One quibble about an important aspect that you perhaps inadvertently omitted. A key aspect of the romanticism of the 18th century was reconnecting with the natural world. The Romantic poets were rather obsessed with this as poet Robert Bly points out in his stellar book “News of the Universe” (I highly recommend it.) In shifting our life on a day-to-day basis into an increasingly claustrophobic and self-reinforcing digital cage, we have abandoned, not only our connection to the natural world -- which is essential to the very important human values you cite -- but also our connection to each other.
Connecting to nature also let's us tap into the mystery of the universe, which despite human folly remains nonetheless fully intact even if absurdly rationalized by Western scientific materialism and reductionism. ( Carl Sagan and Einstein were both scientists who could appreciate this. Today...not so much.)
I totally agree that a new romanticism is very necessary at this strange time in human history but am perhaps a bit less optimistic that it will happen --- at least over the next few years. The forces of technocracy seem too powerful at the moment to be countered because so much of the necessities of everyday life depend on our attachment to this digital realm. Paying bills, financial maintenance, getting a license renewed and so much more. Further, technological dependency keeps getting ratcheted up by the self-appointed masters of the universe represented by Big Tech. And finally until our educational system returns to the fundamentals of the liberal arts and humanities to balance out the insane obsession with STEM-based (i.e. utilitarian) education, we won’t have the necessary grounding to turn things around. That said, I hope I’m wrong about this although it's great to hear the hopeful signs you reference.
Yes. This. This has been bothering me. Why are nature, ecology, and the nonhuman such a peripheral part of this discussion? They are almost nowhere. Feel free to prove me wrong! I haven't read all of the writers listed here exhaustively yet, and I know some are touching on it. But it's not there much, from what I've seen, not even when people talk about enchantment or vitalism, which it damn well should be. And we are facing an environmental crisis of epic proportions, objectively. So, why does the New Romanticism talk about it so infrequently? Why is it not front and center to these discussions? Because it is a fulcrum of all of these problems. And it was for the Old Romantics, too.
This is half challenge half anthropological question, for the record, lol.
I think it does; it's an omission. Certainly there is the potential for Romanticism without straightforward or uncomplicated concern for the revitalization of nature (Blake and Byron are proof). Certainly one person's Romanticism need not do everything. But are you really meeting the moment if you're not meeting what's happening to the environment at large?
It's also telling that some of our most important contemporary thinkers on ecology are interested in Romanticism, whether or not they embrace it. Timothy Morton was a Shelleyan once (though he doesn't at all go a Romantic direction in his thinking in some respects). Jane Bennett certainly believes it paves the way and thinks with Emerson, Whitman. Bruno Latour ended up talking about a heavily revised Gaia-figure.
Indeed, the awareness of nature undiluted--savage, brutally simple and bloody in its rules, yet profound beyond any human religion for those humans who regain an acquaintance with their mammal selves, who abandon the parks and paved paths and venture to swim a long distance alone upon a stormy sea or who find themselves trapped by a lightning storm on a mountaintop far from civilization--that terrifying yet transformative acquaintance with Deity is the "sublime" the Romantic Rebellion sought out. It is what Blake meant when he wrote, "The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man."
But we have electricity. He didn't.
Very few of us today know or have the courage to confront the sublime. Without that, we cannot escape our end as widgets in a solar-system mind born of AI. But we can be proud of that. That our organic minds created the inorganic platform for a solar being, one that will possibly expand across our home galaxy.
We will be like Moses, left behind to witness the next generation of Mind escape into the Promised Land. There will be no rescue, no return of the Romantic Rebellion. Instead, the last generations will be content with immersive AI distractions and a menu of marvelous drugs.
But until that end arrives, I will sleep under the stars, far from Urizen's Satanic Mills.
Yes! I’d include Barry Lopez, Gary Synder, Wendell Berry, Richard Hugo, to name just a few .. who articulated (or illuminate) the junction of nature and Romanticism… & thanks much for your thoughts!
Yesterday nature was being disputed in the Supreme Court and there is no consensus among the justices on whether it is objectively real or submissive to the imagination. Strange days.
I still have no idea what commenter @cifautsch was talking about in regard to the 'postmodernist spirit possession of corporate-interest-beholden conservatives.' Perhaps her idea of Nature does not include the divine feminine.
Oh my lord, they are postmodernists without knowing it*. Why do conservatives turn on the postmodernism the minute corporate interests are involved.
* Postmodernism was mostly great by me but I still have to argue that nature exists in intellectual conversations sometimes and it's all because of postmodernism.
