Introduction
It appears to me that it is no coincidence that the Zeitgeist is currently defined by identity politics and blue haired university students on one side, a former University professor who dresses up in 3-piece suits and talks about lobsters and mysticism on another side and a brash, bold, larger than life former president with nationalist political sympathies. I think they all have something in common and that is that they are all strongly influenced by a much older movement – romanticism. In this article, I will attempt to describe romanticism as a reaction against the enlightenment, showing its characteristics and excesses. I will then draw parallels between the old romanticist pathos and the current zeitgeist and attempt to characterise romanticist influences as cutting across both sides of the political spectrum.
What is Romanticism?
A reaction to the enlightenment
Romanticism is a package of ideas, motifs and artistic movements that became prevalent in the second half of the 18th century, predominantly in France, Germany and England. Romanticism is not an ideology. As a matter of fact, it is extremely difficult to define what romanticism actually is beyond its opposition to the enlightenment.
The enlightenment is also quite difficult to define, but with some background, I think we can get a general working definition for our purposes.
The enlightenment was a revolt against church authority after the Protestant schism and scientific developments headed by Copernicus, Galileo and later, Newton disproved several key claims about the nature of the universe that were historically held by the church. The earth was not at the centre of the universe. The sun did not revolve around the earth, and matter was inert. These discoveries showed that mathematics was a way for humans to avoid being deceived by the limitations of their senses. It showed that old traditions did not necessarily convey objective truths and instead may have even served to cloud humanity’s knowledge of the truth of the universe.
Accordingly, the enlightenment was a project to systematise and ‘scientise’ human knowledge – the idea was to release humanity from old traditions that cloud their perceptions and show them pure objective truth through mathematics, one of the only known ways to have contact with objective reality in a manner that is not distorted by the limitations of human senses.
A condensed version of the foundations of the enlightenment is that it is based on the following propositions:
1. There are objective discernible truths that humans can know.
2. Any question that is a true question is something that can be answered using science and reason by any reasonable person.
3. Any question that cannot be answered using science and reason is no true question at all – it is mysticism, superstition, prejudice and so forth.
4. Objective truths cannot contradict each other – instead, they should complement and validate each other in a neat tapestry – this is the basis for universalism.
5. Humanity can only progress in a meaningful sense if it is led by answers to true questions with answers grounded in fact, reason and science, and that tradition, religion and other old societal constructs were mere distractions in the way of humanity getting at the ultimate, objective truth of the universe.
While the enlightenment heralded a new age of scientific discovery, technological development and overall human progress, it had a plethora of other consequences on the human condition. The abolishment of the Monarchy (a church-backed institution) in France was a bloody affair, effectively resulting in total societal collapse and instead of any real ‘liberte, egalite et fraternite’, they just got Napoleon and more war. The crisis of faith led to a crisis of meaning – if the world is not controlled by God, and we are all simply matter moving around in some corner of the universe then what is our purpose? Sterile city environments created by the technological advances in the enlightenment project resulted in people being alienated from both nature and from other people – their communities. Feelings were suppressed and superseded by logic and reason. Everything worked like clockwork but that was precisely the point – it all felt hollow.
Romanticism was the rebellion against a world ruled by mathematics. Instead of coming into contact with objective reality by subjugating human emotion to rationality, the romantics prioritised human emotion, sentimentality and the search for meaning to reveal truths about reality that mathematics could not.
A fulsome history of key strains of romantic thought was provided by Isaiah Berlin in a series of lectures. A higher level and more accessible summary of the movement in a philosophical sense is also in John Vervaeke’s series (thought I note, this is one of the lectures in the middle so coming in at this point may result in needing to read up on some terminology used in previous lectures).
This in my view was the seedbed of Romanticism: a revolt against reason. I think a quote from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864) encapsulates the romanticist pathos:
“…one may say anything about the history of the world--anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational. The very word sticks in one's throat. And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that those very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one.
Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!
He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know?”
Romanticism is about unleashing our deepest emotions on the world. It is about the hero’s journey. The acceptance of mysticism. It is a rejection of universalism in favour of relativism and subjectivism. The art is not about the city but a yearning for the country, not the orderliness of action, reaction, cause and effect but the expression of raw emotion, not civility but passion.
Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818
La Maja vestida, Francisco Goya, 1800-1807
Le Desespere (the Desperate Man), Gustave Courbet, 1843-45
The Hay Wain, John Constable, 1821
Where enlightenment art critics sought to try to seek out objective standards of beauty by seeking convergence of themes and elements of artwork, romantics like Johanne Gottfried von Herder felt there was no need for any convergence or unity in artwork, instead, art was simply the expression of the artist. A beautiful work of art was beautiful because it was beautiful – that was the defining property – it was not because it possessed a series of well synchronised formalist properties.
For those interested, a comprehensive documentary on the romantic movement from an art history perspective is in Sir Kenneth Clarke’s Civilization (Part 12).
Romanticism as nationalism
The will and cultural gestalt
The urge to find connection in a new, post-enlightenment world was met with a mixture of culture, symbolism, traditionalism and nationalism. As Herder wrote:
“If a folk song speaks to you, they said, it is because the people who made it were Germans like yourself, and they spoke to you, who belong with them in the same society; and because they were Germans they used particular nuances, they used particular successions of sounds, they used particular words which, being in some way connected, and swimming on the great tide of words and symbols and experience upon which all Germans swim, have something peculiar to say to certain persons which they cannot say to certain other persons. The Portuguese cannot understand the inwardness of a German song as a German can, and a German cannot understand the inwardness of a Portuguese song, and the very fact that there is such a thing as inwardness at all in these songs is an argument for supposing that these are not simply objects like objects in nature, which do not speak; they are artefacts, that is to say, something which a man has made for the purpose of communicating with another man.”
In this sense, there is a sort of cultural nationalism here – you are connected to those before you and those in your culture where art or music or poetry speaks to you. It speaks to you because you understand its language, and you understand its language because you belong. You are the culture and the culture is you. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is cultural gestalt.
This is reminiscent of the late Sir Roger Scruton’s aesthetic thesis that great art satiates our oikophilia – our longing for home. Echos of this thinking are found in Carl Jung’s thesis on the collective unconscious too, where cultural artefacts are manifestations of that unconscious and both bind and speak across generations of people within the same culture. Similar thoughts are in Mircea Eliade’s works on comparative mythology where religious symbolism is traced through the ages.
Additionally, the search for connection was matched with the need to express individual will, summarily described as ‘freedom’. While Immanuel Kant regarded himself as an enlightenment philosopher and had little but contempt for romanticism, his moral theory was central to a particular strain of romantic individualism. In summary, it is the proposition that to be a moral agent, man must be free to exercise his will. It is this proposition that results in calls for individual freedom, but as will be seen next, it can be expanded to national freedom and sovereignty.
Romanticism co-opted into Nationalism
It is not a massive leap between the longing for community and connection through culture combined with the need for individualism and freedom to be expanded to a national scale. One can be inspired to defend one’s culture and fight for their nation as the embodiment of their culture. Again, we see fire and passion here grounded in community connection through culture. In a broader sense, a nation may be regarded as the embodiment of the will of ‘its people’ (ie. those connected to its culture) and just as people must be free per Kant’s reasoning, so too must the nation. It must be liberated from all constraints. All those who dare to oppose it must be crushed. It is about conquest. And so we again revert to the strong being justified in crushing the weak and the weak being right to resist in a great clash, except it is no longer a clash of individuals, it is a clash of the masses, and eventually, a clash of nations.
Liberty Leading the People, oil on canvas by Eugène Delacroix, 1830
Napoleon Crossing the Alps, oil on canvas by Jacques-Louis David, 1801.
It is also not too far a stretch for a nationalist government to proudly proclaim their culture and predicate that sense of belonging within the culture to being based on race. This is, like Nietzsche’s work, broadly speaking the very manner in which romanticism was co-opted into Nazism. But it was more than mere philosophical writings that Nazism adopted – they adopted an interpretation of a romanticist pathos more broadly. They held passionate speeches, rallies, stylish uniforms and searched for mystical occult artefacts. The mood in Germany was not one of carefully considered scientific inquiry but nationalistic fervour. Again the passion, the hero’s journey, off to fight for our culture! In WW1, ‘Blood and Soil’ was the motto! While not historical, a scene from Cabaret (1972), ironically written by two Jewish musicians, exemplifies this seductive pre-war pathos: Tomorrow belongs to me. Indeed this song has since been adopted by several prominent far-right groups and personalities including The National Socialist League in America, Anders Breivik, Jorg Haider and Richard Spencer.
