The Romantic and the Feminine

The most common use of the word Romantic in our daily lives is to denote love. There is the Romance section in the bookstore and the Romantic-Comedy section in the DVD store. Both these are largely considered as being for a female market, and so therefore is the word Romantic often associated with femininity.

The word Romantic originally meant Roman-like to describe the pigeon Latin that emerged in Western Europe after the fall of Rome. These dialects eventually evolved in what we call the Romance Languages of French, Italian, and Spanish.

In time, a particular type of story came to be referred to as Romances because of the languages in which they were written. All of these stories have four main features: love and adventure in the form of knights and maidens, scenic locations, and some sort of supernatural element, like magical beings or events.

From this we have four uses of the word Romantic. It can be associated with love, but also with adventure, a beautiful bit of landscape, or the strange and supernatural. I do not believe that anyone would assign a specific gender label to a film like Raiders of the Lost Ark, if anything they would call it masculine. In that story we have all the Romantic elements present. It is an adventure story; there is a love interest; it does not focus on landscape like many Westerns, but that element is there; and of course the supernatural element.

Stories that focused primarily on the supernatural were called Gothic Romances. Westerns were likened to the Historical Romances of Sir Walter Scott. So too might we call Space Westerns, like Star Wars, Science-Fiction Romances instead of Space Operas. Most genre fiction in literature, cinema, television, and even narrative video games could be called Romances.

Regarding the Historical Romances and Westerns, people tend to forget that Clio was one of the nine muses who inspired the arts. Her speciality was history. G.M. Trevelyan in his essay Clio, a Muse observed, “The great antiquarian and novelist [Sir Walter Scott] showed historians that history must be living, multi-coloured, and romantic if it is to be a true mirror of the past.”

Another misinterpretation of the concept of the Romantic that is prevalent in our modern language is to associate the word Romantic with the unrealistic, fake, fanciful, or far-fetched. This stems from the supernatural aspect of the Medieval Romances as being improbable.

The truth is that the less-than-factual elements of the Romances made them more interesting. Besides, how many people became historians or archaeologists because of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Or became involved in the sciences because of Star Trek? The Romances inspired attitudes and actions in real life despite being fiction.

The goal of the Romance writer, be it Historic, Gothic, or Science-Fiction, is not to be real, but to be realistic. The objective is the achieve verisimilitude. This is where a Romantic film like Batman Begins succeeds and a camp film like Batman and Robin fails. It marks the difference between a genius like Christopher Nolan and a hack like Joel Schumacher.

It’s unfortunate that we have come to limit the scope of the word Romantic to describe genres strongly associated with the female market when traditionally the word Romantic was either non-gender specific or primarily masculine. Likewise, it is unfortunate that we associate the Romantic with the fake when it is telling us the deeper truths through fiction.

Due to the modern common association of the Romantic with love, to the exclusion of elements that were once more dominant, like action, adventure, and the supernatural, the Romantic is viewed as being a feminine concept. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s funny how critics of the Romantic have blamed Romanticism for The American Civil War and both World Wars, and yet today the Romantic is associated with love and not war.

A few of the key by-words for the Romantic are volition, energy, and action. Why? Because these qualities drive the narrative, whether in a fictional adventure story or in real life history. More importantly, these are considered to be predominantly masculine qualities.

If we look at Romanticism from the perspective of Cultural Philosophy as opposed to literature we see that not only is Romanticism predominately masculine in nature it is also anti-feminists. This is not to say that it is anti-woman by any stretch. Romantics love women, but they are anti-feminist.

The reason is that there are two opposing premises. The Romantics, as represented by the Victorians here, believed that men and women are different both biologically and psychologically. That being the case, then men and women can never be equal because it is logically impossible for two different things to be equal. Although an apple and an orange are equally fruit, they are different and can therefore never be equal, however they can be complimentary. It was this complimentary relationship that was the goal of the Victorians in terms of relationships and the familial division of labour.

The Feminist stance is that men and women are equal except in instances where women are superior to men. This fosters a competitive relationship between men and women rather than a complimentary one and thus the battle of the sexes was born.

The primary casualties in this war have been women forced into the labour market, children in single parent households, and men being socially devalued and alienated from their children. The primary benefactors have been political, financial, and social institutions who feed off the problems caused by the destruction of the family unit and the absence of men.

I am not saying that the Romantic goal is to return women to the home. In the Nineteenth Century, women had yet to prove themselves as doctors, for example, but in the Twentieth Century they have proven their capability, therefore it would be ludicrous to deny any qualified woman such a job.

The Romantic stance is “if you can, then you may”. No person should be denied their chosen profession and its just rewards provided they are capable of performing the required task. However, the competition for these jobs must be fair without any special privileges or considerations.

There is a problem here. Life is not fair because men and women are different. The tool for levelling the playing field for women is the contraceptive pill because it takes reproduction out of the equation. The only way for women to compete with men is for them to sacrifice reproduction.

Contrary to the popular rhetoric, she cannot have it all. There is a choice every woman must make between career and family. Actually, that is not true. The choice has been made for her before she was born.

The way the current economy has developed few women have the luxury to choose between being a housewife caring for the children and a job because few men are in a position to afford a wife and family. It takes two these days. Where in 1911 a man could live a middle-class lifestyle supporting a home, wife, children, and servants while employed by a bank as a common clerk, today’s man would have to be in a much higher paying job to support the same.

Therefore any responsible couple has to examine their joint financial situation before committing to children. The only way she can have it all is through state intervention either through regulating businesses to force them to pay maternity leave (which men do not require) or through state benefits. The third alternative is of course a wealthy husband.

That’s only half the story. Recent government figures in the United Kingdom show that 50% of children are born out of wedlock. According to The Telegraph (12 Sept 2011):

A recent academic study claimed that the Government's benefits reforms have encouraged family breakdowns, since they meant women who left their husbands were better off financially after leaving their husbands because they could claim higher welfare payments and better child care. The introduction of the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999 had a "substantial impact'' on the divorce rate among the poorest households, prompting a 160 per cent rise in separations, the report published in the Economic Journal claimed.

The traditional male figure based on the Romantic model of the man of independent action who voluntarily takes responsibility for protecting and providing for his wife and children is now obsolete due to social forces largely engineered by government. So now government moves in to fill the role. The father is forced-out, the mother is either on benefits or working, and the child is raised by the State as its surrogate father.

Romanticism is primarily a masculine phenomenon and women love the Romantic because most normal women love men just as normal men love women. What a man wants in a woman is a partner and helpmate with whom he can raise children and grow old with. He does not want a battle of the sexes.

