If one reads Prince by Machiavelli and then takes a look at Renaissance art, sculpture, culture, one can see how a plea to virtue was embedded in and reflected the ruling ideology. The virtues were captured in art and portrayed for everyone to see (before and while Machiavelli wrote – he didn’t necessarily come up with the idea himself).

The art from that time is often brutal. It was a virtue to be warlike and able to crush one’s enemies. So aristocrats and merchants (an early model of the modern bourgeois in the first proto-capitalist city states) would pay for paintings and sculptures of themselves wielding clubs and crushing other strong men – capturing their supposed manly virtue.

The same kind of portrayals can be seen throughout Europe following the Renaissance.

It’s strange… the dark ages are acknowledged, a time when records were lost, before the Renaissance became the Enlightenment, but if humans survive whatever is about to come our way with global warming and nuclear war, I’m guessing that future societies will look back at this time as having ‘slipped back’ into a second dark age, where humanity largely lost the capacity to see itself. The parallels are uncanny. (Parenti’s History as Mystery touches on the suppression of historical knowledge, as does, IIRC, Cedric Robinson’s An Anthropology of Marxism.)

Today we see this everywhere in film, TV, books, magazines, all media forms. Constant depictions of what makes people (especially those in the ruling class) great, and better than others. It’s quite insidious, but art is taught poorly in schools, so children are not taught to question – or even to see – their environment. @[email protected], this may explain why we see so many Terminators and Jasons.

Curiously, most people don’t even accept that members of the ruling class pay for art (and news stories) that depicts them in glory. If you mention it, people’s eyes glaze over or they call you a conspiracy theorist.

In a way, they’re right, because some of the payment mechanisms are distorted by the wage labour relation. And there are so many people willing to idealise the status quo without being commissioned like a merchant explicitly seeking out a canvas by da Vinci or Michelangelo. As if PR and marketing firms are not just a sophisticated form of the same age old practice.

I suppose the ruling class knows how dangerous it is to teach the lower classes history and to teach them how to understand relations as historically contingent. That path would lead to Marxism even if it did not lead to Marx or Marxists.

I’m unsure if this is what you meant, @[email protected], by

the material emanation of subjective idealist philosophy

but it’s what you made me think of.