And, by some analysis at least, cities are projected to continue to grow ever larger in terms of total human population over the next 20 years. I have a cite around somewhere.
Ted, Since you mentioned Blake, I should like to strongly recommend a remarkable new book about him and his continuing relevance, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, by Mark Vernon (2025).
thanks for that rec Peter! we are involved with the Swedenborg Foundation, in publishing, and Blake was quite the Swedenborg enthusiast, as was Johnny Appleseed and Helen Keller. I think I need more deep dives into Blake, much more, so will get this book right away...
It’s time to choose sides. Slop, and algorithms, or humanity and creativity. Rusty Pilgrim, my record label, was one of the first to implement an anti-AI logo, or rather a ‘Human Made’ logo, on its music. And maybe some people might laugh, but the return and rising, even if niche, popularity of the Dungeon Synth genre is a symptom of what you’re describing.
This reminds me of the Authors Guild's Human Authored Certification (https://authorsguild.org/human-authored/), which I used for my last book and plan to use from now on.
Buried deep in the list is the tell: "So anything I say in favor of Romanticism is solely with regard to the current context."
Well...yes! Romanticism created Beethoven...but also Adolf, Uncle Joe, Mao, and their heirs in other unfortunate nations. The romantic impulse is now busily pulling the stake out of socialism's heart...doesn't anyone in New York, Minneapolis or Portland OR read history? Nah; they're too busy "reimagining."
The romantic impulse is easily hijacked; this process is inevitable and will be amplified by the internet--a supreme irony given Ted's reservations about and participation in the pernicious web.
A flaw in your argument - today's technological over reach is not rational like the 18th century - in fact it's often batshit crazy. Algorithms yes but often flawed, whereas the enlightenment, while often wrong was trying to be rational. And a bit rose tinted about Britain's rather hypocritical outlawing of slave trade, which didn't end for a long time. Also Wilberforce and many abolitionists were not exactly Rousseauian romantics. And factory worker's sitution became worse during the 19th century
I agree that rationalism today can feel scary. For many people it has become almost a religion. “Trust the science” often means trust without understanding, without curiosity, without awareness of limits, without knowing the basic principles behind it. Rationality turns into belief rather than thinking.
At the same time, I think we should be careful not to romanticize Romanticism itself. I just want to point out that it isn’t an answer, only a counterweight. It can help restore balance, but leaning on it too much is really dangerous. I see this in some anti-AI reactions, where fear of dehumanization turns into rejection of rational thinking altogether. Though you mentioned that Romanticism can also become scary, I feel the need to repeat this thought as I see people dividing into these two war camps already.
The hardest position is the middle one, like always. Not worshipping reason, not escaping into feeling, but staying between them without turning either into a belief system. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s probably the only place where something genuinely human can still exist.
Harvard professor of poetry and literature, Adam Walker, is also on board with the New Renaissance, and, as I understand it, he's in the process of an early retirement from the ivory tower to establish his own independent program linked below.
I like what you're saying about "enchantment" and "small space of freedom." The word that comes to mind is "Wilderness." The technological imperative of total surveillance that conquers reality by constructing a simulated model of it, which applies quantity to everything, including behavior, the shadow of cognition, and quantity only, has no truck with qualitative evaluation, and so denies its existence. This is in evidence in the 'philosophies' (really just advertisements) sold by Harrari and Sapolsky.
I don't know that the term Rationalism applies itself so perfectly to what we're going through, because there is no leading philosophy of our era, only post-rational excusses and coercive advertising. What we have is the absolute quantitative expedient, which of course resembles classical Rationalism.. "Mankind makes tools, and then the tools remake mankind." We have been possessed, unwittingly and unconsciously, by the quantitative model of the computer's structure, as a default condition to which we must cope. And this has had the effect of squeezing out any domain left unconquerable by quantitative measure, leaving no wilderness, where the mental & emotional life can flourish unburdened.
Thanks for writing this, Ted. Will forward it around. -M
Agree. Is it really rationalism or merely technocracy, or more to the point, capitalism run amok? As was stated in a previous comment, a truly rational approach would take a more balanced approach as opposed to pseudo rational values at the expenses of all else.
Whatever it is, it represents the collapse of all boundaries, where all disciplines and institutions fuse under a regime of pure number.
