of beautiful and useful things. He refers to those folks as being "values damaged," in that their values are restricted and narrowed to a single measure of reality. Bergstöm said, "Just as the blind man cannot see the the shape of a physical object, the finger blind cannot perceive its intrinsic worth." 

Rather than understanding the diverse cooperative values associated with craftsmanship, the only measure for the finger blind is that of competitive financial or political success. Some of the richest  and most influential folks in our society suffer from it. We see the effects of this all the time, from SWEPCo having had plans to put a huge superhighway of electric power through my back yard, destroying 48 miles of Arkansas forests in the process, to schools in which politicians and administrators overlook the needs and interests of each child in order to foist schemes of political correctness and short term cost-effectiveness, on our kids. We see it in Putin's attempt to take over Ukraine through a most horrid and brutal war.

As an antidote to the gospel of greed that infects the world, Ruskin proposed what he called "the first law of the universe, that there is no true wealth but life." From that Ruskin proposed "The law of help" which governs all healthy biological and social systems. Ruskin's law of help is as follows: "Government and cooperation are in all things and eternally the laws of life. Anarchy and competition, eternally, and in all things, the laws of death."

The simple answer of course is for us to be of service to each other. There are many ways to serve. Some simple, some complex. Some large some small. There are many ways also to tear at the fabric of our humanity that we must resist by proceeding to do good work.

Make, fix and create... align with the creative and cooperative forces of the universe.