Romanticism today
It is my view that the western world is currently in the era of a new wave of romanticism and that this cuts across the political spectrum. Despite the difficulties in defining romanticism, there are cultural tropes that become readily apparent once one reads the following passage from Isaiah Berlin’s ‘The Roots of Romanticism’ (2001) – when describing romanticism, he said:
“It is extreme nature mysticism, and extreme anti-naturalist aestheticism. It is energy, force, will, youth, life, etalage du moi; it is also self-torture, self-annihilation, suicide. It is the primitive, the unsophisticated, the bosom of nature, green fields, cow-bells, murmuring brooks, the infinite blue sky. No less, however, it is also dandyism, the desire to dress up, red waistcoats, green wigs, blue hair, which the followers of people like Gerard de Nerval wore in Paris at a certain period. It is the lobster which Nerval led about on a string in the streets of Paris. It is wild exhibitionism, eccentricity, it is the battle of Ernani, it is ennui, it is taedium vitae, it is the death of Sardanopolis, whether painted by Delacroix, or written about by Berlioz or Byron. It is the convulsion of great empires, wars, slaughter and the crashing of worlds. It is the romantic hero - the rebel, l’homme fatale, the damned soul, the Corsairs, Manfreds, Giaours, Laras, Cains, all the population of Byron's heroic poems. It is Melmoth, it is Jean Sbogar, all the outcasts and Ishmaels as well as the golden-hearted courtesans and the noble-hearted convicts of nineteenth-century fiction. It is drinking out of the human skull, it is Berlioz who said he wanted to climb Vesuvius in order to commune with a kindred soul. It is Satanic revels, cynical irony, diabolical laughter, black heroes, but also Blake's vision of God and his angels, the great Christian society, the eternal order, and 'the starry heavens which can scarce express the infinite and eternal of the Christian soul'. It is, in short, unity and multiplicity. It is fidelity to the particular, in the paintings of nature for example, and also mysterious tantalising vagueness of outline. It is beauty and ugliness. It is art for art's sake, and art as an instrument of social salvation. It is strength and weakness, individualism and collectivism, purity and corruption, revolution and reaction, peace and war, love of life and love of death.”
A couple of superficial clues give us pause for reflection, in particular those pertaining to Gerard de Nerval: the blue haired dandy walking a lobster in the park. Maybe it reminds you of some people:
(Jordan Peterson wearing a 3-piece suit and wearing a tie with lobster imprints on it)
(Random blue-haired protester who appears to not like corporations very much)
The right
It may appear trite, but I don’t think that it comes as any surprise that a right wing cultural figure – Jordan Peterson – invoked the image of the lobster in the first chapter of his first non-academic book. His philosophy appears to boil down to the following:
1. The bedrock of his thought is grounded in the idea that pursuing a meaningful life (which is subjectively defined) by adopting individual responsibility is the antidote to the existential crisis of modernity – the atomization, alienation and so forth). This is very reminiscent of the romantic emphasis on the will and individualism.
2. He draws on religious and mystical themes regularly in making his arguments (he made an entire series on the psychological significance of biblical stories) and in particular draws greatly on Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade’s work in encouraging people to adopt the ‘Hero’ archetype by taking responsibility and doing something meaningful with their lives. If you’ve read Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, you will know that this is a ‘call to adventure’ in the hero’s journey. This again is very reminiscent of the mystic aspects of romanticism.
3. He views people as embodiments and intrinsically connected to their cultural history which is a direct call-back to romantic thought.
4. He rejects materialist epistemology (this is the root of his disagreement with Sam Harris’ atheism).
But while JBP is a cultural figure, I would also point to another figure on the right who has adopted some of the more…unhealthy…romanticist tropes. Big, bombastic, larger than life personality (you could almost say…YUGE!), penchant for large rallies and inciting radical fervour its…
While it may be coincidence, his ‘America First’ tagline is a hark back to the America First Committee which espoused similar policies in the 1940s. Isolationism and nationalism with a few racist and perhaps even Nazi sympathising elements – most notably back then, Henry Ford and in Trump’s case, former advisor Steve Bannon.