'Capitalism' becomes indistinguishable from a soviet style control economy (except insofar that it functionally delivers the goods most of the time), healthcare becomes finance, war becomes psychology, art becomes espionage, philosophy becomes meme, science fiction becomes prophecy, the body becomes machine, governance becomes theater, the gulag becomes lifestyle, democracy becomes pro-sports devotion, catastrophe becomes investment opportunity, biology becomes brand loyalty, poetry becomes terrorism, privacy becomes commodity or myth, victims become victimizers, power outages become vacation, money becomes religious confession, fraud becomes the economy, forced obsolescence becomes genealogy, slavery becomes a promotion, humans become pets, cancellation becomes rebirth, music becomes scanner tracking, beating dead horses in the agora of comments sections becomes lonely, self-flagellating spectacle.
The clearinghouse does not recognize what it cannot count. It has no way to sense ethical valence, good or bad. Hence the hospital insists that you measure your pain on a scale of 1 to 10 and it responds with a dosage calibrated to numb it, to mediate its presence out of existence and ensure dependency on its absence. The concept of a cure to fix the cause of pain is debunked as superstition, peer reviewed out of the professional lexicon. (Note the curious proximity of the word 'numb' to 'number,' and for that matter, 'doll' to 'dollar.')
Back in 2016, a whole decade ago, before ubiquitous phased array cellular antennae, in his last public lecture, Assange observed that each cell-phone (fixed to nearly every human body) and each IoT appliance 'gives off' a harvest, on average, of about 10-100 interactions per second that are used by A.I. and surveillance capitalism companies to model the world and hold its objects in a manageable 2 dimensional EM web or matrix. It boggles the mind to imagine what that frequency of interaction has become now under 3D conditions (5G), and what it is slated to become in the models' projections which guide investment in a compounded bubble economy. Currently there is no physical outside from this totalizing environment, no wilderness. One's unspoken thoughts are anticipated with near perfect fidelity by targeted advertisements.
At the moment when interoperable digital ID and ledgered currency is deployed under mandate (for your own safety), this condition of no-wilderness will be locked in, perhaps until total system collapse. Hypothetically - and I certainly hope to be wrong about this - escape might only exist in unmedicated madness or death. Perhaps the New Romanticism can remedy this profound problem. Or must the New Romanticism exist within it as managed mysticism, simulated ephemera, canned spontaneity?
What Gioia is thankfully promoting and prophesying is a transcendence from this quantitative reduction and return to analogue (or at least non-networked, unmeasured) experience on a mass scale. I hope it comes true. I wonder about the technology required to achieve that. For it to be a centralized cultural phenomena necessarily wraps it into the boundary-less blob's envelop.
Meanwhile the generations who have a memory of such analogue, non-networked life are quickly-enough passing on, and when we (the elders who remember how to remember) are gone, how can any on-boarded private memory be functionally restored beyond the occasional outlier? By and large, the kids in their 20s literally can't do basic arithmetic at the point of sale. Whole generations have never once had to subtract $9.11 from $20.00 or remember a single phone number.
Joyce named his archetypal hero/father figure in the Wake, H.C.E.: Here Comes Everybody. It could have just as well been Here Comes Everything.
You mention this "Mankind makes tools, and then the tools remake mankind." Where did this come from? It is my view of evolution. Life evolves to the point where it has no evolution to speak of, until it learns to re-engineer and evolve itself. We are at this precipice now, beginning to evolve ourselves.
I’ve been fighting this battle ever since I refused to carry a camera on a tour of the UK in the early 80s - those experiences are as clear in me now as they were in the moment they happened…far beyond the visuals that would fading away in a photo album somewhere. Thank you Ted for articulating what needs to become clear now.
Not sure I would denominate the dominant cultural phenomenon today as "rationalism." In many ways, it is decidedly irrational. We saw this most clearly during Covid when the call was to "follow the science" (i.e., be rational) but the so-called science turned out to be anything but rational. Instead, we see the methodology of rationalism but the substance is irrational in nature. It is irrational because it depends on an ideological narrative, not objective reality or realism.
Ah, you are unfamiliar with 'dual use' bioweapon engineering and bioweapon-vaccine engineering. Read up on DARPA's project funding, Robert Kadlak, et al. It's all there in black and white, and you can be sure all the checks cleared. It's very well funded to say the least. And it's not coincidental that you consider conversation about it to be beyond the pale, or mentally disregulated. Stigma is also weaponized by military interests.
You're a victim of it, as is everyone. Payment comes in the form of social inclusion. Don't worry, you're still safe from the threat of cancellation.
If you're so confident, dare to google Robert Kadlak and DARPA. I can't speak for your library science skills, or the limits of your tailored algorithm, but that would be the first step, if you were to endeavor a disinterested look to test your certainty.
I rarely intervene in the comments, but I need to when my views are misrepresented. I never said scientists invented ALL cornoviruses. I never said scientists invented COVID-19. Others here can debate such topics if they wish.
