Over the past few weeks I have been besieged with requests to write comment pieces on the arts in a recession. I haven't written any of them because art in a recession is no different from art in a boom; art is always a different vocabulary of desire.

I know that the arts are diverse, and that a poem is not a painting, nor is a piece of theatre a piece of music, but whatever their forms, the arts are also Art, with a capital letter. Art is its own territory with its own values, and its worth to us is in its capacity to reach into the inarticulate or unsaid or unspoken or muffled, silenced self, lost under everyday pressures and muted by a false belief in the surface of life as the whole of life.

Right now, the so-called civilised West, at its most materialistic, has failed to deliver the goods. The goods, largely unpaid for, have not produced the happy, go-ahead society claimed by enthusiasts of unfettered markets. We are in a terrible mess and, with the money gone, what happens now?

Art will be doing what it always does; asking us to rename what is important.

I don't mean this as left-wing political agitprop, and I am not talking about anything as direct as Shaw, Orwell, or Brecht. Yet the malaise that affects societies who put all their faith in material progress is readily understood not only by political giants such as Marx, but by writers and artists of all kinds. Anyone who works creatively feels discomfort around the myth of economic progress as the route to human self-realisation, because emphatically, that is not where it happens for us.

If you believe, as I do, that there is such a thing as a creative continuum common to everyone, it is not difficult to believe that everyone benefits from exposure to, and participation in, creative endeavour. Capitalism has doomed most people to meaningless jobs by day and passive consumer pleasures for the rest of the time. Creativity is about engagement, prompting us to reconfigure what it means - and what it costs - to be content.

I have been reading Sheila Rowbotham's truly wonderful biography of Edward Carpenter, an early socialist pioneer, who in the 1880s gave up his smart life at Cambridge and built a modest house and market garden outside Sheffield, where he put into practice ideas about living simply and sustainably.

Carpenter, like Ruskin and William Morris, passionately believed in the importance of meaningful work with a creative element. Most early socialists, like most trade union men, feared that mechanisation was not just about throwing people out of work, but about reducing work to meaningless toil.

Carpenter wanted to see education and better working conditions, but he also wanted a society where men and women could be absorbed in their occupations, producing what was necessary, not what was superfluous. He feared, rightly, that progress would be misinterpreted as the masses aspiring to the luxurious lifestyle of the indolent upper classes, instead of progress as a rereading of what makes people happy and stable, related and productive.

For Carpenter, the drunkenness and brutality of working-class life was a direct result of its creative and spiritual impoverishment - as he saw it, direct results of the Industrial Revolution's capitalism. Carpenter was not religious, and certainly no advocate of churchgoing, or what he called “rib-story” Christianity. Yet he believed that there is such a thing as the inner life, and he believed in soul and spirit in the sense that not everything can be explained away or satisfied by empirical or material answers.

A mathematician by training, he was an early questioner of value-free science and the arrogance of 19th-century scientific rationalism. He was a spiritual son of the American poet Walt Whitman, travelling to visit Whitman, and borrowing much from Whitman's philosophy of life as a connected whole. In turn, E. M. Forster was deeply influenced by Carpenter, and likely distilled from him, via Whitman, his famous phrase, in Howards End, “only connect”.

Carpenter was homosexual. He had good relations with women, including the South African novelist Olive Schreiner, but he loved men, and longed for a time when love, wherever it is found, was seen as wholly good. He refused to separate the political and the personal, just as he would not separate the making of money from its consequences.

Love, sex, labour, money, body, spirit; it was a whole lexicon he aimed at, when he talked about a new vocabulary of desire.

Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham
Verso, £24.99; 548pp Buy the book

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