1) Anti-trust is the secret sauce here. I say this not because I want to suppress innovation or freedom, but because corporations want to. "Walled gardens" are just a way of rolling up a favourable situation into a racket (see Apple's 30% tax and Google's monopoly powers over search). And the only time you ever see Republicans and Democrats playing nice with each other and even agreeing is on this topic (see Josh Hawley, Amy Klobuchar, etc.). Also, it seems like Trump is going to have at least a semi-robust FTC so we can hope.
2) No more essays in school. Just written tests. You get a question or two, and you have to answer them during the time given.
It's never an accident. There was a systematic dismantling of the controls on the financial industry, and the trust enforcement arena suffered. Might be one of the only spaces government helped rather than hurt.
The fall of antitrust started in the late 90s and ran until the last years of Trump 1. It's been sputtering since, but not much traction. The decline of antitrust was thoroughly bipartisan.
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'.
This weekend, seven thousand, five hundred and twenty nine journalists wrote an analysis of a conversation in the White House. Under those articles were 500k comments on the subject. Some percent were erudite and well thought out. And now, millions of us are equally informed and enlightened about the subject. The algo is no longer 24/7. It’s 24/7 and a mass orgie of contests of who can analyze it better to get my attention, over and over again.
They play the same tape over and over until the next thing happens that pushes this subject out of the news and then the crowd runs to the new accident and we all become experts on the next news story.
I’m not saying these are unimportant but their frequency makes them dull. A good tsunami, or any geologic event, fires too, get top billing. I’m tired of mass news events being pushed by the algorithms in my face 24/7. Ennui. Bad diet for the soul.
Politics has pushed art and even healing arts off of social media, with exceptions like Ted.
I spent the weekend revisiting the Roberta Flack catalog. Nobody told me she recorded an all Beatles album. Some good arrangements too! I listened to some old western audiobooks in the evening. And while I was less informed, I felt a lightness of being. At some point there has to be some backlash to the constant bombardment of our attention back to areas of pursuit that nourish our souls. Emerson, Thoreau come to mind
I see this in my own community. Our own local arts festival on Long Island is oversubscribed this year. We've started a film society to bring classic films and unseen masterpieces at our local library (Cognitivefilms.org) and have gotten amazing support! Keep banging the drum on this. Our culture desperately needs it!
Thanks for the substack tip, Su. From one of his conversations ( I tried to find it yesterday without success), I picked up that he found some meaning in Taoist thinking as well. I recall he'd engaged in a delightful conversation with former eco-greenie, newbie Orthodox pilgrim Paul Kingsnorth, too, with commonality in seeing our place on the planet and in life in broader context, and acknowledging that there are limits in what we can 'have' and in our 'wants'. It seems that both those writers were, for a time, caught up in the excitement of the attention of the anti-Wokers, but that seems to have passed. Hard not to get caught up in the pull of "likes" to your writings, I think. I always thought that anglo guys' attacks on Wokeness was just mean-ness under a popularized meme, btw. Would be interested in your observations. Thanks again.
Hi Tim, well I think there's always a lot of flag-waving going on, whether it's for a country, an ideology or whatever. And of course, wherever there are flag-wavers, there are anti-flag-wavers. I try to go down rabbit holes that are a little higher up on the food chain.
The reform of the most brutal aspects of industrial capitalism was driven by the collective power of workers and by the bourgeoisie’s fear of the revolutionary potential of that power, not by a bunch of floppy-fringed ‘romantics’. And if we’re going to rescue ourselves from today’s iron cage of techno-feudalism being built by the anarcho-capitalists, oligarchs and security state mavens, it’ll take another workers’ movement, not a few ‘romantic’ bloggers and TV shows.
Recall how that commiesymp, Adam Smith, remarked that, when you put two competing businessmen in a room together, the first thing they do is try to rig prices, divide territories, or otherwise choke off competition.
We stand on the shoulders of great people that labored before us… whether they belonged to Big Labor or strong individuals of all stripes. Agree on that
I'm considering the intrinsic benefit if removing two valve cores from the tires of the anarcho-capitalists. I assure you, they didn't bring a tire pump.
Ironically, deindustrialization is part of the problem - I manage a sculpture studio, and every year it gets harder to find suppliers and subcontractors that we need for our work. The economy in our big city isn't friendly to such businesses, and the skills for some are being lost outright.
I love this article. Please also consider post-humanism, animal rights, and our environment, which I think are equal in importance to what might be called re-humanization, since even if we overcome technological alienation, it can't be all about humans if we're going to survive.
The New Romantics is hooky…works perhaps better than Ted’s Excellent New Movement. Seemingly this has always been among us, bubbling under the rude and the cold of the ones and zeros. Talent is everywhere and always will be even if unsustained. If the money moves there, we will see more of it and be happier for it.