I simply said that government-funded scientists developed coronaviruses.
My statement is true if ANY government-funded scientist or institution under ANY circumstances developed coronaviruses. This has happened, and is a matter of fact, not opinion. You can consult the link below on gain of function research if you want more details.
2025's best films: Sinners, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Weapons, Superman, No Other Choice, Blue Moon/Nouvelle Vague, The Secret Agent -- all at their core were about putting people, family and humanity above machines, political ideologies/systems, and materialism. Rosalia literally put out an album with Operatic songs backed by the London Philharmonic. Its everywhere if you know where to look.
One Battle? All I see is violence, weapons of war...I found it unwatchable (I understand AI was involved in some of them). My favorite movies this year were "The Mastermind" and "Sentimental Value." I didn't detect an ounce of AI generated sound/imagery, but perhaps I'm wrong. I'm way too old for mainstream culture.
One Battle After Another was shot on film with vintage VistaVision cameras. What are you on about? Also the Mastermind was pretty good, but a tad tedious.
Mastermind drew me into it slowly....but I LOVE slow moving stories. Kelly Reichart's work is astounding. I also couldn't watch Everything Everywhere, but I gave it several tries. I'm a dinosaur and I don't care.
Yeah, the ending was okay but I have a big problem with current directors trying to recreate protests from the 60s and early 70s since I lived it and they didn't look or feel like that to be part of them.
I loved Train Dreams and Sentimental Value, so that says something about my taste in movies. I watch a lot of old and foreign films. Current Hollywood stuff bores me, mostly. Malick my favorite director. SLOW....
I work in a laboratory of Romanticism and I'm enormously grateful for it. The path of our work is deeply embedded in materials, in our community, and in embodied practices. I'm pretty sure I would have lost my mind by now if I were in a corporate or public sector environment. www.robinsonstudio.com
in fact, some of us never left this worldview and lifestyle, but it has been much more of a challenge than I initially would have anticipated, due to the exact entrenchment and expansion of Uber-Rationalism in my whole lifetime. maybe I'm a radical romanticist; an arch-sensualist.
Although, I am skeptical about your brief view in here that Romanticism can go too far -- not if it is truly holistic and thinking as Systems Thinkers would suggest. That would include lots of both/ands: near/far; whole/part; narrow/wide; immediate/long-term, etc. This is the only path towards balance, so for me within my practice of "romanticism," Harmony is both an ingredient and an outcome. It is intrinsic.
Command & Control, on the other hand, "rationalism," is, in practice, severely irrational in that it always creates an imbalance that leads to its own demise: a virus that kills all of its hosts, a parasite that dwindles its host population into collapse. In other words: humans have tried to make an art of parasitism, but even in that we have failed to study how Nature *actually* does it (i.e., intelligent parasitism, if you will), and our key error is often: complete lack of balance or understanding of cause & effect on scales both large and small
One quibble about an important aspect that you perhaps inadvertently omitted. A key aspect of the romanticism of the 18th century was reconnecting with the natural world. The Romantic poets were rather obsessed with this as poet Robert Bly points out in his stellar book “News of the Universe” (I highly recommend it.) In shifting our life on a day-to-day basis into an increasingly claustrophobic and self-reinforcing digital cage, we have abandoned, not only our connection to the natural world -- which is essential to the very important human values you cite -- but also our connection to each other.
Connecting to nature also let's us tap into the mystery of the universe, which despite human folly remains nonetheless fully intact even if absurdly rationalized by Western scientific materialism and reductionism. ( Carl Sagan and Einstein were both scientists who could appreciate this. Today...not so much.)
I totally agree that a new romanticism is very necessary at this strange time in human history but am perhaps a bit less optimistic that it will happen --- at least over the next few years. The forces of technocracy seem too powerful at the moment to be countered because so much of the necessities of everyday life depend on our attachment to this digital realm. Paying bills, financial maintenance, getting a license renewed and so much more. Further, technological dependency keeps getting ratcheted up by the self-appointed masters of the universe represented by Big Tech. And finally until our educational system returns to the fundamentals of the liberal arts and humanities to balance out the insane obsession with STEM-based (i.e. utilitarian) education, we won’t have the necessary grounding to turn things around. That said, I hope I’m wrong about this although it's great to hear the hopeful signs you reference.