To avoid such conflict he will typically simply leave the situation. The result is men rejecting women simply because he has learned that on balance she is not worthy of the sacrifices that he is prepared to make. More and more it seems as though the so-called toxic women glorified in the media in shows like Sex and the City are outnumbering the women of virtue that men truly desire.

So men use the party girls for sex and move on because logically that is all they are good for. To linger too long in the relationship is only to invite emotional hardship. If that seems hard to believe, consider that men are three to four times more likely to commit suicide after a failed relationship than women.

Regular readers will know that I have identified two distinct zeitgeists; The Romantic (1776-1929) and The Socialist (1929-present). The Romantic Era was a more masculine period driven by the male qualities of invention, risk taking, and competition. The Socialist Era is more feminine with the rise of government central planning and social programs intended to control citizens under the pretext of care. Winston Churchill observed:

"The women's suffrage movement is only the small edge of the wedge, if we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun."

This has indeed occurred. According to voting trends, women are more inclined to vote for politicians promising greater social welfare programs at the expense of individual responsibility. The result is greater state authority as votes primarily from women sustain the mostly men in power who arrogantly believe that they can regulate both the economy and society and historically do so to the detriment of both.

If I am correct in my hypothesis that the Romantic is primarily masculine, then it is equally true that the ideal man is the Romantic Man. So how does the Romantic Man function in the predominantly feminine Socialist Era?

This is the existential crisis facing modern man. We do not know what to do. We are lost. We are fish out of water. Some men are not men at all but boys lacking the self-discipline of manhood. Others are frustrated Alphas looking for a fight and not finding a morally acceptable one. Some are simply deluded and think that the old rules still apply. While others still have accepted to role of “mangina” catering to the whims of females as “white knights” and “orbiters” who are more than happy to feed a woman’s ego in return for her validation.

Among the Romantic Men there are various points of view. Some figure that the best course is to keep your head down and enjoy life until the inevitable crash, whether that enjoyment means a solitary pursuit of wisdom or social hedonism. My chosen course is to be openly Romantic regardless of the social mores of political correctness and hope someone listens. I suppose it is for each man to make his own choice.

Whether you look at Romanticism from a literary, historic, philosophical, or cultural perspective, I believe that it is clearly a masculine phenomenon. I would go so far as to suggest that attacks on Romanticism are attacks on the masculine virtues themselves and the common perception of the Romantic as feminine is nothing short of a blatant attempt to strip a man of these virtues. If anything the word represents one more territory to be reclaimed in the common social discourse.

We live in an age where narrative fiction is the primary form of entertainment; be it television programs, films and even video games side-by-side with the traditional forms of written fiction stories and the vast majority of these narratives are Romantic. We have been raised on them. The result of this is that we want adventures; we want to be Indiana Jones or Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds or Captain Kirk. But then the nanny state steps in and says, “No, you might hurt yourself”. The sad thing is that we obey because it’s the law.

If change is going to happen then it’s a spiritual change that’s needed. I don’t mean God or some New Age awakening. It’s a fundamental break from our existing social programming. The truth is that we are asleep while they live. The purpose of the Romantic life is to live and they live at our expense. I for one won’t stand for that.

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars [Romantics]. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. -- Tyler Durden: Fight Club

Romanticism as Cultural Philosophy

In the appendix to his book, Classic, Romantic, and Modern, Jacques Barzun provides examples of no less than twenty-two different usages of the word Romantic. I cannot think of any other phenomenon in all of cultural history as diverse, loved, hated, misunderstood, and argued as much as the concept of the Romantic. So it is irresponsible for anyone to discuss or write on the topic without saying what they mean when they use the word Romantic.

This is not to say that there is no definitive meaning of the word. Simply that there is no consensus of meaning. Writers on the subject may share particular spheres of general commonality or touch on common points. They may also disagree on key features, for example, there is the question of whether the Romantic Movement was a reaction against the Classicism of the Enlightenment or a natural manifestation of the Enlightenment when it was put into widespread action. On this point, I believe that a surface reading of the Romantic would lead one to the first conclusion, but a deeper reading would lead one to the second.

My approach to the Romantic is similar to that of Jacques Barzun, Ayn Rand, and others who have approached the Romantic Movement by looking at the common denominators that linked all of these diverse writers, artists, and philosophers labelled Romantic. Their most basic conclusion is that Romanticism is individualism. Or, as I say, the Romantic can be summed-up by one word – I. Admittedly, this is an over-simplification, but it gets the essential point across.

There is a key point where I differ from any writer that I have read on the subject of the Romantic. Most authors focus on the Romantic as an intellectual and artistic movement whose most narrow parameters are set between 1780 and 1850. The more generous critics see the movements that followed Romanticism to be merely variations on established themes and therefore extend the dates from 1780 to 1918. Where my approach differs is that I do not see Romanticism solely as an intellectual and artistic movement but more importantly also as a zeitgeist.

The word zeitgeist means “spirit of the age” and essentially describes what we might call the culture of a particular time and place. My unique interpretation and usage of the term Romantic is to describe the prevailing culture of the West from 1776-1929. What this does is shift the focus of the Romantic from the intellectuals and artists who produced the works that we label Romantic and looks to the prevailing attitudes, beliefs, rituals, social philosophy, and material production and consumption of the people themselves. When we do this, historical figures like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Washington Roebling, and Wyatt Earp become just as much Romantic figures as Byron, Shelly, Hugo, and Goethe.

The result of this shift takes Romanticism out of the established pigeon-holes of academia and releases it into the world. As a religion, Shintoism has a key weakness. Because it is ancestor worship, the practicing of the faith is bound to the land of Japan. It is not portable. Whereas, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam demonstrate that by having a textbook faith it becomes not only portable but exportable. Likewise, if we look at Romanticism as a cultural philosophy and codify it, then the philosophy gains living power and is not imprisoned within the ivory tower. That is what I am attempting to achieve in these articles.

When I write that Romanticism is a cultural philosophy I must add that as far as I know this is as original as a concept can be these days. For all I know someone else has explored this and given it a different name. I’ll explain the notion.

Cultural philosophy is basically looking at the zeitgeist of a particular period and extrapolating a general belief system derived from the cultural evidence. In a sense, it is the opposite of the traditional approach to philosophy. Rather than an ideology being codified and put to action, the action is codified into an ideology.

