Portrait of John Ruskin, John Everett Millais (1853-54)
In art and social critic John Ruskin's fifth volume of his Modern Painters, published in 1860, Ruskin identified "help" as "the highest and first law of the universe -- and the other name of life." In this wide-ranging lecture, writer Gabriel Meyer will examine Ruskin's "law of help" and its moral vision of connection, whereby the "intensity of life is also the intensity of helpfulness -- completeness of depending of each part upon all the rest"; the laws of death, separation, anarchy, and competition. He will reflect on the fascinating interface of Ruskin's ideas with contemporary scientific explorations of the "evolution of cooperation," which critique aspects of Darwinian thought. And he will suggest ways in which Ruskin's "law of help" challenges contemporary mores, with its focus on radical individualism and its attendant ills -- social isolation and growing polarization.
Poet-journalist Gabriel Meyer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has lived and worked throughout the Middle East, the Balkans, and East Africa. His reporter’s diary on the civil war in Sudan, War and Faith in Sudan (Eerdmans), won ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year award for essays in 2006. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in recognition of his work as a journalist by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at UC Berkeley in 2017 and by Lancaster University in the UK in 2022. He had been involved with the historic Ruskin Art Club since 1998 and currently serves as its executive director. He has lectured widely on Ruskinian themes, most recently at the University of Arkansas at Monticello and at Notre Dame University where he delivered the second annual “Ruskin” lecture in February (2022), sponsored by the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, on Ruskin and ecology. His essay “Ruskin and the California Dream” appears in the latest edition of the Ruskin Review (Lancaster University, UK). He is a Companion of the Guild of St. George.