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The Worth of the Maker
I'm amused to see that the final section of Dorothy L.Sayers' "The Mind of the Maker" has apparently been described by reviewers both as condemning capitalism and as an exposé of socialism, thus indicating that the reader is apt to see in it precisely what he puts there himself...
The religious aspect, I'm afraid, leaves me stone cold; like all people who try to demonstrate by logic that their faith is objectively true, she is missing the basic necessity for a leap of belief. You cannot argue your religion into existence in someone else's mind any more than you can argue someone into loving you by proving that he ought rationally to do so, and stating that "this extraordinary set of formulae about Trinity-in-Unity, about the Eternal-Uncreate-Incomprehensible incarnate in space-time-matter, about the begotten Word and the Ghost preceding, and about the orthodox God-Manhood so finickingly insisted upon and so obstinately maintained amid a dusty mellay[sic] of mutually-contradictory heresies" translates into "a picture of the human artist at work", proving that the author's very specific subset of Christian theology is the only true religion, requires a very considerable leap of trust on the part of the reader -- even assuming that his eyes have not already glazed over by the time he reaches the first comma of that appalling doctrinal affirmation. I read the entire book with the application of considerable intellectual effort and attention to detail, and, far from grasping the doctrine of the Trinity as revealed truth from my own creative experience, I never got beyond the perception of a rather laboured analogy.
Shorn of its religious trappings, however, the argument of the final chapters is essentially that of William Morris, Tom Rolt, et al. -- that the human being is by nature an artist who needs to express himself in his work, whatever that may be, and that by turning a world of craftsmen into a world of mindless machine-servants we have created widespread alienation and dissatisfaction. "We do not expect him to turn all his experience into masterpieces in ink or stone. His need is to express himself in agriculture or manufactures, in politics or finance, or in the construction of an ordered society.... To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems of extreme difficulty, which he has to solve with the means at his disposal. And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of-- such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilised amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity."
It is Sayers' assertion that the basic trouble with modern society -- by which she, of course, means 1940s society, but the issue is equally applicable today -- is a mindset which sees human existence in terms of problems and solutions, even when this is not at all applicable; that there is, and can be, no 'answer to Life, the Universe and Everything'. There is, for example, no solution to death: "our efforts are not directed, like those of the saint or the poet, to making something creative out of the idea of death, but rather to seeing whether we cannot somehow evade, abolish, and in fact 'solve the problem of' death. The spiritual and mental energy which we expend on resenting the inevitability of death is as much wasted as that... expended on attempts to 'solve the problem' of perpetual motion". Discussing the war currently raging in Europe, Sayers comments "We continue to delude ourselves into the belief that 'when the war is over' we shall 'this time' discover the trick, the magic formula" to prevent all further wars "by a set of regulations, by a League of Nations or some other form of constitution that would 'solve' the whole problem once and for all", and that the basic error of perception is in regarding peace and security as a one-off problem to be solved and not as an ongoing work.
The creative artist, whose labour of creation is never finished (even if an individual work is concluded as a "'still' cut out and thrown off from the endless living picture which his creative mind reels out"), ought to know better. "At the day's end or the year's end he may tell himself: the work is done. But he knows in his heart that it is not, and that the passion of making will seize him again".
He "is not necessarily an artist in handling his personal life but (since life is the material of his work) he has at least got thus far, that he is using life to make something new. Because of this, the pains and sorrows of this troublesome world can never, for him, be wholly meaningless and useless, as they are to the man who dumbly endures them". Which is what my mother used to say: "you can always put it in a book some day". Well, I have, in various forms :-(
"We notice also that the 'Problem of Unemployment' limits us to the consideration of Employment only; it does not allow us even to consider the Work itself—whether it is worth doing or not, or whether the workman is to find satisfaction in doing the work, or only in the fact of being employed and receiving his pay-envelope." It is true that the professional artist, like everybody else, receives remuneration from his work, and that this remuneration can ultimately be beyond the bare minimum necessary to enable him to go on working. "What is remarkable about him is the way in which he commonly employs the escape-from-work which the extra remuneration allows him. If he is genuinely an artist, you will find him using his escape-from-work in order to do what he calls 'my own work', and nine times out of ten this means the same work (i.e. the exercise of his art) that he does for money."
Sayers discusses the case of the armaments worker who labours passionately when his country's existence is under threat, when "his imagination beholds the fulfilment of the work in terms, not of money, but of the blazing gun itself, charged with his love and fear.... Is the man, for example, engaged in the mass-production of lavatory cisterns encouraged to bring to his daily monotonous toil the vision splendid of an increasingly hygenic world?" Sadly not, although arguably he ought to be.
The artist has a second, unique attitude to property in addition to that held by most people. "When he says 'this is my top-hat, my bathroom, my motor-car' he means merely that he possesses these things; but when he says 'this is my work', he means that, no matter who now possesses it, he made it."
Sayers' argument is that the activity of creation in some form or another is a primary human need; that a worker should take pride in what he produces and do it with integrity, whether that be a well-run household or a political negotiation or a setting for a gemstone or a piece of computer software. "Yet the integrity of the work—the stipulation that it shall be both worth doing and well done— rarely figures in any scheme for an ordered society".