Yes. This. This has been bothering me. Why are nature, ecology, and the nonhuman such a peripheral part of this discussion? They are almost nowhere. Feel free to prove me wrong! I haven't read all of the writers listed here exhaustively yet, and I know some are touching on it. But it's not there much, from what I've seen, not even when people talk about enchantment or vitalism, which it damn well should be. And we are facing an environmental crisis of epic proportions, objectively. So, why does the New Romanticism talk about it so infrequently? Why is it not front and center to these discussions? Because it is a fulcrum of all of these problems. And it was for the Old Romantics, too.
This is half challenge half anthropological question, for the record, lol.
Bill McKibben and Wendell Barry, among others, certainly address this
Big fan of both, but the aren't part of the New Romanticism discourse proper, are they?
Does it matter?
I think it does; it's an omission. Certainly there is the potential for Romanticism without straightforward or uncomplicated concern for the revitalization of nature (Blake and Byron are proof). Certainly one person's Romanticism need not do everything. But are you really meeting the moment if you're not meeting what's happening to the environment at large?
It's also telling that some of our most important contemporary thinkers on ecology are interested in Romanticism, whether or not they embrace it. Timothy Morton was a Shelleyan once (though he doesn't at all go a Romantic direction in his thinking in some respects). Jane Bennett certainly believes it paves the way and thinks with Emerson, Whitman. Bruno Latour ended up talking about a heavily revised Gaia-figure.
Indeed, the awareness of nature undiluted--savage, brutally simple and bloody in its rules, yet profound beyond any human religion for those humans who regain an acquaintance with their mammal selves, who abandon the parks and paved paths and venture to swim a long distance alone upon a stormy sea or who find themselves trapped by a lightning storm on a mountaintop far from civilization--that terrifying yet transformative acquaintance with Deity is the "sublime" the Romantic Rebellion sought out. It is what Blake meant when he wrote, "The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man."
But we have electricity. He didn't.
Very few of us today know or have the courage to confront the sublime. Without that, we cannot escape our end as widgets in a solar-system mind born of AI. But we can be proud of that. That our organic minds created the inorganic platform for a solar being, one that will possibly expand across our home galaxy.
We will be like Moses, left behind to witness the next generation of Mind escape into the Promised Land. There will be no rescue, no return of the Romantic Rebellion. Instead, the last generations will be content with immersive AI distractions and a menu of marvelous drugs.
But until that end arrives, I will sleep under the stars, far from Urizen's Satanic Mills.
Interesting.
Yes! I’d include Barry Lopez, Gary Synder, Wendell Berry, Richard Hugo, to name just a few .. who articulated (or illuminate) the junction of nature and Romanticism… & thanks much for your thoughts!
Yesterday nature was being disputed in the Supreme Court and there is no consensus among the justices on whether it is objectively real or submissive to the imagination. Strange days.
Interesting.Thanks for this (and all comments). Do you happen to have a link handy?
Gladly Tom. The first three require id submission and payment to read.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01/13/us/supreme-court-trans-athletes
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/01/11/supreme-court-trans-sports-transgender/
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/justices-ask-for-definition-of-sex-during-supreme-court-arguments-on-transgender-students-in-girls-sports-5970496
The Epoch Times article is mirrored with more detail here:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/justices-ask-definition-sex-during-supreme-court-arguments-transgender-students-girls
Curiously ZH is the only version not self-censored via limited access subscription gate-keeping.
Jeff Childers, Esq. on Substack editorializes the first two articles in the body of his post here, in three segments, around the same period:
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/real-coffee-wednesday-january-14
I still have no idea what commenter @cifautsch was talking about in regard to the 'postmodernist spirit possession of corporate-interest-beholden conservatives.' Perhaps her idea of Nature does not include the divine feminine.
Oh my lord, they are postmodernists without knowing it*. Why do conservatives turn on the postmodernism the minute corporate interests are involved.
* Postmodernism was mostly great by me but I still have to argue that nature exists in intellectual conversations sometimes and it's all because of postmodernism.
I don't think I understand. I must have misread this the first time around.
I do not perceive where you could be visualizing conservatives 'turning on' the post-modernism. What court case did you have in mind?
I totally agree, Romanticise was hugely a love of nature and a need to move away from the city.
And, by some analysis at least, cities are projected to continue to grow ever larger in terms of total human population over the next 20 years. I have a cite around somewhere.
Good observation; I was thinking the same, but you articulated
better and faster. Cheers!
Ted, Since you mentioned Blake, I should like to strongly recommend a remarkable new book about him and his continuing relevance, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, by Mark Vernon (2025).
thanks for that rec Peter! we are involved with the Swedenborg Foundation, in publishing, and Blake was quite the Swedenborg enthusiast, as was Johnny Appleseed and Helen Keller. I think I need more deep dives into Blake, much more, so will get this book right away...