Where traditional philosophical criticism looks for the application of reason and logic in the codified arguments of a single person or school of thought, cultural philosophy applies an interdisciplinary approach to identify a general philosophical expression of a particular group, which may involve specific philosophic influences. Once identified, it can be codified in the form of general principles. This process involves looking at both the top of the intelligential hierarchy as well as the bottom and understanding the dynamics in-between

This idea of cultural philosophy is in itself a Romantic notion. From the Romantics comes the idea of Nationalism. This is often misrepresented as a worship of the State, but more accurately it stems from the Romantics valuing different cultures as representative of the general will of all the individuals within that society and the belief that a culture could be seen as an ideological entity unto itself’ as often portrayed as a national symbol, like Columbia, Uncle Sam, and Brother Jonathan in America; John Bull and Britannia in the United Kingdom; or Marianne in France. Just as we can recognise a national spirit, so too can we recognise a temporal one.

Romanticism, like national culture, can be defined in similar terms as the dominant cultural philosophy in the West during a specific period of time (1776-1929). We can observe all the different people of this vast era and still recognise a general similarity that distinguishes them from the Classicists who went before and the Socialists who followed.

To illustrate, imagine two men are walking down a street and encounter a homeless man. One man says, “Isn’t this tragic, I can’t believe that we live in a society where people are still homeless”. The other man says, “Isn’t this tragic, I can’t believe someone could mess up his life so horribly”. Each archetype represents two distinct zeitgeists, the Romantic (1776-1929) and the Socialist (1929-present). The key differential between them is that the Romantic is individualistic and believes the man should have done more for himself while the Socialist is a collectivist who believes that society, in the form of the State, should do more to help the homeless in general.

In this example I am not referring to any high minded ideological conflict to be fought by quoting Adam Smith or Karl Marx. For each individual the zeitgeist manifests as a general feeling of what is right that he may never fix to an established codified ideology or assume a set label recognised by academia. The more inquisitive individual may study and find philosophers to justify their sense of reality, but it is important to recognize that their sense or feeling of truth precedes their understanding of any concrete ideology.

One of my favourite films to illustrate this temporal cultural divide is Kate and Leopold which depicts the clash of cultures and attitudes between a Nineteenth century duke and the people of the Twenty-first century world he finds himself in. Remember that the word attitude means orientation. The feelings we describe as attitude are simply the product of a person’s orientation to reality, that is, their philosophy of life. Understanding and codifying this is the process of cultural philosophy.

By emphasising the importance of cultural philosophy it is not my intention to discredit the role of the philosophers, writers, and artists, especially those associated with the Romantic. It is important to understand the connection between these creators and the cultures that they influenced.  Far too often academics focus on the literary and material products of the few at the top because that is their critical expertise and ignore the movements of the much larger cultural mass at the bottom which requires the skill sets of a social scientist or cultural historian.

Richard Dawkins coined the word meme to describe how ideas move through society. A meme is "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." Malcolm Gladwell describes a meme as "an idea that behaves like a virus--that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects."

The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau was written in 1762 and yet it is cited as one of the key influences of the French Revolution of 1789. That’s a twenty-seven years span. The Communist Manifesto was written in 1848, and yet we do not see the first Communist nation until seventy years later.

Memes take time to spread and often when they reach the stage of widespread cultural influence the ideas presented often become diluted, misinterpreted, or misrepresented, like Chinese Whispers. The source of the ideas may be unknown outside the true believers, but the ideas are still there, imbedded in each person’s general sense of life.

For example, the British free newspaper The Metro had this from a girl who had participated in the London Riots of 2011. The message is watered-down and converted to common perception, but if you look closely you can see Karl Marx’s message, “Property is left”.

One of the girls bragged about ‘getting a couple of free things’, before insisting: ‘It’s the government’s fault. I don’t know. Conservatives, whoever it is. It’s the rich people who’ve got businesses and that’s why all this happened.’

Likewise, the ideas of Romanticism spread like memes through Western Civilization and became the key defining feature of Nineteenth Century culture. This was supported by the laws, governments, institutions, and social codes of conduct that developed and reaffirmed among the people by their attitudes and actions.

When of my favourite little stories that I repeat often is that of the American outlaw Curly Bill Brocious. He had just evaded conviction for murdering of the marshal of Tombstone, Ed White. After the trial, he and a friend rode into a town and went to a restaurant where they forced the patrons to undress and dance at gunpoint. A passing deputy saw this through the window and formed a posse. A gunfight ensued and a horse in the livery where the posse held-up was killed in the crossfire before Bill escaped. The following day a messenger from Bill paid compensation to the livery owner for his loss.

So here is a cruel man who takes pleasure in humiliating people, has no regard for the law, and had just narrowly avoided a murder conviction and yet he felt obligated to take personal responsibility for the livery owner’s property losses. I find that incredible. Compare that attitude with the girl from the London riots or try getting a parent to pay for an item in a shop broken by their child. Even the lowliest criminal of the Nineteenth Century showed more respect for the property rights of others than the average person today. If Bill robbed someone, then that was intentional, but killing the horse was an accident to be repaid. Amazing thought process by our standards.

Here’s in another example of the Romantic attitude from the National Review dated 19 April 1999 called Paying for Beauty - motion picture 'Titanic' misrepresents the social codes of the wealthy.

Yet Cameron-who, as I say, did his homework-knows that there were many true gentlemen in first and second class who indeed, according to their code of behavior, "did the right thing." For example, we see in a cameo shot Isidor Strauss and his wife. They are lying together on a bed in their stateroom, waiting for death. Cameron knows that their real story is more complicated and much more poignant.

Isidor Strauss created the great department store Macy's. In his late 60s, rich and retired, he toured Europe with his wife. They were now heading home on the Titanic. As the ship sank, Mrs. Strauss was allowed to board a lifeboat. She pleaded that her elderly husband be allowed to board too. This was allowed. But Mr. Strauss refused to board. He said, "I will not go before the other men." That was that. She said that she had spent her life with him and would not leave him now. She stepped out of the boat, and they sat on deck chairs to watch others load.

The point here is that the upper-class gentleman's code of that era was deeply felt and sternly enforced. It involved "setting an example" for the rest of society. When things went wrong, one bore it with stoicism, or irony, or humor. Perhaps above all, one was deferential to women.

Col. John Jacob Astor, whose ancestors first earned their money in fur trading, also makes a cameo appearance in Titanic. He was traveling with his second wife, young and pregnant. She pleaded that he be let into a lifeboat with her. Second Officer Lightoller refused: "Women only." Without complaint, Astor withdrew. Apparently while swimming in the ocean he was crushed by tons of steel as one of the funnels tilted and crashed. Benjamin Guggenheim, of the great steel fortune, met a similar fate and asked a departing passenger to tell his wife he had died "like a gentleman."

