The nineteenth century has much to answer for: the invention and propagation of ethnically based nationalism, eugenics, the development of totalitarian ideologies, the smugness of nations who mistook economic power for moral worth, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that's only the serious stuff. Remember to throw in Victorian Christmas traditions, the Pre-Raphaelites, Wagner's music, the myth of the American West, economic liberalism, robber baron capitalists, the Mormon religion, and the Romantics. Especially the Romantics. Not romance as in languages or novels, Romance, as in Shelly, Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Chopin, Schumann, Schubert, Liszt, Brahms, Dostoyevsky, Scott, Hugo, Delacroix, an endless list of poseurs and inflated egos. Yes, Romanticism also gave us Beethoven and Blake, but on balance, debits outweigh credits, and Blake, being a self-educated genius, would probably have been Blake regardless of era. What's wrong with Romanticism? For a start, it won't do the decent thing, and die quietly, as artistic and intellectual fads are supposed to. It is reborn in successive generations, under different names but with the same core content. And the content is the stuff of adolescent fantasy run amok, if that isn't tautology. Romanticism starts in the eighteenth century, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau is often mistakenly lumped with the Enlightenment Philosophers. Voltaire and his crowd believed in Classical learning, reason ruling emotion, progress through the education and intellect, an aristocracy of merit, and government by, who else, the enlightened. Miltantly anti-clerical, they nonetheless bought the doctrine of original sin: credulousness was the sin, knowledge the redemption. They were not democrats, rather the very models of elitist benevolent dictators. Fortunately, while they enjoyed immense status, no one ever offered them political power. Rousseau believed in humanity's innate goodness, embodied in his portrait of the Noble Savage. He rejected reason and education: for him, emotions and imagination were the centre of the human experience. His writings on education emphasised developing the child's creativity, freeing it from discipline to explore and discover the world through subjective interaction with nature. He argued that, far from benefitting from society, the individual was corrupted by it, and rejected the idea that scientific and intellectual progress helped the common person: all it did was make governments more powerful and oppressive. He cherished individual liberty and spontaneity above all, and was one of the first modern writers to attack the concept of private property. Yet, Rousseau also wrote The Social Contract, which directly contradicts his other political writings. In it, he described nature as savage, without law or morality, and argued that good people could only exist within society. In nature, individuals must compete for the necessities of life. Because we can more successfully face threats by joining with others, we have formed society. Individuals give up some of their natural rights in exchange for social protection against predators and aggressors, working out a new set of rights and duties that work equally for all. As a result of this contradiction, Rousseau inspired a range of movements. The Romantics adopted his corpus, holus bolus, with the notable exception of The Social Contract. The Romantic Credo exalted beauty, subjectivity, emotion, spontaneity, mysticism and imagination, and denigrated reason, the intellect, society and discipline. Freedom from rules was its ultimate value. The Romantic ideal was an artist, living in solitary communion with a deified nature. Forced to live in society, he, or ocassionally she, was bound to be in conflict with it, for Romantics believed that the world of reason, machinery and enterprise was irredeemably corrupt: they worshipped the past, especially the myths and mysticism of the Gothic Middle Ages. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Romantic Movement had become the rage among the young, educated bougeoisie, and in one form or another, dominated the arts and thinking of Europe's elites, and through them, influenced the early socialist movement. Even those who argued against Romanticism had to do so in the vocabulary the Romantics had set out for discourse. Even after the Romantic Movement passed, in about 1830-35, its legacy remained, growing more pervasive with time, influencing even those who thought they were rejecting Romanticism. One has no trouble recognising the influence of Romantic assumptions in Dicken's virtuous heroes and uneducated orphans -- essentially middle class heroes temporarily inconvenienced by birth in or abandonment to the poorer classes, or in his fascination with ghosts and phantoms. Who could be more Romantic than Kierkegaard's free individual, alone before God, unable to trust reason in anything that matters. Through Delacroix's fascination with horror there is a direct line to Picasso's Guernica -- Picasso copied some of Delacroix's paintings several times. The Impressionists' emphasis on expressing individual vision, on spontaneity in perception and creation, their exaltation of nature, and their battle with the Establishment, are straight from the Romantics. One hears the Romantic Hero in Mahler's self-aggrandizing symphonies, in the sensitivity and egoism of Liszt, in the American romance of the Gunslinger, and the Promethean megalomania of Wagner. The Romantic Hero came to stay. Before the Romantic Movement, there was no assumption that art and youth must be in constant rebellion against society: after it, no generation has been without its self-conscious