Which is of course neither a leftwing nor a rightwing attitude, but an artistic one.
The religious aspect, I'm afraid, leaves me stone cold; like all people who try to demonstrate by logic that their faith is objectively true, she is missing the basic necessity for a leap of belief. You cannot argue your religion into existence in someone else's mind any more than you can argue someone into loving you by proving that he ought rationally to do so, and stating that "this extraordinary set of formulae about Trinity-in-Unity, about the Eternal-Uncreate-Incomprehensible incarnate in space-time-matter, about the begotten Word and the Ghost preceding, and about the orthodox God-Manhood so finickingly insisted upon and so obstinately maintained amid a dusty mellay[sic] of mutually-contradictory heresies" translates into "a picture of the human artist at work", proving that the author's very specific subset of Christian theology is the only true religion, requires a very considerable leap of trust on the part of the reader -- even assuming that his eyes have not already glazed over by the time he reaches the first comma of that appalling doctrinal affirmation. I read the entire book with the application of considerable intellectual effort and attention to detail, and, far from grasping the doctrine of the Trinity as revealed truth from my own creative experience, I never got beyond the perception of a rather laboured analogy.
Shorn of its religious trappings, however, the argument of the final chapters is essentially that of William Morris, Tom Rolt, et al. -- that the human being is by nature an artist who needs to express himself in his work, whatever that may be, and that by turning a world of craftsmen into a world of mindless machine-servants we have created widespread alienation and dissatisfaction. "We do not expect him to turn all his experience into masterpieces in ink or stone. His need is to express himself in agriculture or manufactures, in politics or finance, or in the construction of an ordered society.... To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems of extreme difficulty, which he has to solve with the means at his disposal. And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of-- such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilised amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity."
It is Sayers' assertion that the basic trouble with modern society -- by which she, of course, means 1940s society, but the issue is equally applicable today -- is a mindset which sees human existence in terms of problems and solutions, even when this is not at all applicable; that there is, and can be, no 'answer to Life, the Universe and Everything'. There is, for example, no solution to death: "our efforts are not directed, like those of the saint or the poet, to making something creative out of the idea of death, but rather to seeing whether we cannot somehow evade, abolish, and in fact 'solve the problem of' death. The spiritual and mental energy which we expend on resenting the inevitability of death is as much wasted as that... expended on attempts to 'solve the problem' of perpetual motion". Discussing the war currently raging in Europe, Sayers comments "We continue to delude ourselves into the belief that 'when the war is over' we shall 'this time' discover the trick, the magic formula" to prevent all further wars "by a set of regulations, by a League of Nations or some other form of constitution that would 'solve' the whole problem once and for all", and that the basic error of perception is in regarding peace and security as a one-off problem to be solved and not as an ongoing work.
The creative artist, whose labour of creation is never finished (even if an individual work is concluded as a "'still' cut out and thrown off from the endless living picture which his creative mind reels out"), ought to know better. "At the day's end or the year's end he may tell himself: the work is done. But he knows in his heart that it is not, and that the passion of making will seize him again".
He "is not necessarily an artist in handling his personal life but (since life is the material of his work) he has at least got thus far, that he is using life to make something new. Because of this, the pains and sorrows of this troublesome world can never, for him, be wholly meaningless and useless, as they are to the man who dumbly endures them". Which is what my mother used to say: "you can always put it in a book some day". Well, I have, in various forms :-(
"We notice also that the 'Problem of Unemployment' limits us to the consideration of Employment only; it does not allow us even to consider the Work itself—whether it is worth doing or not, or whether the workman is to find satisfaction in doing the work, or only in the fact of being employed and receiving his pay-envelope." It is true that the professional artist, like everybody else, receives remuneration from his work, and that this remuneration can ultimately be beyond the bare minimum necessary to enable him to go on working. "What is remarkable about him is the way in which he commonly employs the escape-from-work which the extra remuneration allows him. If he is genuinely an artist, you will find him using his escape-from-work in order to do what he calls 'my own work', and nine times out of ten this means the same work (i.e. the exercise of his art) that he does for money."
Sayers discusses the case of the armaments worker who labours passionately when his country's existence is under threat, when "his imagination beholds the fulfilment of the work in terms, not of money, but of the blazing gun itself, charged with his love and fear.... Is the man, for example, engaged in the mass-production of lavatory cisterns encouraged to bring to his daily monotonous toil the vision splendid of an increasingly hygenic world?" Sadly not, although arguably he ought to be.
The artist has a second, unique attitude to property in addition to that held by most people. "When he says 'this is my top-hat, my bathroom, my motor-car' he means merely that he possesses these things; but when he says 'this is my work', he means that, no matter who now possesses it, he made it."
Sayers' argument is that the activity of creation in some form or another is a primary human need; that a worker should take pride in what he produces and do it with integrity, whether that be a well-run household or a political negotiation or a setting for a gemstone or a piece of computer software. "Yet the integrity of the work—the stipulation that it shall be both worth doing and well done— rarely figures in any scheme for an ordered society".
Which is of course neither a leftwing nor a rightwing attitude, but an artistic one.