It is possible that Cameron intuited that a modern audience would scarcely believe that any such code of honor existed. Yet I think he never considered for a moment trying for genuine complexity here, because he had a very different, more up-to-date ideal in mind: that of Jack Dawson.

The author makes a chilling point. We of the Twenty-first century can scarcely imagine how people could possibly be so noble. Remember, this is not a foreign culture. This was us one hundred years ago – next year will be the century anniversary of the Titanic.

We can learn just as much on how to live our lives as Romantics from the examples of the people who actually lived according to the Romantic philosophy as we can in studying the raw material of Romanticism as taught in university literature, political science, philosophy, and art history courses.  You might say that being a modern Romantic requires abandoning your native culture to emulate that of Victoriana.  In its ideal form that is what subcultures like Goth and Steampunk seek to achieve.

When coming to understand Romanticism it is import to know the works and ideas of the key individuals involved in the movement during its first sixty years, but Romanticism cannot be limited to that relative minority. The real Romantic revolution is to be found in the unwritten cultural philosophy and history of the millions of people who participated in the zeitgeist created by those ideas and together created the modern world that we have inherited.

Addendum

I appreciate that in writing this I found I had to explain the concepts of zeitgeist, cultural philosophy, and memes and in doing so I never actually elaborated on the Romantic principles I say are inherent in the Romantic zeitgeist.  So I will abandon my responsibility to defend my position and simply list a few here that I have gleaned from my research.

Equilibrium:  Life is full of contradictory extremes that must be held in balance.  For example, man is an individual creature but also a social creature, therefore the needs of the individual and the legitimate needs of the group must be balanced.  Life is full of such things requiring balance.

Emotion and Reason:  Romanticism rejects the false dichotomy separating emotion and reason.  You cannot have an idea without an emotion or an emotion without an idea.  When someone is accused of being too emotional, we are actually judging the quality of their thoughts and how they act on those thoughts.  Likewise, when we accuse someone of being too rational, we are denying that they are feeling but choosing not to act in an demonstratively emotional manner.

Volition: This is a fundamental component.  Romanticism is an action oriented philosophy so there is strong emphasis on the will to act, take risks, and try new things.

Energy: This pairs with volition for the purpose of action.  The Romantics glorified men of will and energy who accomplished  great visions.

Natural Rights:  The high value placed on individualism requires a high value also be placed on the importance of the Natural Rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. If the man of will and energy accomplishes his vision at the expense of the rights of others, then he has violated the key rules that define the Romantic.

Karma:  This is cause and affect.  With actions come consequences and each man must take ownership of his actions.  This is positive if he reaps rewards and negative if he brings hardship.  Everyone has the right to keep their justly earned rewards and a responsibility to rectify their mistakes against themselves and others.

Self-Awareness and Acceptance: The Romantic must accept himself for who he is and not be afraid to be honest and open about that.  This ties in with individualism.  You own your life, so it stands to reason to know yourself.  The converse of this is ego, self-consciousness, and self-obsession.  These are forms of fear, and fear is after all the mind-killer.

Diversity, Tolerance, and Acceptance:  The world is a diverse place with diverse opinions with every piece playing its part in the whole dynamic.  Uniformity is never the goal.  This means tolerating things you cannot bear, like the free speech of others with whom you disagree, and accepting those  things that you cannot change. Diversity does not mean allowing people of other cultures, beliefs, and backgrounds walk all over you and yours for fear of offending them, but it does mean respecting the rights of others to act and if need be holding them accountable for their words and deeds.

Social Responsibility:  Humans are social creatures and we choose to join groups for our benefit.  With this comes a responsibility to carry your own weight, so to speak, and see that others do the same.  This also means being someone of your word.  Do what you say and say what you do.

Faith:  As Shepherd Book tells Mal, “I don’t care what you believe, just believe”.   A common trait among all the Romantics was that they had faith is something bigger than themselves whether that be God, or forces of nature, or the nation, or even science.  I call this the great mystery and I think Romanticism needs mystery.

Truth: This is one of the higher Romantic values. It is a honest and un-prejudicial pursuit of understanding the reality the things.  It is a fearless desire to know what is no matter where that journey takes you.

Heroism: The Romantics believed in heroes as exemplars of their values, as models to emulate, and as people worthy of praise.  This ties in with a few other principles: the denial of ego, the respect for other individuals and their achievements, and the will to achieve your own greatness.

Finally there is the Romantic’s idea of the purpose of life.  The answer is simply to live.  Have experiences, find the high places and the low, be brave and bold, search every corner that interests you, take risks, and make life interesting.  Do not be content with the office cubical lifestyle or even a hedonistic routine.  You are an individual, so go and think, feel, and act.

 

Defiant

If I were to give a short list of recommended reading on the topic of the Romantic, then it would be in no particular order: The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand, Classic, Romantic, and Modern by Jacques Barzun, and Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet.

One common thread that runs through all three books is the hostility displayed by the Twentieth Century academics, artists, and intellectuals towards the Nineteenth Century. Both Barzun and Sweet use the analogy of a child’s hostility towards their parents and both point the book Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey as the first volley as he and his fellow members of the Bloomsbury Group set the tone for the coming century by devaluing the last.

Have you ever arrived late to a party and everyone there is well into the party mood and all the frivolity seems foolish to you until you get to that mental state as well? Romanticism is like that. If you do not believe in it, then it all seems foolish to you. Herein lies a key division between the Romantic 19^th Century and the so-called Modern 20^th Century.

The so-called Moderns cannot comprehend the attitudes and accomplishments of the Romantic so they want to expose the truth of them, tear them down, ridicule them, and then elevate themselves in the process. Here’s an example.

According to Bloomsbury Group member Virginia Woolf, the modern world began in the spring of 1908 when Lytton Strachey noticed a stain on Vanesa Stephen’s dress and inquired, “Semen?”. With the publication and popularity of Sigmund Freud’s theories, which revolved around sex, we see the beginnings of what Barzun recognises (in 1941!) as our zeitgeist’s obsession with sex as a symptom of our rampant self-conscious egotism. It was Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who created modern advertising, and we all know that sex sells.

To a person who is obsessed with sex anyone who is not must seem sexually repressed, and that is exactly how the Bloomsbury Group and countless writers, academics, and even historians and filmmakers have painted the Romantic Victorians.