Ok, Ted this is exactly what my stuff has been about for a long time, and this will be required reading in my classes. Perfect - just a week ago I tried to put things in historical context for my gang and this would have been a perfect addition… Bless you for your great work. You know so much more than I do - what a synoptic vision…
Well, only insofar as how Romanticism has affected individuals who have come along post-early-mid 19th c. Because some folks will find beauty in many works that are, for lack of a better term, old and out of fashion.
I love the work of painter Caspar David Friedrich, while at the same time being aware that a number of people in the upper echelons of the Nazi party saw him as a kind of demigod. So if I write an essay about Friedrich, that's definitely something I'm going to mention. Equally, a lot of Wagner's music is beautiful, but to not put it in context per his own intense antisemitism and Hitler's love of Wagner is unwise at best.
I read this and saved a copy. I've set a calendar reminder and I'll return to it in five years. I confess I like the vision. But I think it assumes a political and economic predictability we may not actually have now.
Adding somewhat to @Joe Panzica’s comment, I’m interested to know what you think about & how you respond to the rightward lurch of the tech industry. Its most extreme ideologues, such as Peter Thiel, are embracing a kind of neo-reactionary anti-modernism that blends elements of Romanticism & Girardian mysticism with familiar conservative rhetoric around race & gender. While I do think that there are promising progressive & humanist ends that a neo-Romantic movement can contribute to, we’re already seeing elements of it being deployed by tech billionaires in ways that are deeply concerning. Thanks for another thought-provoking & stimulating essay.
I think we could also use a New Transcendentalism. Their is a chain linking the two movements together of course, but here on American soil it would be good to see some new shoots from our own homegrown philosophy start to emerge.
1) Anti-trust is the secret sauce here. I say this not because I want to suppress innovation or freedom, but because corporations want to. "Walled gardens" are just a way of rolling up a favourable situation into a racket (see Apple's 30% tax and Google's monopoly powers over search). And the only time you ever see Republicans and Democrats playing nice with each other and even agreeing is on this topic (see Josh Hawley, Amy Klobuchar, etc.). Also, it seems like Trump is going to have at least a semi-robust FTC so we can hope.
2) No more essays in school. Just written tests. You get a question or two, and you have to answer them during the time given.
3) And seriously people, BAN PHONES IN SCHOOL.
Hear, hear! BAN PHONES IN SCHOOL.
The lack of antitrust enforcement astonishes me.
It's never an accident. There was a systematic dismantling of the controls on the financial industry, and the trust enforcement arena suffered. Might be one of the only spaces government helped rather than hurt.
The fall of antitrust started in the late 90s and ran until the last years of Trump 1. It's been sputtering since, but not much traction. The decline of antitrust was thoroughly bipartisan.
"Technology is no longer enhancing human life" - Ain't that the truth. A lot of us can relate to this in our daily lives.
Have you ever started whimpering in the morning at the thought of having to go through email?
“Email Jail”!!!
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!
This weekend, seven thousand, five hundred and twenty nine journalists wrote an analysis of a conversation in the White House. Under those articles were 500k comments on the subject. Some percent were erudite and well thought out. And now, millions of us are equally informed and enlightened about the subject. The algo is no longer 24/7. It’s 24/7 and a mass orgie of contests of who can analyze it better to get my attention, over and over again.
They play the same tape over and over until the next thing happens that pushes this subject out of the news and then the crowd runs to the new accident and we all become experts on the next news story.
I’m not saying these are unimportant but their frequency makes them dull. A good tsunami, or any geologic event, fires too, get top billing. I’m tired of mass news events being pushed by the algorithms in my face 24/7. Ennui. Bad diet for the soul.
Politics has pushed art and even healing arts off of social media, with exceptions like Ted.
I spent the weekend revisiting the Roberta Flack catalog. Nobody told me she recorded an all Beatles album. Some good arrangements too! I listened to some old western audiobooks in the evening. And while I was less informed, I felt a lightness of being. At some point there has to be some backlash to the constant bombardment of our attention back to areas of pursuit that nourish our souls. Emerson, Thoreau come to mind
amen
I see this in my own community. Our own local arts festival on Long Island is oversubscribed this year. We've started a film society to bring classic films and unseen masterpieces at our local library (Cognitivefilms.org) and have gotten amazing support! Keep banging the drum on this. Our culture desperately needs it!
Three recent figures that have helped me most begin the New Romanticism in my own life have been:
1. Iain McGilchrist for the mind, thought, and meaning;
2. Christopher Alexander for architecture, design, and the material world;
3. David Bentley Hart for religion, criticism, and literature;
4. And of course, Tolkien before them.
While I feel like I was born into an age more like Kant's, I'm looking forward to a world more like Goethe's.
I can't recommend highly enough McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary", all 400 pages of it.
McGilchrist is a quite brilliant humanist thinker. I'm following him on Substack now.