rebels. Before Romanticism, nature was something to be feared and tamed: after, it was something to be revered, Up 'til the Romantics, the chief critics of industrialism had been conservative gentry, aristocracy, and churchmen, who feared the passing of their power: after them, the torch passed to artists and intellectuals who mourned the deadening of their spirit. Socialism was not a Romantic rebellion: socialism rejects capitalism, not industrialsim, and seeks to return the ownership of, and the profit from, industrial output to the workers who create it. It was the Romantics, the young, educated bourgeoisie, who bit the hand that fed them. Before Romanticism, a liberty was an exemption from particular rules: after, it was an ideal state of self-realisation. Beauty, once the mundane creation of a service class for an aristocracy that could pay them, became an esoteric ideal, open only to those with spirits sensitive enough to perceive it. Emotions, once meant to be tamed by social forms and religion, were now to be expressed, directly, without regard for consequences. Reason, previously man's tool for understanding, was portrayed as cold and sterile, unable to perceive anything of value, while intuition and subjectivity became the source of all truth, or the definitive argument against the possibility of perceiving Truth at all. And, behind it all, somewhere, was a lost paradise, a Romantic Eden of pure values, noble savages, intuition and oneness with Nature. What's so wrong with that? Rebels grow up, but, as they do, they leave each generation a little more inspired, surely? Haven't they have made a valuable contribution to the democratisation of societies, to reining in the excesses of capitalism, to making the rest of us aware of the perils of endless exploitation of the environment. It is a stage we all go through, isn't it? Well, no. Romanticism has done little for the general run of humanity. Nor is it harmless, or open to all. Romanticism is the ultimate spoiled brat ideology, which is why it finds its adherents in generation upon generation of privileged young in rich nations. The poor, the hungry, the desperately embattled citizens of other places, have no time for sensitive solitude: they are too busy trying to stay alive. Romanticism is not about fighting for others, it is about indulging oneself without constraint. The Romantic comes into conflict with society not because s/he is fighting for social justice, or democracy, or any cause, but because society, per se, is oppressive to the unlimited freedom of the self-realising individual. The Romantic Individual is not the individual of a democratic society, or even of the kind of moral anarchy Kropotkin envisioned, s/he is the individual outside society, an outlaw, and proud of it. You won't find the Romantic on the barricades, or in the marches, or serving in the soup kitchens. That requires commitment to others. No, s/he talks a great line in rebellion and scorn, but it extends in all directions: society is oppressive, and the people are a vulgar mob. The only value to the Romantic is in his or her own precious soul. As for contributions, indeed, Romanticism has contributed to environmentalism. It has also saddled it with the image of Wiccans and tree-huggers, and inspired a significant part of the movement to exalt anything natural over everything human-created, as if humanity were not also natural, but irradicably corrupting and evil. It is the environmentalist's Romantic respect for the Noble Savage which so severely hampers them when aboriginal peoples are on the other side of the table, telling them to butt out of their development plans. Romanticism has also stuck the movement with the Sensitive Hero, that morally superior being capable of perceiving what pitiful humanity cannot, some mystical balance of Nature which, if it had ever existed, would have put paid to the need for evolution right there. If anything, the legacy of Romanticism to the environmental movement has been destructive. While the capacity of the dedicated environmentalist to awaken public outrage has been of great value, the Romantic distrust of science and technology has closed off any possibility of compromise or of managing the environment for every one, every thing, in it. For every big battle won, dozens of smaller ones have been lost by this uncompromising attitude. It would not surprise me if the gains and losses zeroed out, or went into the red. As for democratising society, like I said, you don't find Romantics on the barricades or the picket lines. The extension of the franchise, the fight for civil rights, for a greater share, for more control over their own lives, has been fought by the under-educated, the overworked, and the oppressed. Artists and intellectuals who do get involved tend to be patronising and dismissive of those they claim to represent, and downright destructive: from the frustrated poets and playwrights of the Committee of Public Safety to Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, that Georgian poet and seminarian, leadership by the intellectual elite has tended to result in massive sacrifice of the lives of those whose welfare they claim to have at heart. It was not poets and painters who rioted against the British Corn Laws, it was working people who were directly affected. The Paris Commune was not a battle of intellectuals, though some drew lessons from it, it was the poor and the hungry against an opprssive regime. Not one Romantic Hero chained him/herself to anything to get women the vote. Romantic Heroes were notable by their absence from the battle for trade unionism in any nation you care to examine. Critics of capitalism they might be, opponents they are not. The stereotype