The Romantics had lots of sex alright, but it was not an obsession for them. It was the Moderns who coined the phrase “sex life”, whereas the Romantics did not feel the need the set one aspect of life apart and distinct from the rest of life. As Barzun puts it, food is an important part of life too, but we don’t go around asking people how their food life is going or criticise Charles Dickens because his novels are not food-filled.

We see this pattern across the board in the criticisms and faulty perceptions of the Romantics coming from the Moderns. The Romantics respected property rights, so they are materialistic and did not care about the poor. Whereas, we Moderns have created government social programs. Gee, aren’t we superior. Well, no. When the welfare state came into full force in Britain in the late 1940’s only 4% of the population required benefits. Today, it is nearly a quarter of the population.

Both Barzun and Rand see the central pillar of the Romantic to be individualism and both emphasize the role played by the faculties of volition and energy. They also agree that the man of will and energy is to be praised, but if those faculties are used to oppress the individualism of others then it is to be condemned. Barzun calls this “false romanticism” and cites Napoleon and Hitler as examples.

The Moderns on the other hand are driven by their ego. Where the Romantic promotes self-awareness and self-improvement derived from a desire to be a better person, the Modern is self-obsessed and self-conscious and seeks self-help driven by self-loathing. The ego is constantly looking for social validation. It’s hyper-sensitive to what others are doing so they can fit in or rebel and what others are thinking about them.

The Romantic accepts that greatness and failure go hand in hand and like other apparent opposites he seeks equilibrium. In politics, this is the balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of society. The Moderns on the other hand demand consistency.

Last week a random on Facebook left a comment condemning Thomas Jefferson and it seemed this is because he was a rapist. I assume her logic was that he had children by his slave Sally Hemings and as a slave she could not refuse his sexual advances and therefore he was a rapist and we should discount anything he wrote because as a rapist he is obviously an evil man.

This typifies the Modern perspective. We must tear down the great. We must find that fissure in the rock and explode it. Like Strachey had done, we must find any flaw, any inconsistency, any action that does not fit our moral precepts, find the true story, and expose the fraud. We must destroy the fallacy that men can be great.

As you judge so shall ye be judged. The Romantic extolled the men of will and energy so their heroes were inventors, industrialists, politicians, scientist, and of course traditional heroes of fiction. They accepted the equilibrium of greatness and weakness. They accepted the whole of man and judged him on balance.

The Modern ego cannot tolerate this. The result of the destruction of man is desolation. There is no enlightenment, no deeper meaning, and no self-righteous justification. All that remains is the fear and self-loathing that has become more and more rampant as this age has progressed. Our epitaph may read “Man stopped believing in Man”.

Ayn Rand noted in The Romantic Manifesto that the character of James Bond in the novels is a Romantic hero, but the Moderns do not believe in heroes. They are a joke. As a result the films became increasingly disconnected from Romantic Realism and devolved in camp silliness. Likewise, compare the Romantic Batman trilogy of Christopher Nolan to the camp versions of Joel Schumacher.

That said, pop culture is in many ways the last refuge of the Romantic. The academic and intellectual elite, be they actually so or simply in their own minds, still denounce the Romantic. Just look at how the art community in Britain attacked the Romantic paintings of Jack Vettriano which the consumers adored, meanwhile the annual Turner Prize for art went to Tracy Emin and her filthy bed complete with skid-marked underpants.

Matthew Sweet points out that where modern interior design is constantly looking for the new and innovative the mass market still prefers pseudo, neo-Victorian “chintz”. In this particular chapter of Inventing the Victorians, he takes yet another shot at Virginia Woolf demonstrating how her concept of Victorian décor, which she spread through her writings, was completely false and founded on nothing more than her personal speculations filtered through her prejudices. Nonetheless, it created the false modern preconceived notion of drab and dreary Victorian décor.

In politics, those who promote the Romantic values of self-determination, personal responsibility, and accountability are branded as cold, heartless, and ignorant by the intellectual “elite” of the left who are promoting programs for the poor that will ensure greater power to themselves and promote dependency. One accusation is that the promoters of individualism want to return us to the dark days of Victoriana. Again painting the Romantics in a negative light when the economic report cards show the Victorians as getting high marks in most departments and we are failing.

Because the Romantics are not sexually obsessed like the Moderns, they are accused of being sexually repressed. Because they are not cynics, they are accused of being fanciful idealists. Because they promote individual action and responsibility, they are accused of being anti-society. These are but a few of the constant assaults on Romanticism.

I believe that Romanticism is man’s natural state, but I, and you my dear reader, have been socially conditioned for this Modern society. The sins of our fathers that we bear come not from the Nineteenth Century, but from the self-doubts, fears, cynicism, and egoic motivations of the Twentieth Century. I see it as a virus I have contracted that is eating my Romantic soul. I too find myself lacking the will and energy that defines Romanticism and I still carrying the burdens of my personal perceived failures that manifest as a self-defeating attitude.

But I stand defiant. When I self-examine I see the Romantic qualities that I promote and I see the Modern qualities that I denounce. For those who, like me, believe in the Romantic it becomes a constant war with both our inner programming and our outer programmers to maintain our faith. It is a faith in the self and by extension humanity despite the seemingly contrary evidence promoted that we are all just petty and vile creatures.

According to all three authors, Barzun, Rand, and Sweet, the Romantic Era ended with World War I. I do not see it that way. The Great War was a blow, to be sure, but the final battle was the advent of the Great Depression in 1929. But that was not the end. Romanticism persists and we see examples of it throughout the Twentieth Century, mostly in popular culture.

The fifth branch of philosophy is Aesthetics and it acts as a summary and manifestation of the other four branches. We can say in art what it takes chapters to say in prose and we imbibe those ideas with greater emotion than they possess on their own.

Much of what is written by me and from the authors mentioned here can be seen in the art still existent. One such example is the song and lyrics below which serves to summarise and fully express this aspect of the Romantic.

 

The Romantic vs. the Idealist

Just some rambling random thoughts on recent readings…

Recent studies are putting an interesting picture in my mind. I was always taught that Jean Jacque Rousseau was the starting point for the Romantic. I have even repeated this. Now I am coming to the conclusion that I was wrong, and also seeing something that I consider to be quite dangerous. I guess you could call it an evil twin.

One interesting fact about the Romantics is that they never called themselves such. In fact the label was not applied until the 1890’s. Most scholars mark the end of the Romantic Era as World War I, but I argue it was 1929 with the coming of the Great Depression when the zeitgeist shifted from individualism to state planning. So time between when the label was fixed and the end of the era is less than forty years during which time seeds of the new collectivist zeitgeist were growing in the halls of academia.

