Some of these posts come out, in my own self perception, like music on a radio station that is just slightly out of tune.
Walking up our local Main Street today, it occurred to me to contrast the colorfulness of Picasso–his radical whimsy, and, I’m told, genius–with his radical political views. Why is it that so many of the more creatively inclined people embrace a doctrine which would sideline or kill them if it ever came into power, if they did anything but toe the Party line?
I have said before that leftism represents a meaning system for those who lack one. At the same time, I think the progression is–in their self assessment–a positive one. If Capitalism is grey and banal, and utterly preoccupied with the unheroic, prosaic elements of human life, then SURELY ending it would cause the creation of something better. I think this is the logic.
Yet, to fail to plan is to plan to fail. They understand centralized economic planning, but they neglect the necessity of centralized cultural planning too, the propaganda and forced silences which attend the project. All logic and factual history to the contrary, they somehow keep the faith that from the overthrow of the existing social order something beneficial will come. Patently, the logic goes, since our system is so flawed ANYTHING must be better. Anyone who fails to understand that Regression and Progression are both versions of change needs to redo grammar school.
And we see this sort of criticism everywhere. We see aging radicals get all teary eyed when they talk about the brave civil rights marchers in Selma or wherever, then in the next breath praise the Cuban regime, which has inflicted and continues to inflict far worse tortures on its inhabitants than were ever dreamed of by the slave-holders. Self evidently, the curse of poverty lays across the Cuban landscape, unnecessarily.
It is in this spirit that we should take this comment, which is utterly out of character for Keynes in its candor: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many psuedo-moral principles which have hagridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues.
By this he means the greed for money of the Capitalists, which is for them vastly inferior to their own greed for power. This argument is unassailable, for the simple reason that they jettion reason itself to reach this conclusion. Once adopted, it is beyond debate.
Only a willful fool could fail to see that Keynes was sympathetic to the Fabian Socialist aims of his life-long comrades, most notably his mentor George Bernard Shaw. To him we can attribute most of the decrease in personal savings that has progressed for the better part of 60 years, and which has made us, in our debt, so vulnerable in so many ways.
More generally, though, this is the template. Keynes and his Bloomsbury group had great fun mocking Victorian morality, which in their case is equivalent to saying “any coherentm non-ironic set of behavioral standards whatsoever”. Yet from this flowed nothing of social value, and much that has damaged and continues to damage our social fabric, and the enthusiasm with which we embrace life, and particularly our shared life together.
From Picasso’s bold yellows emerge wraiths of grey, enfolding everything they touch in the smoke of intellectual loathsomeness and moral tranquility even in the face of monstrous atrocities.