Your heart is in the right place, but the Romantic reaction to Rationalist excesses was NOT always “progressive” either in the sense of “forward looking” or in terms of being concerned with the plight of either industrial workers or peasants. As an artistic and philosophical concern, romanticism could be quite backward looking, tending t…
Your heart is in the right place, but the Romantic reaction to Rationalist excesses was NOT always “progressive” either in the sense of “forward looking” or in terms of being concerned with the plight of either industrial workers or peasants. As an artistic and philosophical concern, romanticism could be quite backward looking, tending to ‘romanticize” the Middle Ages. To the extent it influenced political thinking, it could (and was employed) to disparage the very idea of progress. A distinction must be made between “rational” and evidence based arguments that “reason is not the whole” of humanity and emotionalized arguments that celebrate unreason. If the crimes of communist regimes (Stalin and Mao) can be described as a cancerous outgrowth of “rationalism, the crimes of fascist regimes (including Nazi Germany and others who emphasize ‘blood and soil”) can be ascribed to an excess of both Romanticism and unreason.
Today there is a motivated (by who?) push to disparage ideas of “enlightenment” or “wokeness” either because they are associated with elites, elite levels of education, preachiness, or uncivil challenges to both unjust and legitimate authorities. This includes a lot of discourse about how Western Civilization took a wrong turn in the Age of Enlightenment which, as Max Weber pointed out, involved a certain degree of “disenchantment.” But this “disenchantment” was part of liberalizing (or liberatory) resistance to the authority of churches and clerics as well as a concerted drive to free the human mind from all manner of superstition and magical thinking. When I hear pleas for a re-enchantment of the world, sometimes I hear a call for more respect for our natural environment and for thoughts and traditions more associated with broader human experiences. Other times I hear a call to re-surrender political and social power to preachers, priests, and sorcerers.
I don't minimize the negative aspects of Romanticism (although I will point out that these happened mostly in the later stages of the movement), and agree with many of your points. But this article is not the proper place for that kind of granular historical critique of 19th century Romanticism.
The reality is that all movements cause problems when they are pushed too far. Right now, however, we are suffering under the extreme dysfunction of rationalism and algorithmic manipulation dominating all spheres of human life. We need to counterbalance that. At our current moment, a resurgence of Romanticism would be almost entirely healthy—with no risk of returning to the Middle Ages.
I was almost going to reply that I am less worried about returning to the 1300s than I am about the ongoing resurgence of a 1930s-like rise of fascism (or should we call it “illiberal populist authoritarianism”?) except that I remembered that the 1300s was the century of the Black Plague and the ongoing surge of anti-rationalist, anti-science sentiment has a propensity to increase the likelihood of the breakout of another lethal pandemic.
I certainly agree with you that “algorithmic manipulation dominating all spheres of human” life is a very grave problem likely to get worse, but I would want to argue that this represents less of an excess of rationalism than it does a deficit of democracy. I think we might both agree that there needs to be much more humanist and environmentally aware activism. But I would think of that more in terms of liberal populism than I would in terms of romanticism — with “liberal” holding to its Enlightenment roots involving the establishment of a rule of law that protects individual rights and resists tyranny.
Also when it comes to “algorithmic manipulation dominating all spheres of human life” I believe we need to consider how the worst causes and consequences of this are related to grievously obscene inequalities of wealth and income which has progressively subverted public policy since the 1970s. And when I think of the 1930s (with Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Stalin) I also think of FDR and the New Deal which reversed much of the wealth and income inequality that pertained during the Gilded Age but which has now returned so cancerously. I never thought of FDR or Martin Luther King as “romantics” but I’m sure many of their strongest supporters and fiercest opponents would have claimed the label. (This reminds me that “romantic cause” during the Civil War was the Confederate one under Lee and not the brute machinery of the Union under Grant, Sherman, and Lincoln.)
“Illiberal populist authoritarianism” is probably a more useful descriptor. Maybe I just tell myself that to intellectualize my fears of being tortured to death and disappearing up the chimneys of an anti-trans death camp as so many were during the last Holocaust.
But it is fascinating to observe the differences. Previous fascists sought to concentrate and totalize state power into a powerful, unified, omnipresent dictatorial state with a single ideology and unified industrial strategy. Today's Illiberal populist authoritarianism is actively seeking to dismantle state power and to unleash populist energies of the masses. Hitler never would have abided anything like American gun rights, for instance. But some regimes are perfectly content to let their own people organize the pogroms, or let corporate oligarchs manipulate the governing agenda. In any case, there is quite a difference between what Russia does with it's second-class citizen minorities and what China does. I don't think you could call one "better" over the other, though.