This is important in that I have realised that I could make the argument that much of what has been taught about the Romantic and thus the common perception of people in and out of academia is a bias version codified by post-Romantic critics.

When we look at the writings of Rousseau, his book The Social Contract, and his theory of General Will, we do not see Romanticism. Edmund Burke accurately predicted the horrors of the French Revolution solely by extrapolating the inevitable outcome of the application of Rousseau’s theories. What we see are the seeds of modern liberalism and indeed socialism.

If we define the central premise of the Romantic as individualism and volition, then Rousseau and socialism are the antithesis of the Romantic. I also call the post-Romantic Era is the Socialist Era, so is it any wonder that the socialist academics have twisted Romanticism to make it their own by writing the history books and literary criticism so that it fits their model? I had to come up with a term to describe this dark mirror version of the Romantic that has led so many astray. The name I have settled on for the time being is Idealism. It seems to fit as Romanticism is often wrongly associated with Idealism.

I mark the beginning of the Romantic Era at 1776 for three reasons. That year saw the writing of The Declaration of Independence, the publication of The Wealth of Nations, and the use of the first commercial steam engine. Each of these empowered the individual, expanded freedom, and allowed for the level of individual expression and achievement associated with the Romantic.

The men behind these three events were all connected and all of them could be called followers of John Locke. They all knew each other as either friends or were admirers of each other’s works. They also shared a common vision. They were part of a social, political, and philosophical movement called the Enlightenment. The Romantic Era is simply the result of the Enlightenment put into action.

One of the leading lights of the Enlightenment was the French philosopher and writer Voltaire. He was a follower of Locke as well. He was also friends with Adam Smith (who was friends with David Hume), and Benjamin Franklin, and he even attended Sir Isaac Newton’s funeral. He was also a bitter enemy of Rousseau. When Rousseau sent Voltaire a copy of The Social Contract he replied:

"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it."

In Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization, he argues that the American War of Independence was Locke’s revolution while the French Revolution was Rousseau’s because the French chose equality over liberty. I love this quote from Voltaire, “Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.”

A virtue is a habit that leads to positive results. So what Voltaire is saying here is that yes, all men are created equal, but after that a man is judged by the profit of his actions. This is what makes one man better than another. When we deny the outcomes of both vice and virtue, then virtue becomes a vice and vice becomes virtue. We see this operating in society today where the weak and stupid are allowed to thrive at the expense of the virtuous and all in the name of equality.

In his book Democracy in America, Alec de Tocqueville wrote:

The citizen of the United States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he only claims its assistance when he is quite unable to shift without it...In America the liberty of association for political purpose is unbounded...There are no countries in which associations are more needed, to prevent the despotism of faction or the arbitrary power of a prince, than those which are democratically constituted.

This passage is taken from his comparison of the American and French revolutions and contrasts the American with his distrust of social authority with the French embracing what Rousseau called the General Will and today we call the “greater good”. History shows that this idealistic pursuit of the general will for the greater good leads to mob rule, death, destruction, and tyranny.

I’ve always agreed with the idea that education is all about throwing shit on the wall and hoping some of it sticks. I saw the stuff that we want to stick as being the general headers, you know, the basic framework that can be filled in if needed later.

Now I see that though this is largely correct, more often than not students do not even take that away unless they actually have an interest or investment in a subject. Instead they have a sense of the subject material. So it’s not so much the shit that has stuck but a vague Rorschach image or impression.

For example, they know that the Great Depression occurred and that it was bad, but not much of the particulars. They have a vague impression that it was caused by rampant capitalism and Roosevelt’s New Deal policies and World War II saved America. The people who do know are academic experts who believe this to be the case because it supports their politics, even though the facts do not support that position. The facts are that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression and the New Deal made things worse, but that does not support the popular conception.

In thinking about this I resurrected an old concept that I had come up with, the idea of presumptive cognition. This is basically how we think about things that we presume to have knowledge of but do not actually have all the facts. Instead it’s based on our sense or idea of a subject as derived from forgotten lectures, mass media representations, and memes.

For the average person their understanding of historical events is largely painted by a liberal academic bias in the same way that the modern mainstream media is presented according to a liberally biased narrative. In both academia and in the media any variation from the official liberal narrative is branded “right-wing” and biased and often regardless of the facts.

So let’s look at the common perception of the Romantic. Since the Romantics championed individual feeling people presume that they were against reason and empiricism. The facts just do not support this. I’d wager if anyone defended their ideological position to arch-Romantic stereotypes like Byron or Shelly by appealing to their personal feelings that they would be laughed at viciously, and yet modern sentimental idealists appeal to the Romantics as their ideological forebears and paint them as such.

If we accept the premise that the Romantic was a reaction against the Enlightenment, which is the common perception, then we can understand why Rousseau is so often seen as the Father of the Romantic. The clique of Enlightenment thinkers, which included Voltaire, Adam Smith, David Hume, and Francois Diderot, were all personal and intellectual enemies of Rousseau.

I discovered an article from 2006 which outlines the feud between Rousseau and Hume written for The Guardian newspaper by David Edmonds and John Eidinow called Enlightened Enemies. It contained this character view.

In hindsight, it seems unlikely that they were ever going to get along, personally or intellectually. Hume was a combination of reason, doubt and scepticism. Rousseau was a creature of feeling, alienation, imagination and certainty. While Hume's outlook was unadventurous and temperate, Rousseau was by instinct rebellious; Hume was an optimist, Rousseau a pessimist; Hume gregarious, Rousseau a loner. Hume was disposed to compromise, Rousseau to confrontation. In style, Rousseau revelled in paradox; Hume revered clarity. Rousseau's language was pyrotechnical and emotional, Hume's straightforward and dispassionate. JYT Greig wrote in his 1931 biography of Hume, "The annals of literature seldom furnish us with two contemporary writers of the first rank, both called philosophers, who cancel one another out with almost mathematical precision."

Where the Enlightenment thinkers believed that the application of reason and technological advancement would exalt the human condition, Rousseau believed "Nature has made everything in the best way possible; but we want to do better still, and we spoil everything,

It is easy to look at Rousseau and paint him in the mould of a Byronic hero, the misunderstood, alienated, loner, and genius driven by his passions. This has been the dominant narrative. However, we could just as easily paint him is less idealistic terms.

He is like Eric Cartman dressed like an out of control teenage girl on a talk show declaring, “I do what I want”. This is how Rousseau alienated himself, by being a selfish and deluded asshole. The great feud between Hume and Rousseau came about when Hume helped Rousseau flee the Continent for Britain and set him up, but Rousseau’s paranoia got the better of him and he became convinced that Hume was at the centre of a great conspiracy to entrap him. None of which was true.