For his supporters, it’s about attending the rallies, storming the capitol (not too far off from the volunteers in Marseille marching on Paris, singing La Marseillaise (aka War song for the army on the Rhine, adopted by the National Assembly in 1795 and now the French National Anthem) or storming the Bastille), fighting for what they believe in and so forth. Some even like to dress up in nativist/primitivist costume:
When put together as an ‘ecosystem’ of thought and action, this all appears to be converging on a great many romantic motifs.
But this is not an American/Canadian phenomenon. Take a look at virtually any hard-right figure in the west today. Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni and so forth. The political positions centre around anti-globalism, nationalism, religion and traditionalist culture (that of the countryside rather than the globalist cosmopolitanism of the cities). Other right wing commentators such as Peter Hitchens draw on exactly the same motifs (albeit perhaps in a more educated and sophisticated manner).
It is no wonder that the scientific rationalism during COVID that prompted the lockdowns resulted in such strong rebuke – it was a revolt against science ruling our lives! Nor is it a wonder why people have suddenly decided to take a stance against climate change – it is again a rebellion against the proposition that our lives should be ruled by scientific reasoning!
The left
The left in a sense is much harder to pin down given it is a looser knit alliance of groups. Some are corporatists like Hillary Clinton. Some are socialists like Bernie Sanders. Some are wokesters like AOC.
This being said, the left has not fundamentally changed much since the French revolution: ‘liberte, egalite et fraternite’.
They want the liberty to be openly gay or trans or anything else for that matter. However, this liberty is a manifestation of the romantic focus on the will and individualism. It is not enough that I identify as a goldfish, but I must impose my will on others to recognise me as such, by using my new pronoun of ‘xee’. It is the liberty to dress in outrageous clothes or dye one’s hair blue, as Gerard de Nerval did.
The biggest word on the left at the moment is equality. Equality between men and women. White people and POC. Rich and poor. Privileged and oppressed. In this sense, equality is a universal value that is characteristic of enlightenment universalism. However, this universalism is undermined by the simultaneous tribalism that is implicit in the claims of the left – there is a black or hispanic or asian culture that white people should not appropriate. There is the proposition that a person in a privileged position can never truly understand the lived experience of a person of an oppressed class, yet they must try to.
And the fragmented interest groups and oppressed classes yield community through shared culture – a culture of struggle against the oppressor – fraternite.
The output of these quasi doctrinal positions is similar to that of the far right on Capitol Hill. Group fervour, fighting for a higher cause, a focus on being an individual and giving effect to one’s will – the freedom to be in a certain sense as discussed by Kant. So we have protest culture. Holding placards outside buildings is the new pastime of blue haired university students. Black lives matter rallies turned into riots and so forth. This is not to draw an equivalency in scale between these events and those on the right but merely to observe the presence of romanticist elements across the political spectrum.
But while the right is preoccupied with institutionalized religion, the woke mob has their own mysticism – a worship of primitivism through the support of indigenous rights and the endorsement of the motif of ‘the noble savage’. A worship of mother earth – Gaia as the pagans once called her through the cause of environmentalism. It is often these very people that support the legalization of psychedelic drugs that create mystical experiences in users.
This is not to say either the left or right are exclusively romantic – but I hope that this analysis can demonstrate that romanticism is very much present in both sides of the political spectrum, particularly where there are excesses or irrational behaviour or stances. In fact – that is precisely the point!
It has always seemed to me that the left’s treatment of Indigenous people has a strong romantic element: the noble savage, truly in touch with his or her environment, and with a connection with the land. Speaking as someone with some Indigenous heritage, it doesn’t follow that just because you have that ancestry, and perhaps even some cultural markers of that heritage, that you are somehow spiritually connected to the land. I discerned in the Voice debate a romanticisation, but also an ethno-nationalist streak (if I have this ancestry I am more genuinely Australian than others, and I have a more genuine connection to the land). If it had been a non-minority group (eg, English people saying that about England) the left would have gone bonkers; given it was Indigenous people, they were delighted. Therefore, romantic ethno-nationalism is allowed for some, but not for others. However, the right can also display the same inconsistency: they might roll their eyes at Welcomes to Country, yet tear up at ANZAC Day, and be offended if someone criticises it. I’m someone who likes consistent rules, but I’m also not particularly romantic. Without modern medicine etc, I’d be dead, and I’m under no illusions that there was a wonderful prelapsarian past where everyone lived in harmony. Anyway, thanks for the post.