Yes! Johnny Appleseed is also a prototype for the great American weirdo.
If I remember correctly, Mark Vernon is a regular contributor to The Idler, a significant force in the developments described in the post.
It’s time to choose sides. Slop, and algorithms, or humanity and creativity. Rusty Pilgrim, my record label, was one of the first to implement an anti-AI logo, or rather a ‘Human Made’ logo, on its music. And maybe some people might laugh, but the return and rising, even if niche, popularity of the Dungeon Synth genre is a symptom of what you’re describing.
This reminds me of the Authors Guild's Human Authored Certification (https://authorsguild.org/human-authored/), which I used for my last book and plan to use from now on.
Buried deep in the list is the tell: "So anything I say in favor of Romanticism is solely with regard to the current context."
Well...yes! Romanticism created Beethoven...but also Adolf, Uncle Joe, Mao, and their heirs in other unfortunate nations. The romantic impulse is now busily pulling the stake out of socialism's heart...doesn't anyone in New York, Minneapolis or Portland OR read history? Nah; they're too busy "reimagining."
The romantic impulse is easily hijacked; this process is inevitable and will be amplified by the internet--a supreme irony given Ted's reservations about and participation in the pernicious web.
A flaw in your argument - today's technological over reach is not rational like the 18th century - in fact it's often batshit crazy. Algorithms yes but often flawed, whereas the enlightenment, while often wrong was trying to be rational. And a bit rose tinted about Britain's rather hypocritical outlawing of slave trade, which didn't end for a long time. Also Wilberforce and many abolitionists were not exactly Rousseauian romantics. And factory worker's sitution became worse during the 19th century
All good points. Thanks.
"They are people you would trust with a spreadsheet" -- they also want to upload you to a spreadsheet - the transhumanist afterlife.
I agree that rationalism today can feel scary. For many people it has become almost a religion. “Trust the science” often means trust without understanding, without curiosity, without awareness of limits, without knowing the basic principles behind it. Rationality turns into belief rather than thinking.
At the same time, I think we should be careful not to romanticize Romanticism itself. I just want to point out that it isn’t an answer, only a counterweight. It can help restore balance, but leaning on it too much is really dangerous. I see this in some anti-AI reactions, where fear of dehumanization turns into rejection of rational thinking altogether. Though you mentioned that Romanticism can also become scary, I feel the need to repeat this thought as I see people dividing into these two war camps already.
The hardest position is the middle one, like always. Not worshipping reason, not escaping into feeling, but staying between them without turning either into a belief system. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s probably the only place where something genuinely human can still exist.
These days you cannot be exceptional or a high achiever unless you are out of balance.
Harvard professor of poetry and literature, Adam Walker, is also on board with the New Renaissance, and, as I understand it, he's in the process of an early retirement from the ivory tower to establish his own independent program linked below.
https://adamgagewalker.substack.com/archive
https://versedcommunity.mn.co/
https://www.youtube.com/@closereadingpoetry
Escape "the dead-end of a data-driven life" and lead a Dada driven life.
Dada not data.
HAHA love it.
"Dada isn't really dead. It just went to Miami for the sun..." Graffiti in chalk on the pavement of Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley, 1978.
“Chaos never dies”!
I like what you're saying about "enchantment" and "small space of freedom." The word that comes to mind is "Wilderness." The technological imperative of total surveillance that conquers reality by constructing a simulated model of it, which applies quantity to everything, including behavior, the shadow of cognition, and quantity only, has no truck with qualitative evaluation, and so denies its existence. This is in evidence in the 'philosophies' (really just advertisements) sold by Harrari and Sapolsky.
I don't know that the term Rationalism applies itself so perfectly to what we're going through, because there is no leading philosophy of our era, only post-rational excusses and coercive advertising. What we have is the absolute quantitative expedient, which of course resembles classical Rationalism.. "Mankind makes tools, and then the tools remake mankind." We have been possessed, unwittingly and unconsciously, by the quantitative model of the computer's structure, as a default condition to which we must cope. And this has had the effect of squeezing out any domain left unconquerable by quantitative measure, leaving no wilderness, where the mental & emotional life can flourish unburdened.
Thanks for writing this, Ted. Will forward it around. -M
Agree. Is it really rationalism or merely technocracy, or more to the point, capitalism run amok? As was stated in a previous comment, a truly rational approach would take a more balanced approach as opposed to pseudo rational values at the expenses of all else.
Whatever it is, it represents the collapse of all boundaries, where all disciplines and institutions fuse under a regime of pure number.