I do not believe that Rousseau is the Father of the Romantic. He is the patriarch of something more sinister. His child is the Romantic’s evil twin, Idealism. This is the belief that personal feeling and perception supersedes everything else. Here is an example.

One of the academic clubs at Glasgow University is the centre of protest. Due to cut-backs the university has closed the club. This has become a magnet for protestors. At one such protest, students squatted in the club and the university called the police to remove the trespassers from university property. The police formed a line to prevent the angry mob from entering. The crowd chanted things like “this is our club” and “this is what a police state looks like”. That may well be their perception and their feelings, but it is not reality. The reality is that this is university private property and a police state is when the cops are beating the living shit out of you or invade your home.

Idealism, as I am putting it forward, is the French Revolution, Marxist theory, Republicrat politics in America, and the Green Movement to name a few outcomes of this ideology. These are all driven by individual perceptions and feelings over facts. Once you have programmed your internal sensors to spot this phenomenon you easily recognised the similarity between Rousseau knocking-up a scullery maid five times and then abandoning the children in a foundling hospital and Barack Obama’s parents abandoning him for the same reason. They felt like something that they wanted to do was more important than their responsibilities. Oh, Rousseau did take his dog, Sultan, with him when he took off.

If I was to give a key differential between Romanticism and Idealism it would be that the Romantic extols the individual as I and not the personal ego of me. This goes back to the principle that the individual does not exist for the purposes of other individuals. If we accept this premise, then it follows that voluntary cooperation and trade is the only way the individual can morally advance and this requires a meeting of the minds on the common ground of reason.

The Idealist on the other hand uses rationalisation rather than reason to further their emotional desires at the expense of others because their feelings take precedent over the feelings of others; their desires take precedent over the desires of others; their perceptions take precedent over the knowledge and experience of others; and their ego takes precedent over the freedom of others.

In December 1997, a woman called Julia Butterfly Hill lived in a California redwood tree for two years to save the tree from logging. She claims that while there she began literally communing with nature. At one point the trees around “her tree” were being cut down and her tree began pouring sap which she realised was the tree communicating its grief. Yes, the tree was “crying”.

This type of infantile solipsism and projection may not have been Rousseau’s intention, but that is the logical outcome of his ideology. We also see this in protests where people have deep and personal feelings about an issue and they protest by dressing in costumes and dancing to drums with no rational dialogue even possible. It’s all about their perception and their level of mass feeling.

The ever present irony is that the system that they protest is the very boat that they are standing in. We see this in the protestors against globalization who use the tools provided by globalisation to organise their protests, or they protest corporations while consuming the very products produced by the corporations.

The outcomes of Idealism are historically the same. The masses driven by their emotions and perceptions become violent when they do not get their way, the “General Will”. According to the US Department of Defence, 4,435 patriots died in the American Revolution and 6,188 wounded, in contrast the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that followed as a result claimed in total close to four million lives. One reason for this is that in revolutionary France the General Will took precedent over all else and what determined the General Will of the people was force of the mob. We see the same in the revolutions in Russia, China, and Cuba. Eventually a totalitarian regime takes over in the name of the mob.

To make a socio-political distinction between the Romantics and the Idealist we need only look at the political compass. The Romantics falls into the Libertarian-Right quadrant while the Idealists fall into the Libertarian-Left quadrant. Both groups are anti-authoritarian and pro-individual liberty. This is why they appear similar on the outside. The key differential is property rights.

The Romantic position is that the individual has the right to his justly acquired property to use, trade, and dispose of as he chooses. Another word for property is capital, the means of production. So the Romantic is by definition a capitalist and looks to government to defend that right.

The Idealist position is that the individual has the right to his justly acquired property except when such ownership, trade, and disposal runs contrary to the general will or greater good. So the question is “who determines the greater good?” Quite simply it is the people, the mob, the loudest voice, or society and the idealist looks to government to enforce the general will.

This is where the Libertarian-Left falls on its face. They are anti-authoritarian, but the only way to enforce the general will is through government force. So the best idealistic intentions shift in practice from the Libertarian-Left to the Authoritarian-Left. We have moved from the quadrant occupied by Gandhi to the one occupied by Stalin. This problem is usually addressed through denial. Stalin is seen as a one-off thug and not the true picture of communism, or they idealise mass murderers likes Ché Guevara or Mao because they acted for the greater good.

During the Romantic Era from 1776-1929 the concept of the classical liberal democracy was in full force and the people reaped the benefits and dealt with the problem of expanding liberty. That period rested upon the achievements of the philosophers during the Enlightenment who championed these liberties.

If this was the age of the Libertarian-Right, then the current Socialist Era is the Idealist Age of the Libertarian-Left. They even assumed the mantle of “liberal” and to an extent “romantic”. Their traditional adversaries were the Authoritarian-Right quadrant occupied by most political parties in the West.

Today we are seeing the inevitable shift from the Libertarian-Left to the Authoritarian-Left in the form of the rampant nanny-state, political correctness police, and of course more laws and regulations to enforce the general will for the greater good.

The reaction against this a bolstering of the Authoritarian-Right and a ground swell among the Libertarian-Right as the conservatives and the libertarians respectively. Where the Romantics inherited the benefits of the Enlightenment, today’s new Romantics must fight for it. They do not have the luxury of advocating individual feeling over reason because the pendulum has swung too far. Equilibrium must be achieved.

There is a war on for the future and the enemies of the Romantic are the same enemies fought by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. They are political and religious authoritarianism and human ignorance. I can label these as Rousseau’s Idealists, Socialism, Islam, and to a lesser degree fundamentalist Christianity.

I’ve decided to conclude with this excerpt that I have found from Casanova’s memoirs. The scene takes place at a Paris salon where Casanova is discussing the fight for liberty with Voltaire at a party. Bear in mind that this was written from Casanova’s recollection of the discussion the following day. It can be found in chapter nineteen of his book.

VOLTAIRE:  If Horace had had to combat the hydra-headed monster of superstition, he would have written as I have written--for all the world.

CASANOVA: It seems to me that you might spare yourself the trouble of combating what you will never destroy.

 VOLTAIRE:  That which I cannot finish others will, and I shall always have the glory of being the first in the field.

CASANOVA:  Very good; but supposing you succeed in destroying superstition, what are you going to put in its place?

VOLTAIRE:  I like that. If I deliver the race of man from a wild beast which is devouring it, am I to be asked what I intend to put in its place?