Thanks for the substack tip, Su. From one of his conversations ( I tried to find it yesterday without success), I picked up that he found some meaning in Taoist thinking as well. I recall he'd engaged in a delightful conversation with former eco-greenie, newbie Orthodox pilgrim Paul Kingsnorth, too, with commonality in seeing our place on the planet and in life in broader context, and acknowledging that there are limits in what we can 'have' and in our 'wants'. It seems that both those writers were, for a time, caught up in the excitement of the attention of the anti-Wokers, but that seems to have passed. Hard not to get caught up in the pull of "likes" to your writings, I think. I always thought that anglo guys' attacks on Wokeness was just mean-ness under a popularized meme, btw. Would be interested in your observations. Thanks again.
Hi Tim, well I think there's always a lot of flag-waving going on, whether it's for a country, an ideology or whatever. And of course, wherever there are flag-wavers, there are anti-flag-wavers. I try to go down rabbit holes that are a little higher up on the food chain.
The reform of the most brutal aspects of industrial capitalism was driven by the collective power of workers and by the bourgeoisie’s fear of the revolutionary potential of that power, not by a bunch of floppy-fringed ‘romantics’. And if we’re going to rescue ourselves from today’s iron cage of techno-feudalism being built by the anarcho-capitalists, oligarchs and security state mavens, it’ll take another workers’ movement, not a few ‘romantic’ bloggers and TV shows.
Yes. Labor unions. We need more, not less, of them.
More than the current 9% ? They want power, price control and are interested in only themselves
Sort of like capitalists, then.
Recall how that commiesymp, Adam Smith, remarked that, when you put two competing businessmen in a room together, the first thing they do is try to rig prices, divide territories, or otherwise choke off competition.
Capitalism is open to all though, unions not so much
Open to anyone with capital, yes.
Exactly, we all have capital, post adolescence
The middle class, to which I surmise most of the readers of this Substack belong, is in great part the result of the Labor Movement.
We stand on the shoulders of great people that labored before us… whether they belonged to Big Labor or strong individuals of all stripes. Agree on that
The consequence is living, thriving, surviving
A brave and courageous solution
I'm considering the intrinsic benefit if removing two valve cores from the tires of the anarcho-capitalists. I assure you, they didn't bring a tire pump.
'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.'
--Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy
Ironically, deindustrialization is part of the problem - I manage a sculpture studio, and every year it gets harder to find suppliers and subcontractors that we need for our work. The economy in our big city isn't friendly to such businesses, and the skills for some are being lost outright.
I love this article. Please also consider post-humanism, animal rights, and our environment, which I think are equal in importance to what might be called re-humanization, since even if we overcome technological alienation, it can't be all about humans if we're going to survive.
The New Romantics is hooky…works perhaps better than Ted’s Excellent New Movement. Seemingly this has always been among us, bubbling under the rude and the cold of the ones and zeros. Talent is everywhere and always will be even if unsustained. If the money moves there, we will see more of it and be happier for it.
Ok, Ted this is exactly what my stuff has been about for a long time, and this will be required reading in my classes. Perfect - just a week ago I tried to put things in historical context for my gang and this would have been a perfect addition… Bless you for your great work. You know so much more than I do - what a synoptic vision…
Predictably I'm seeing comments in this thread saying Romanticism led to Nazism.
Nobody said that.
I think that’s a misreading . Romanticism is liberating, fascism is controlling. Plus there is a huge time gap between the two
Well, only insofar as how Romanticism has affected individuals who have come along post-early-mid 19th c. Because some folks will find beauty in many works that are, for lack of a better term, old and out of fashion.
I love the work of painter Caspar David Friedrich, while at the same time being aware that a number of people in the upper echelons of the Nazi party saw him as a kind of demigod. So if I write an essay about Friedrich, that's definitely something I'm going to mention. Equally, a lot of Wagner's music is beautiful, but to not put it in context per his own intense antisemitism and Hitler's love of Wagner is unwise at best.
I read this and saved a copy. I've set a calendar reminder and I'll return to it in five years. I confess I like the vision. But I think it assumes a political and economic predictability we may not actually have now.
Adding somewhat to @Joe Panzica’s comment, I’m interested to know what you think about & how you respond to the rightward lurch of the tech industry. Its most extreme ideologues, such as Peter Thiel, are embracing a kind of neo-reactionary anti-modernism that blends elements of Romanticism & Girardian mysticism with familiar conservative rhetoric around race & gender. While I do think that there are promising progressive & humanist ends that a neo-Romantic movement can contribute to, we’re already seeing elements of it being deployed by tech billionaires in ways that are deeply concerning. Thanks for another thought-provoking & stimulating essay.
I think we could also use a New Transcendentalism. Their is a chain linking the two movements together of course, but here on American soil it would be good to see some new shoots from our own homegrown philosophy start to emerge.