There exist in Europe museums of popular traditional art. They display interesting, picturesque, and magnificent works of craftsmanship which the people have thought up and afterwards retained as a tradition and used for centuries, because in what they have produced the people have found the very expression of their soul.
In German, this tendency is called drang nach oben – pressure or effort directed upwards. This would be a tendency of society as a whole.
The Grey Drawing Room 1917 by Albert Chevallier Tayler.
And while in the castle they would be making ever better furniture and living an ever more attractive life, the house of the manual laborer would be ever more curious, interesting, and artistic.
Silver Cake Basket, 1751, by Samuel Courtauld I (a silversmith, like his father, Augustin II). Each basket would be filled with a cake, so diners could the various goodies being offered.
The drang nach oben is the opposite of miserabilism and the precise representation of this tendency to ascend, ascend, ascend. If the soul ascends, then secondarily the stomachs also become more normal and healthy, and the people eat more, drink more, and speak more; the dances of the people are born, that popular dance so pure, so chaste; an entire life conceived and born of the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the teachings of the Church is born.
We are speaking of the opposite of miserabalist society. Nor is it a society of consumerism.
This non-consumerist society is a phenomenon of the soul and could be called a society of ideals, of faith or, even better, Christendom.