In any case "Make America Great Again," rather does sound like more of a "Romantic" slogan. Making appeals to the conquest of Greenland, or Panama, or Canada, or Mexico as a glorious, self-celebrating triumphalist adventure is certainly a Romantic notion, though even more ill-considered than America's last adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Let alone the idea that America is so mighty it ought to jettison it's NATO alliance as a kind of third wheel to it's global ascendancy.
To be fair, I'd also point to the left as the domain of rarified moralism in the last decades - a sort of, vengeful hyper-idealism allergic to reality and hell-bent on forcing into being an imagined utopia of social justice and universal welfare whose only successes were in humiliating dominant minorities and conservative ideologies with little if anything to show in such domains as democratic reform, or improvements to the general standard of living. Instead of secure access to housing, or food, it's all been forced confessions of whatever "privilege" you have however marginal you really are. Here, too, we see mutant sort of Romanticism disconnected from real world problems.
I suppose I just have to disagree with Ted. Our politics belongs to a decadent age of spectacle, mysticism, and ritual wherein the very basics of rationality - politics, is abandoned. Big tech may control advanced technologies, but it's actual ideology is millenarian - based on a Silicon Valley "master race" of geniuses riding out the storm it creates from doomsday bunkers, and sociopathic ethics based, at best, on pseudo-scientific appeals to game-theory, and evolutionary psychology, just as the rich Scrooges of the Romantic era appealed to "social-Darwinism."
The 1300s were not a century of black plague. It ravaged through many many centuries before anyone figured out that rats were spreading it. And what sort of anti-rationalist, anti-science sentiment was Antony Fauci using for COVID.
I would say the bulk of those who demonized Fauci were anti-science and anti-rationalist.
From Wikipedia:
“The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic that occurred in Europe from 1346 to 1353. It was one of the most fatal pandemics in human history; ...”
There is no "science". Kuhn got rid of that and ww1 got rid of the optimism. Your criticism of romanticism is exceptionally on point but enlightenment has been a zombie for a couple decades at least.
Is that supposed to be a reply? Assuming that you are an adult, why don't you try to make a case of some sort? Or if you wish you can prefer to remain not being taken seriously.
Granular? It's the whole thing. Napoleon wasn't a minor footnote. Neither was communism (which was quite literally a German romantic development). The reenvisoning of states beyond kingdoms as romantic nation-states caused havoc throughout the wholecentury (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848). That it was the fundamental ideological foundation of ww1 then ww2 then developed into modernism and postmodernism aren't minor footnotes. You don't get to just pick random aesthetics you like then push them onto people as narrative control to get what you want.
Strip this senior of medicare and social security, and you'll create an old guy who knows how to do things, can do without, and who has little to lose.
Romanticism was, for the most part, focused on individualism, not anything that was even remotely communitarian, apart from the countries where it more or less fused with revolutionary nationalism.
The communities were subverted into the individual. They were immediately subverted into the individual; that's how every German idealist, romantic etc envisioned it. Rousseau himself placed state formation by subverting the community into the individual. If you are, e,g., a Pole then you are Polish (the Polish state is yours because it is you — this differs from subjects of kingdoms).
It’s not a belief. It’s a sentiment. It’s mostly a deep longing! It is a feeling of yearning for something that seems missing or elusive whether it be a sense of wholeness, a sense of being “at home in the world”, a sense of belonging (to another sometimes) or a sense of participation in the awesome grandeur of the sublime. It can certainly be a reaction to anything felt as impoverishing or oppressive so it can be a reaction to the misuse of reason when it misses out on important aspects of natural and human reality or when it is misused to justify irresponsibility, irresponsiveness, or exploitation.
When humanists look back at the Age of Enlightenment and the “Romantic Reaction” to it in “elite” and bohemian circles … (Bohemia refers here to the sketchy urban neighborhoods where students intermingled with street people, drop outs, and artist types) … they note that this turn toward “rationalism” in Europe involved a lot of categorization that was part of the racist rationalization of European imperial colonization which was very brutal. After Auschwitz ‘Critical” thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer saw the roots of totalitarianism in The Enlightenment, but I’m not sure they advocated for “romanticism.” The sentiment at the time was more like “After Auschwitz, poetry is impossible.”