'Capitalism' becomes indistinguishable from a soviet style control economy (except insofar that it functionally delivers the goods most of the time), healthcare becomes finance, war becomes psychology, art becomes espionage, philosophy becomes meme, science fiction becomes prophecy, the body becomes machine, governance becomes theater, the gulag becomes lifestyle, democracy becomes pro-sports devotion, catastrophe becomes investment opportunity, biology becomes brand loyalty, poetry becomes terrorism, privacy becomes commodity or myth, victims become victimizers, power outages become vacation, money becomes religious confession, fraud becomes the economy, forced obsolescence becomes genealogy, slavery becomes a promotion, humans become pets, cancellation becomes rebirth, music becomes scanner tracking, beating dead horses in the agora of comments sections becomes lonely, self-flagellating spectacle.
The clearinghouse does not recognize what it cannot count. It has no way to sense ethical valence, good or bad. Hence the hospital insists that you measure your pain on a scale of 1 to 10 and it responds with a dosage calibrated to numb it, to mediate its presence out of existence and ensure dependency on its absence. The concept of a cure to fix the cause of pain is debunked as superstition, peer reviewed out of the professional lexicon. (Note the curious proximity of the word 'numb' to 'number,' and for that matter, 'doll' to 'dollar.')
Back in 2016, a whole decade ago, before ubiquitous phased array cellular antennae, in his last public lecture, Assange observed that each cell-phone (fixed to nearly every human body) and each IoT appliance 'gives off' a harvest, on average, of about 10-100 interactions per second that are used by A.I. and surveillance capitalism companies to model the world and hold its objects in a manageable 2 dimensional EM web or matrix. It boggles the mind to imagine what that frequency of interaction has become now under 3D conditions (5G), and what it is slated to become in the models' projections which guide investment in a compounded bubble economy. Currently there is no physical outside from this totalizing environment, no wilderness. One's unspoken thoughts are anticipated with near perfect fidelity by targeted advertisements.
At the moment when interoperable digital ID and ledgered currency is deployed under mandate (for your own safety), this condition of no-wilderness will be locked in, perhaps until total system collapse. Hypothetically - and I certainly hope to be wrong about this - escape might only exist in unmedicated madness or death. Perhaps the New Romanticism can remedy this profound problem. Or must the New Romanticism exist within it as managed mysticism, simulated ephemera, canned spontaneity?
What Gioia is thankfully promoting and prophesying is a transcendence from this quantitative reduction and return to analogue (or at least non-networked, unmeasured) experience on a mass scale. I hope it comes true. I wonder about the technology required to achieve that. For it to be a centralized cultural phenomena necessarily wraps it into the boundary-less blob's envelop.
Meanwhile the generations who have a memory of such analogue, non-networked life are quickly-enough passing on, and when we (the elders who remember how to remember) are gone, how can any on-boarded private memory be functionally restored beyond the occasional outlier? By and large, the kids in their 20s literally can't do basic arithmetic at the point of sale. Whole generations have never once had to subtract $9.11 from $20.00 or remember a single phone number.
Joyce named his archetypal hero/father figure in the Wake, H.C.E.: Here Comes Everybody. It could have just as well been Here Comes Everything.
What is the invisible color of saying no?
“This condition of no-wilderness will be locked in; perhaps until total system collapse”
These are brilliant ramblings/musings of a keen mind. Proud to say I read to the finish. But, then, I’m one of those who remembers.
Very kind acknowledgement. Thank you.
You mention this "Mankind makes tools, and then the tools remake mankind." Where did this come from? It is my view of evolution. Life evolves to the point where it has no evolution to speak of, until it learns to re-engineer and evolve itself. We are at this precipice now, beginning to evolve ourselves.
It is a paraphrase from McLuhan. You may wish to begin with 'Understanding Media,' if you aren't already exposed to him.
I’ve been fighting this battle ever since I refused to carry a camera on a tour of the UK in the early 80s - those experiences are as clear in me now as they were in the moment they happened…far beyond the visuals that would fading away in a photo album somewhere. Thank you Ted for articulating what needs to become clear now.
Not sure I would denominate the dominant cultural phenomenon today as "rationalism." In many ways, it is decidedly irrational. We saw this most clearly during Covid when the call was to "follow the science" (i.e., be rational) but the so-called science turned out to be anything but rational. Instead, we see the methodology of rationalism but the substance is irrational in nature. It is irrational because it depends on an ideological narrative, not objective reality or realism.
Please tell me you don't *really* believe that scientists "invented...coronaviruses".
