The Art of Being Ruled

Rating:
Summary: The art of reading
Review: "The Art of Being Ruled" is a difficult book to review, because the author (P. Wyndham Lewis) takes an ironic view of the cultural, artistic and political movements of the early 20th Century, and irony is vastly overrated as a general way of getting one's message across. Lewis, a novelist and abstract/semi-abstract painter (the founder of England's 'Vorticist' movement) sets out to write a sort of companion piece to Machiavelli's "The Prince"-- but where "The Prince" is a manual about how to rule, Lewis' book is for the rest of us-- a sort of exposé of the mechanics of mass-culture and mass-rule.

Lewis had the bad luck of being born too soon-- his observations about the feminization of culture and about the rise of virtual reality, for example, would have been hard to digest at the time they were written, but nowadays they are almost clichés. What Lewis gets at (and you'll see this especially in his book "Time and Western Man") is the modern mania for novelty and subjectivism; Lewis is coming at these ideas from the point of view of an artist rather than a politician, so the book is less political than philosophical. In fact, Lewis changed his political views over the years, so much of the book contains early stabs at the more mature views he took in later books, but "The Art of Being Ruled" is very intelligent and entertaining, not to say prescient.