So be it. I like Neo-Gothic architecture (Disneyland silly as it often was) to Neo-Classicism, which, though prettier than Neo-Nazi Brutalism, is still boring.
Well said. Your comment is a necessary corrective to Ted’s argument. Case in point: a ‘romantic’ understanding of women’s role in society can be a trad wife’s restricted creativity or celebrating women’s creative capacity in all spheres of human endeavor.
I never meant it as an argument, but more as a supportive (if corrective) contribution. When solidarity, courage, and reason align with altruism and nurturance, a person or a movement can make inspiring contributions to human flourishing. Unfortunately those “guiding stars” often fail to align so, and there are so many forces (fields?) affecting their courses and positions.
It’s pretty trendy to critique the Enlightenment, but Emanuel Kant’s most famous work was the “CRITIQUE of Pure Reason” and he also wrote other books to outline what he saw as the limitations of rational empiricism (not to imply I read them..). So in its own way the Enlightenment ITSELF can be said to have generated the reaction we call “Romanticism.” We can’t always count on science to be self correcting in the span of our flitting attentions and brief lifetimes, but we can remember Albert Camus’ own way invoking the necessity of “limits” — or avoiding excess. That, in my opinion, is a fitting form of conservatism.
Thanks! I really appreciate your second to last sentence. And as to the last sentence: it will be a cold day in hell before I surrender ANYTHING to the gaggle of gaslighting, goons who'd own us all, heart, soul and body if we let them in exchange for our 'comfort and ease'.
Your heart is in the right place, but the Romantic reaction to Rationalist excesses was NOT always “progressive” either in the sense of “forward looking” or in terms of being concerned with the plight of either industrial workers or peasants. As an artistic and philosophical concern, romanticism could be quite backward looking, tending to ‘romanticize” the Middle Ages. To the extent it influenced political thinking, it could (and was employed) to disparage the very idea of progress. A distinction must be made between “rational” and evidence based arguments that “reason is not the whole” of humanity and emotionalized arguments that celebrate unreason. If the crimes of communist regimes (Stalin and Mao) can be described as a cancerous outgrowth of “rationalism, the crimes of fascist regimes (including Nazi Germany and others who emphasize ‘blood and soil”) can be ascribed to an excess of both Romanticism and unreason.
Today there is a motivated (by who?) push to disparage ideas of “enlightenment” or “wokeness” either because they are associated with elites, elite levels of education, preachiness, or uncivil challenges to both unjust and legitimate authorities. This includes a lot of discourse about how Western Civilization took a wrong turn in the Age of Enlightenment which, as Max Weber pointed out, involved a certain degree of “disenchantment.” But this “disenchantment” was part of liberalizing (or liberatory) resistance to the authority of churches and clerics as well as a concerted drive to free the human mind from all manner of superstition and magical thinking. When I hear pleas for a re-enchantment of the world, sometimes I hear a call for more respect for our natural environment and for thoughts and traditions more associated with broader human experiences. Other times I hear a call to re-surrender political and social power to preachers, priests, and sorcerers.
I don't minimize the negative aspects of Romanticism (although I will point out that these happened mostly in the later stages of the movement), and agree with many of your points. But this article is not the proper place for that kind of granular historical critique of 19th century Romanticism.
The reality is that all movements cause problems when they are pushed too far. Right now, however, we are suffering under the extreme dysfunction of rationalism and algorithmic manipulation dominating all spheres of human life. We need to counterbalance that. At our current moment, a resurgence of Romanticism would be almost entirely healthy—with no risk of returning to the Middle Ages.
I was almost going to reply that I am less worried about returning to the 1300s than I am about the ongoing resurgence of a 1930s-like rise of fascism (or should we call it “illiberal populist authoritarianism”?) except that I remembered that the 1300s was the century of the Black Plague and the ongoing surge of anti-rationalist, anti-science sentiment has a propensity to increase the likelihood of the breakout of another lethal pandemic.
I certainly agree with you that “algorithmic manipulation dominating all spheres of human” life is a very grave problem likely to get worse, but I would want to argue that this represents less of an excess of rationalism than it does a deficit of democracy. I think we might both agree that there needs to be much more humanist and environmentally aware activism. But I would think of that more in terms of liberal populism than I would in terms of romanticism — with “liberal” holding to its Enlightenment roots involving the establishment of a rule of law that protects individual rights and resists tyranny.