of the guilt-ridden bourgeois intellectual, paralysed between dependence on the power structure that provided the education, leisure and status needed to provide that elegant critique and intellectual sympathy for the vulgar and boorish is telling. Even George Orwell, esteemed intellectual of the left, had trouble accepting that his dreams of liberty were radically different from those of the people he was supposedly sympathetic to. One of the most telling scenes in 1984 is one of the least discussed. Winston Smith, walking through a workers' slum, hears a poor woman singing as she hangs out her washing. In a flash, he realises that the rebellion he dreams of will never come from the proles. Of course it won't. It isn't their rebellion he dreams of. The poor have always demanded in, not out. The Flower Children of the 1960s were more interested in their right to drugs and free sex than in fighting for Black American's civil rights. Oh, there was cheering from the sidelines, and deep discussion about the oppressiveness of straight society and the righteousness of the oppressed. But the slog work was done by blacks themselves, over decades, unnoticed until a bunch of white preppies, the very antithesis of Romantic Rebels, got involved. They were straight kids from the best schools, all noblesse oblige and old money: but they were the ones who risked their lives to help the blacks, not the next generation, not the Romantic Rebels. You will find the Romantic Hero among the more rarified socialist intellectuals: operating at that level of theory, one rarely has to come in contact with actual people. Romantics are active in the movement for human rights: it is the perfect place to feel morally superior, associate with noble savages, denigrate Western values and technology while trying to foist Western morality on small, defenseless cultures. Not that the entire human rights movement is populated by Romantics -- I am sure there are sincere, hardworking individuals who do understand that each people must find their own future. I am also sure they never get higher in the ranks than fieldworkers. The Romantic Hero, for all the posturing, has done nothing for the world, and much to damage it. The Romantic attitude to vulgar society is the ultimate in elitism. The Romantic writer cares nothing for popular success, the Romantic painter insists that appealing to a wide public will compromise the art. What matters is the expression of that unique, personal subjectivity. Younger generations, each looking to find its own way in the world, admire and adopt these attitudes as a first step in self-creation. That's where the damage begins. Sure, most grow out of it. Some don't. Some die, of drugs or illness brought on by the associated poverty, or in flashy suicides brought on by self-indulgent despair. Some go mad, again from drugs, or because they wander too far down the paths of mysticism without the innate capacity to understand it. Some grow old and bitter, and take their elitism into the classroom or the art trade, where they lock up all the art where the vulgar and mindless can't contaminate it with their naive appreciations. Some spread the desease into new generations and classes, spawning Romantic Heros in whole new fields. One has only to read the self-justifications of today's crackers, virus writers, and script kiddies to find the Romantic Hero full blown. Or talk to your average sysadmin, if you want to hear scorn heaped on the vulgar and uneducated. And who is the yahoo techno-billionaire, with his endless toys, his utopian vision, his dirty T-shirts and his deliberately outrageous behaviour, if not the Romantic Hero writ as large as money can write? With the spread of literacy and education, Romanticism escaped the rarified atmosphere of poetry and painting, and entered the despised mainstream. With prosperity, more people could afford to indulge themselves and denigrate those who did not share their precious sensibility. What was once a limited, manageable threat that a wealthy society could tolerate and even encourage, for entertainment, if not for balance, has become the central ideology of two generations. Hippies became yuppies, and charged into the world crying, "He who dies with the most toys, wins!" They educated their children not in reason and social responsibility, but in self esteem and self indulgence. Designer shoes, designer clothes, individual rights without social duties. Those children are now adults. This is the world they grew up in, and, by and large, they seem as cynical as their parents, as competitive and driven, as apathetic to the needs of others. Far from being in tune with a beneficent nature, they consume as if there will always be someone else to pay the bill. The danger in Romanticism is in its democratrisation: we return to Eden, but the Noble Savage turns out to be an obscene Narcissus. Rousseau was right. A society of solitary, self-involved individuals cannot endure. Without surrendering some portion of that natural right to focus exclusively on one's own needs and desires, one ends up in a vicious war of all against all. Only by setting aside some part of our self interests do we gain the benefits of co-operation, mutual self-help, concerted action: defense against predators and aggressors, however imperfect, the rule of law, a share in the goods and decisions, rights and responsibilities. The Romantic Hero is above mundane co-operation, negotiation, haggling, jostling and bargaining. But, without it, there is no society to produce the surplus that indulges the Romantic ego. Without it, there is no society at all. When that war comes, there will be no safe place on the sidelines.
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