A Tale of Two Generations

The Great Failure of The Enlightenment

Beethoven

Rarely had the air crackled with nervous excitement at the venerable old Kärntnertor Theater as it did on the evening of May the 7th, 1824. The Viennese audience packing the house were living out their entire lives before sound had ever been recorded or played back. To them, the rare experience of hearing even a single instrument meant that it was physically being played within earshot. The opportunity to hear the grandiose sound of hundreds of carefully coordinated instruments performing at once was nothing short of magical. Most in the audience were about to hear the best music of their lives for the first and only time, and then never again for the rest of their days, having only the memory to draw upon thereafter. Riots could break out at such events; the later incident at Stravinsky’s premiere of The Rite of Spring being a notable example. 

The sizzle in the air finally erupted when, for the first time in 12 years, the bent figure of Ludwig van Beethoven strode onto the stage. He had planned to premiere his final symphony in Berlin, but a flood of admiration letters had prevailed on the great composer to reconsider. He had suffered a difficult and abusive childhood and he was enduring the loss of his hearing, but Beethoven was beloved in Vienna. 

By the time of this premiere, Beethoven was almost totally deaf. The audience supplemented their delirious cheers by waving their handkerchiefs so that the great man might visually witness their appreciation. The evening was poignant with significance as he turned his back on the crowd to confront the largest orchestra that he had ever assembled. He’d be dead within three years, and the city of Vienna would be heartbroken. But that night, Beethoven was to unleash the final culmination of his life’s work upon the lucky throngs in attendance. With a flick of his conducting baton, Beethoven roused his orchestra...

The lyrics for Beethoven’s swan song were taken from a poem by Friedrich Schiller that had originally been called 'Ode to Freedom'. The great composer had been inspired by a groundswell of feverish optimism that was gripping society at that time. So he changed the title to ‘Ode to Joy’. The thing to understand about that generation of Beethoven, Washington, and Napoleon was that they thought they had saved the world. They were witnessing the old feudal order of kings and queens being swept away. The so-called Enlightenment Era had just seen successful revolutions in America and France replace crowned heads with representative democracies. A glorious future felt like it was arriving and anything felt possible. To the delight of his jubilant crowd, Beethoven immortalized that giddy feeling by capturing it forever with his music. 

Dickens

The next generation to come after Beethoven’s was the generation of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, who both happen to have been born on the very same February day in 1809. It was also the generation of Charles Dickens. Like Beethoven, Dickens was beloved in his day. With his cast of memorable characters, he left behind a vivid portrait of Victorian civilization. But unlike Beethoven’s music, there was no overflowing optimism to be found in Dickens’ tales. Instead, class and poverty were the major themes. In A Christmas Carol, for example, we meet Ebenezer Scrooge, the miserly old money lender who is terrified by ghostly visitations into giving up his vast fortune.  

Dickens was a man who spent his childhood tediously gluing labels onto pots of boot black for ten hours a day. The London that lives on through his words is a city ridden with poverty and pollution. Child labor was a business fixture. Those who could not pay their debts, like Dickens' father, went to debtors' prison. The vast majority lived in squalor, while a tiny minority lived in opulence. The rosy future so confidently expected by the crowd at the debut of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had conspicuously failed to materialize. The work of Charles Dickens is a memorable reflection of that failure. 

Marx

Charles Dickens and Karl Marx were contemporaries. The two men strolled the very same cobble-stoned London streets and lived among the same glaring economic failures that  characterized the city. Rather than writing fiction about it, Marx committed himself to a formal analysis of those infamous economic conditions. It took him 15 years, and the results are a much drier read than Dickens’ lively tales. But his analysis had a colossal impact on the course of world history, and permanently altered the destinies of Russia and China. What did Marx write down that could possibly have caused such a stir?

During Marx and Dickens’ day, the former peasantry was bustling in from the English countryside to settle in cities. They earned wages knocking products together inside the massive brick factories of Manchester and London. The owners of these factories would then, for a tidy markup, sell these products back to the same working class that had knocked them together. To Marx, being a business owner meant insinuating oneself in between the production and the consumption of goods, with the goal of collecting a toll on that traffic. He argued that business owners are just middlemen, who have the same parasitic relationship to the production process that a toll booth has to a highway. It’s very easy to see why the business-owning class has always taken such a dim and dismissive view of his analysis.

But Marx was not satisfied with merely identifying the source of the staggering wealth inequality that afflicted Victorian society. He had a chilling prophecy of doom to go along with his diagnosis. Having watched the cotton gin, the spinning jenny, and the power loom replace the vast majority of textile workers, Marx realized there was a countdown clock built into the Industrial Revolution. As technology progresses, he reasoned, business owners would fire redundant workers and save bundles by not having to pay out wages. But their business model would ultimately collapse when too many fired workers no longer had wages to buy products.

Today, in the 21st century, Western Civilization has still not solved this problem. The American working class has been fired en masse over the past 50 years; those jobs have either been automated away through technology or moved offshore. We’ve slapped a band-aid on the problem by issuing credit cards. With borrowed money, the financially-diminished working class can still keep business afloat by buying their products. Borrowing instead of earning can only ever be a temporary solution, because the debt eventually comes due. Credit cards, along with every other category of debt, are at ominously record levels. Everyone can sense the system is creaking like a dam about to burst. But without Marx’s analysis, it’s not so easy to put our finger on the root of the problem. 

If we are ever to return to the triumphant optimism still so palpably audible in Beethoven’s music, we are going to need to actually address the problems with Victorian society that are still plaguing us. I will not insist that Marx was 100% correct or 100% incorrect. I would instead submit to you, dear reader, that his ideas are the best starting place for mature discussion. The opinion of the business-owning class, as propagated to us through the various media outlets they own, has been to avoid taking Marx seriously. The American and French revolutions ushered in a new era, but they didn’t carry humanity over the goal line. The fact that we urgently need to change the way we do business is becoming more obvious by the day. We must gin up some of that rebellious spirit of the Enlightenment Era and commit ourselves to changing the way we do business. Before it’s too late