Constructing ethics and the ethics of construction: John Ruskin and the humanity of the builder

Cross Currents, Fall, 2002 by John Matteson

It was the triumph of Gothic, Ruskin claimed, that it did not insist on technical precision. Indeed, Gothic, as a physical manifestation of Christian ideals, "recognized, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every soul. But it not only recognizes its value; it confesses its imperfection, in only bestowing dignity upon the acknowledgement of unworthiness." (6) Gothic architecture responded to a fundamentally Christian injunction: "Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession silenced for fear of shame." (7) Thus the Gothic architect took his builder as he found him, knowing that the execution of the work would be fitful and irregular, but knowing too, that this irregularity was a sign of life, since nothing that lives can be precisely perfect. Ruskin summarized his point succinctly: "All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections that have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy." (8)

But Ruskin did not see this law of mercy being acted out around him. He saw it least of all in his native England, which congratulated itself because the slightest details of its manufactures were so regular and uniform. In the Victorian obsession with exactitude and perfection, and in the division of labor that made the goals of that obsession realizable, Ruskin saw the figurative dismemberment of the human being:

We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men:--Divided into mere segments of men--broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail....[In] all our manufacturing cities...we manufacture everything...except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. (9)

Ruskin's lament was quintessentially one of the industrial age. In his protest against standardization and routinized mass production, he was railing against exploitation and alienation before such terms had joined the arsenal of popular Marxist discourse. This is not to say, however, that Ruskin was some form of proto-Marxist. His outlook was fundamentally more humanistic than economic, and, as we have seen, he sought his solutions in justice and mercy, not in prophecies of violent revolution. He appealed above all to a common sense of decency; he supposed that consumers would be willing to sacrifice their enjoyment of a perfect product in order to make possible the pleasure that is felt when people discover, test, and gradually expand the limits of their personal genius.