The redemption that you seem to find (or that I read, anyway) at the end of your essay doesn't really look back to the same place Ruskin is looking (to the 12th century), but it does seem to look back to, or at least echo, a particular kind of romanticism. Maybe it is a tragic longing — you are peering at the ruin of a statue that is looking at the ruin, longing to take it's place. That is, I think, a characterstically modern kind of shattered majesty.

Randall, yes to your observation that Ruskin was living in a fantasy world (and he was a strange, strange man!). But I think that to engage with his ideas is not to devote oneself to “more cathartic lies that fail less spectacularly” or even to romanticize the past. Rather, I think it's important to look at contemporary situations using the concepts and ideas of earlier centuries as a method for becoming aware of the fantasy world that we live in now. It sounds as though you are romanticizing the modern age by saying that it shows us “how to see and name those promises and their failure.” People in all times and places have occasionally seen clearly the fantasies indulged by their own little corner of the world. But it's hard to recognize the ocean of fantasy that we swim in without the ability to contrast these almost-invisible fantasies to those more perceptible ones of other times and places. For the word “fantasy,” substitute the word “ideology,” and it works just as well.

What Randall didn't point out, but what is implied by his argument, is the corollary truth that of course women's bodies were never in some natural state, neither in the Middle Ages, nor in Ruskin's nineteenth century. I don't have any interest in going back to the Renaissance and painting my face with white lead and plucking out my forehead hairs so that I would appear to have a high forehead. I don't think of myself as idealizing the past; rather, I'm plucking an idea out of the past to use as a lens to look at the present. Regarding Tara's comment, though, that there is a (possibly problematic) populism to the idea that everyone should pursue beauty: I think you're right, because the pursuit of beauty historically has only been possible for the wealthy—it's a luxury. So then we're back to late capitalism broadening (at least in rich countries like the United States) access to luxury goods.

I also know, however, that Ruskin's vision of the Gothic age was, in fact, a fantasy. And that his attack on Godless functionalism and standardization was primarily backwards-looking, aimed at a neo-Classical tradition that was just as antagonistic to what would become the 'modern' as the neo-Gothic was (19th century pre-modernity was already about as post-modern as you can get). And, for that matter, it was firmly rooted in just the kind of protestant religious moralism that was becoming so popular at the time and which means little to me when I go looking for balm to anoint the wounds inflicted on me and my self-image by late industrial capitalism.

That's why I tend to take my cues for 'shattered majesty' from the rather more modern figure of Walter Benjamin who, in turn, took his cues from John Ruskin's contemporary, Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire's insight about the emptiness of the coming industrial age was more sophisticated than Ruskin's, at least in so far as he did not allow himself to take refuge in a nostalgic for the less empty pre-modern . Rather, he saw the obvious false promises of modernism as an emperor's new clothes moment, as an opportunity to tear through the illusions of religious and political morality — that is, promises about the future writ large.