Some quotes from Herbert Read To Hell with Culture — he is somewhat too naively found of the pre-industrialization era where there is no machines and mass production.
The fundamental truth about economics is that the methods and instruments of production, freely used and fairly used, are capable of giving every human being a decent standard of living…
To Hell with Culture
Still his thoughts are insightful:
A culture begins with simple things—with the way the potter moulds the clay on his wheel, the way a weaver threads his yarns, the way the builder builds his house. Greek culture did not begin with the Parthenon: it began with a whitewashed hut on a hillside. Culture has always developed as an infinitely slow but sure refinement and elaboration of simple things—refinement and elaboration of speech, refinement and elaboration of shapes, refinement and elaboration of proportions, with the original purity persisting right through.
A democratic culture will begin in a similar way. We shall not revert to the peasant’s hut or the potter’s wheel. We shall begin with the elements of modern industry-electric power, metal alloys, cement, the tractor and the aeroplane. We shall consider these things as the raw materials of a civilization and we shall work out their appropriate use and appropriate forms, without reference to the lath and plaster of the past.
Today we are bound hand and foot to the past. Because property is a sacred thing and land values a source of untold wealth, our houses must be crowded together and our streets must follow their ancient illogical meanderings. Because houses must be built at the lowest possible cost to allow the highest possible profit, they are denied the art and science of the architect. Because everything we buy for use must be sold for profit, and because there must always be this profitable margin between cost and price, our pots and our pans, our furniture and our clothes, have the same shoddy consistency, the same competitive cheapness. The whole of our consumer culture is one immense veneer: a surface refinement hiding the cheapness and shoddiness at the heart of things.
To hell with such a culture! To the rubbish-heap and furnace with it all!…
To Hell with Culture
And
You cannot impose a culture from the top—it must come from under. It grows out of the soil, out of the people, out of their daily life and work. It is a spontaneous expression of their joy in life, of their joy in work, and if this joy does not exist, the culture will not exist. Joy is a spiritual quality, an impalpable quality; that too cannot be forced. It must be an inevitable state of mind, born of the elementary processes of life, a by-product of natural human growth.
A Civilization from Under
Note: Herbert was trying to make a point of why the ussr don’t have great art.