Also when it comes to “algorithmic manipulation dominating all spheres of human life” I believe we need to consider how the worst causes and consequences of this are related to grievously obscene inequalities of wealth and income which has progressively subverted public policy since the 1970s. And when I think of the 1930s (with Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Stalin) I also think of FDR and the New Deal which reversed much of the wealth and income inequality that pertained during the Gilded Age but which has now returned so cancerously. I never thought of FDR or Martin Luther King as “romantics” but I’m sure many of their strongest supporters and fiercest opponents would have claimed the label. (This reminds me that “romantic cause” during the Civil War was the Confederate one under Lee and not the brute machinery of the Union under Grant, Sherman, and Lincoln.)
“Illiberal populist authoritarianism” is probably a more useful descriptor. Maybe I just tell myself that to intellectualize my fears of being tortured to death and disappearing up the chimneys of an anti-trans death camp as so many were during the last Holocaust.
But it is fascinating to observe the differences. Previous fascists sought to concentrate and totalize state power into a powerful, unified, omnipresent dictatorial state with a single ideology and unified industrial strategy. Today's Illiberal populist authoritarianism is actively seeking to dismantle state power and to unleash populist energies of the masses. Hitler never would have abided anything like American gun rights, for instance. But some regimes are perfectly content to let their own people organize the pogroms, or let corporate oligarchs manipulate the governing agenda. In any case, there is quite a difference between what Russia does with it's second-class citizen minorities and what China does. I don't think you could call one "better" over the other, though.
In any case "Make America Great Again," rather does sound like more of a "Romantic" slogan. Making appeals to the conquest of Greenland, or Panama, or Canada, or Mexico as a glorious, self-celebrating triumphalist adventure is certainly a Romantic notion, though even more ill-considered than America's last adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Let alone the idea that America is so mighty it ought to jettison it's NATO alliance as a kind of third wheel to it's global ascendancy.
To be fair, I'd also point to the left as the domain of rarified moralism in the last decades - a sort of, vengeful hyper-idealism allergic to reality and hell-bent on forcing into being an imagined utopia of social justice and universal welfare whose only successes were in humiliating dominant minorities and conservative ideologies with little if anything to show in such domains as democratic reform, or improvements to the general standard of living. Instead of secure access to housing, or food, it's all been forced confessions of whatever "privilege" you have however marginal you really are. Here, too, we see mutant sort of Romanticism disconnected from real world problems.
I suppose I just have to disagree with Ted. Our politics belongs to a decadent age of spectacle, mysticism, and ritual wherein the very basics of rationality - politics, is abandoned. Big tech may control advanced technologies, but it's actual ideology is millenarian - based on a Silicon Valley "master race" of geniuses riding out the storm it creates from doomsday bunkers, and sociopathic ethics based, at best, on pseudo-scientific appeals to game-theory, and evolutionary psychology, just as the rich Scrooges of the Romantic era appealed to "social-Darwinism."
The 1300s were not a century of black plague. It ravaged through many many centuries before anyone figured out that rats were spreading it. And what sort of anti-rationalist, anti-science sentiment was Antony Fauci using for COVID.
I would say the bulk of those who demonized Fauci were anti-science and anti-rationalist.
From Wikipedia:
“The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic that occurred in Europe from 1346 to 1353. It was one of the most fatal pandemics in human history; ...”
And therefore, it wasn’t the 13th century that was plague stricken, but the 14th century. I know, pedantic…
There is no "science". Kuhn got rid of that and ww1 got rid of the optimism. Your criticism of romanticism is exceptionally on point but enlightenment has been a zombie for a couple decades at least.
"...illiberal populist authoritarianism."
Do you really believe that? Or do you hope by repeating the lie to cause the rest of us to believe it?
Are you a machine or just a troll?
Is that supposed to be a reply? Assuming that you are an adult, why don't you try to make a case of some sort? Or if you wish you can prefer to remain not being taken seriously.
Granular? It's the whole thing. Napoleon wasn't a minor footnote. Neither was communism (which was quite literally a German romantic development). The reenvisoning of states beyond kingdoms as romantic nation-states caused havoc throughout the wholecentury (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848). That it was the fundamental ideological foundation of ww1 then ww2 then developed into modernism and postmodernism aren't minor footnotes. You don't get to just pick random aesthetics you like then push them onto people as narrative control to get what you want.