Ah, you are unfamiliar with 'dual use' bioweapon engineering and bioweapon-vaccine engineering. Read up on DARPA's project funding, Robert Kadlak, et al. It's all there in black and white, and you can be sure all the checks cleared. It's very well funded to say the least. And it's not coincidental that you consider conversation about it to be beyond the pale, or mentally disregulated. Stigma is also weaponized by military interests.
Gosh, thanks for revealing me as a paid tool of the military-industrial complex. You got me!
You're a victim of it, as is everyone. Payment comes in the form of social inclusion. Don't worry, you're still safe from the threat of cancellation.
If you're so confident, dare to google Robert Kadlak and DARPA. I can't speak for your library science skills, or the limits of your tailored algorithm, but that would be the first step, if you were to endeavor a disinterested look to test your certainty.
Yes that stopped me in my tracks too! Hope it was a typo...
I rarely intervene in the comments, but I need to when my views are misrepresented. I never said scientists invented ALL cornoviruses. I never said scientists invented COVID-19. Others here can debate such topics if they wish.
I simply said that government-funded scientists developed coronaviruses.
My statement is true if ANY government-funded scientist or institution under ANY circumstances developed coronaviruses. This has happened, and is a matter of fact, not opinion. You can consult the link below on gain of function research if you want more details.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK285579/
Funny. I understood what you meant.
Thanks for clarifying :)
2025's best films: Sinners, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Weapons, Superman, No Other Choice, Blue Moon/Nouvelle Vague, The Secret Agent -- all at their core were about putting people, family and humanity above machines, political ideologies/systems, and materialism. Rosalia literally put out an album with Operatic songs backed by the London Philharmonic. Its everywhere if you know where to look.
One Battle? All I see is violence, weapons of war...I found it unwatchable (I understand AI was involved in some of them). My favorite movies this year were "The Mastermind" and "Sentimental Value." I didn't detect an ounce of AI generated sound/imagery, but perhaps I'm wrong. I'm way too old for mainstream culture.
One Battle After Another was shot on film with vintage VistaVision cameras. What are you on about? Also the Mastermind was pretty good, but a tad tedious.
Mastermind drew me into it slowly....but I LOVE slow moving stories. Kelly Reichart's work is astounding. I also couldn't watch Everything Everywhere, but I gave it several tries. I'm a dinosaur and I don't care.
I think Kelly Reichart's filmmaking is very, very modern. I did enjoy the film a great deal -- and loved the ending.
She got "the look" of that era....but didn't capture that EVERYONE wore bell bottoms!
Yeah, the ending was okay but I have a big problem with current directors trying to recreate protests from the 60s and early 70s since I lived it and they didn't look or feel like that to be part of them.
I read somewhere that AI was used, but not largely. Whether PTA used it or not, I still found it repulsive.
Why was it repulsive? The violence? The explicit sexual discussions?
I loved Train Dreams and Sentimental Value, so that says something about my taste in movies. I watch a lot of old and foreign films. Current Hollywood stuff bores me, mostly. Malick my favorite director. SLOW....
violent images, basically. war scenes. just not my thing. It's a matter of taste. plus, I'm not a Leo fan.
I'll add "Train Dreams," as well, though heavily influenced by Terrence Malick's style of romanticism.
I work in a laboratory of Romanticism and I'm enormously grateful for it. The path of our work is deeply embedded in materials, in our community, and in embodied practices. I'm pretty sure I would have lost my mind by now if I were in a corporate or public sector environment. www.robinsonstudio.com
Wow stunning work, and so direct!, the appeal, and so intense!
fantastic. sign me up Ted!
in fact, some of us never left this worldview and lifestyle, but it has been much more of a challenge than I initially would have anticipated, due to the exact entrenchment and expansion of Uber-Rationalism in my whole lifetime. maybe I'm a radical romanticist; an arch-sensualist.
Although, I am skeptical about your brief view in here that Romanticism can go too far -- not if it is truly holistic and thinking as Systems Thinkers would suggest. That would include lots of both/ands: near/far; whole/part; narrow/wide; immediate/long-term, etc. This is the only path towards balance, so for me within my practice of "romanticism," Harmony is both an ingredient and an outcome. It is intrinsic.
Command & Control, on the other hand, "rationalism," is, in practice, severely irrational in that it always creates an imbalance that leads to its own demise: a virus that kills all of its hosts, a parasite that dwindles its host population into collapse. In other words: humans have tried to make an art of parasitism, but even in that we have failed to study how Nature *actually* does it (i.e., intelligent parasitism, if you will), and our key error is often: complete lack of balance or understanding of cause & effect on scales both large and small