This is a nice concept, but who exactly will drive this movement?
Seniors whose Medicare and Social Security are on the brink of oblivion?
GenZ whose support for Trump has risen since the election, and who worship at the altar of techbros and crypto?
GenX whose children are jobless and parents face economic ruin?
I could keep going.
I don't doubt that a New Romanticism may be what's required, but I truly don't see how we bridge a potential societal collapse with this vision.
Strip this senior of medicare and social security, and you'll create an old guy who knows how to do things, can do without, and who has little to lose.
But your point is valid.
Romanticism was, for the most part, focused on individualism, not anything that was even remotely communitarian, apart from the countries where it more or less fused with revolutionary nationalism.
The communities were subverted into the individual. They were immediately subverted into the individual; that's how every German idealist, romantic etc envisioned it. Rousseau himself placed state formation by subverting the community into the individual. If you are, e,g., a Pole then you are Polish (the Polish state is yours because it is you — this differs from subjects of kingdoms).
If you keep talking about Romanticism you will inevitably get called a Nazi. It's going to be interesting to see you try and navigate this minefield.
I'm not sure that's true at all. If someone were to praise German Romanticism to the skies, without any caveats, it might well be warranted.
But most every country in Western and Central Europe was affected by Romanticism to some degree. (There are definitely exceptions.)
Hmmm. I wonder what those "caveats" are? Does Ted know them? Somebody better tell Ted the caveats before he accidentally steps in it!
*German* Romanticism. Aside from that, I find your heckling a bit silly.
I always have thought that Romanticism was the ultiamte luxury belief.
It’s not a belief. It’s a sentiment. It’s mostly a deep longing! It is a feeling of yearning for something that seems missing or elusive whether it be a sense of wholeness, a sense of being “at home in the world”, a sense of belonging (to another sometimes) or a sense of participation in the awesome grandeur of the sublime. It can certainly be a reaction to anything felt as impoverishing or oppressive so it can be a reaction to the misuse of reason when it misses out on important aspects of natural and human reality or when it is misused to justify irresponsibility, irresponsiveness, or exploitation.
When humanists look back at the Age of Enlightenment and the “Romantic Reaction” to it in “elite” and bohemian circles … (Bohemia refers here to the sketchy urban neighborhoods where students intermingled with street people, drop outs, and artist types) … they note that this turn toward “rationalism” in Europe involved a lot of categorization that was part of the racist rationalization of European imperial colonization which was very brutal. After Auschwitz ‘Critical” thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer saw the roots of totalitarianism in The Enlightenment, but I’m not sure they advocated for “romanticism.” The sentiment at the time was more like “After Auschwitz, poetry is impossible.”
Adorno an advocate for "Romanticism"? Nope!
Otoh, re. your quote about poetry, what about poet Nelly Sachs, who wrote O the Chimneys (and many other works)? She wrote poetry about the Holocaust.
So be it. I like Neo-Gothic architecture (Disneyland silly as it often was) to Neo-Classicism, which, though prettier than Neo-Nazi Brutalism, is still boring.
Well said. Your comment is a necessary corrective to Ted’s argument. Case in point: a ‘romantic’ understanding of women’s role in society can be a trad wife’s restricted creativity or celebrating women’s creative capacity in all spheres of human endeavor.
I never meant it as an argument, but more as a supportive (if corrective) contribution. When solidarity, courage, and reason align with altruism and nurturance, a person or a movement can make inspiring contributions to human flourishing. Unfortunately those “guiding stars” often fail to align so, and there are so many forces (fields?) affecting their courses and positions.
It’s pretty trendy to critique the Enlightenment, but Emanuel Kant’s most famous work was the “CRITIQUE of Pure Reason” and he also wrote other books to outline what he saw as the limitations of rational empiricism (not to imply I read them..). So in its own way the Enlightenment ITSELF can be said to have generated the reaction we call “Romanticism.” We can’t always count on science to be self correcting in the span of our flitting attentions and brief lifetimes, but we can remember Albert Camus’ own way invoking the necessity of “limits” — or avoiding excess. That, in my opinion, is a fitting form of conservatism.
Thanks! I really appreciate your second to last sentence. And as to the last sentence: it will be a cold day in hell before I surrender ANYTHING to the gaggle of gaslighting, goons who'd own us all, heart, soul and body if we let them in exchange for our 'comfort and ease'.
‘Gas lighting goons’ - perfect!