CASANOVA:  It does not devour it; on the contrary, it is necessary to its existence.

VOLTAIRE:  Necessary to its existence! That is a horrible blasphemy, the falsity of which will be seen in the future. I love the human race; I would fain see men like myself, free and happy, and superstition and freedom cannot go together. Where do you find an enslaved and yet a happy people?

CASANOVA:  You wish, then, to see the people sovereign?

VOLTAIRE:  God forbid! There must be a sovereign to govern the masses.

CASANOVA:  In that case you must have superstition, for without it the masses will never obey a mere man decked with the name of monarch.

VOLTAIRE:  I will have no monarch; the word expresses despotism, which I hate as I do slavery.

CASANOVA:  What do you mean, then? If you wish to put the government in the hands of one man, such a man, I maintain, will be a monarch.

VOLTAIRE:  I would have a sovereign ruler of a free people, of which he is the chief by an agreement which binds them both, which would prevent him from becoming a tyrant.

CASANOVA:  Addison will tell you that such a sovereign is a sheer impossibility. I agree with Hobbes, of two evils choose the least. A nation without superstition would be a nation of philosophers, and philosophers would never obey. The people will only be happy when they are crushed and down-trodden, and bound in chains.

VOLTAIRE:  This is horrible; and you are of the people yourself. If you have read my works you must have seen how I shew that superstition is the enemy of kings.

CASANOVA:  Read your works? I have read and re-read them, especially in places where I have differed from you. Your ruling passion is the love of humanity. 'Est ubi peccas'. This blinds you. Love humanity, but love it as it is. It is not fit to receive the blessings you would lavish on it, and which would only make it more wretched and perverse. Leave men their devouring monster, it is dear to them. I have never laughed so heartily as at Don Quixote assailed by the galley-slaves whom his generosity had set free.

VOLTAIRE:  I am sorry that you have such a bad opinion of your fellow-creatures. And by the way, tell me whether there is freedom in Venice.

CASANOVA:  As much as can be expected under an aristocracy.  Our liberty is not so great as that which the English enjoy, but we are content."

 VOLTAIRE:  Even under The Leads?

 CASANOVA:  My imprisonment was certainly despotic; but as I had knowingly abused my liberty I am satisfied that the Government was within its rights in shutting me up without the usual formalities.

 VOLTAIRE:  All the same, you made your escape.

 CASANOVA:  I used my rights as they had used theirs.

 VOLTAIRE:  Very good!  But as far as I can see, no one in Venice is really free.

 CASANOVA:  That may be; but you must agree that the essence of freedom consists in thinking you have it.

VOLTAIRE:  I shall not agree to that so easily.  You and I see liberty from very different points of view.  The aristocrats, the members of the Government even, are not free at Venice; for example, they cannot travel without permission.

CASANOVA:  True, but that is a restriction of their own making to preserve their power.  Would you say that a Bernese is not free, because he is subject to the sumptuary laws, which he himself had made.

VOLTAIRE:  Well, well, I wish the people made the laws everywhere.

The Church of the Romantic

I was trained in my youth to be a preacher and I was quite good at it. For all of my life I have been a preacher, though not necessarily of the Christian variety. It is because of this background that I sometimes refer to myself as a preacher in the Church of the Romantic.

For over ten years of my life I studied and worked to be a bard in the Celtic tradition. It is only recently that I discovered that the image of the Celtic bard also inspired the early Romantics and not just Robert Burns. So perhaps it is only fair to call the position of preacher in the Romantic Church a bard.

Of course using the term “church” is not entirely accurate. For explanation, I must return to my bardic training. I became a bard officially through the Celtic Christian Church. The title was bestowed upon me through the authority of a bishop in the church with twelve lines of apostolic succession. That is the most official as you can get according to Western tradition.

The role of the bard in ancient Celtic society was as the keeper of the culture and traditions of the people. This involved the music and storytelling most commonly associated with bards but also history, news, and even law. So imagine a singer, musician, actor, writer, filmmaker, history professor, journalist, and lawyer all wrapped-up into one package and carrying political authority among the high ranking bards equal to a king. It sounds like a lot, but the functions can be divided into two categories: the medium and the message. The medium is the singing, music, poetry and acting that usually comes to mind when someone thinks of a bard. The message is the philosophy that imbued the culture. The message of the bard was to say, “This is who we are as a people”. In a largely oral culture you can understand why the Roman conquerors sought to eliminate the bards, which were technically part of the Druid caste.

The idea of the bard as poet-prophet, and that is prophet is the sense of speaker for the truth, appealed to the Romantics and many of the Romantic poets saw themselves in that mould drawing on examples from Milton and the Biblical prophets as the spokesmen for traditional Western Civilization at a time of cultural crisis. This strikes a chord with me for I was anointed as a “prophet” in the fundamentalist church where I grew-up. The Romantic poets believed that it was the power of imagination that set them apart and qualified them as bards.

If we look at the Romantic poet Robert Burns as a bard, which he referred to himself as and he certainly filled the role, we might wonder if the other poets were, like Burns, influenced by the work of the folklorist James Macpherson who wrote Ossian. This text was so popular in the early 19^th Century that Napoleon commissioned statues based on the work. So it is likely that the bard Ossian provided a model for other Romantic poets.

I feel obliged to share my life as a bard. When I was eighteen years old I discovered a book in the occult bookstore I used to frequent called, “Practical Celtic Magic”. What caught my attention was the author’s description of Celtic culture. As an alienated young man I felt that I had discovered my people. This sparked a passion, that some called an obsession, with Celtic history and culture from the ancient to the modern, which lasted ten years.

I was not content with this as a hobby or interest. Passion demands action, and I wanted to act on my passions. I wanted real life and not pretend. I was involved with the Celtic Arts Center in Hollywood, California, then I moved to Oregon where I was involved in laying the foundations for a Highland Games in the small town of Myrtle Creek, in Eugene/Springfield, Oregon I was involved in the Celtic Church, and eventually I became the bard for the 79^th New York State Militia, a Civil War re-enactment group portraying a Scottish-American regiment and operating out of Portland, Oregon.

The 79^th was much much more that a Civil War re-enactment group. It was more like a combination of the Boy Scouts and a civilian militia. I taught Scottish history, told the ancient stories, helped with learning folk songs, and provided moral instruction. I also laid the foundation for the transformation of the organisation into The Cameron Highlanders of the Northwest as a non-profit organisation.

During this period, I had helped a young woman who was working on a PhD in modern Celtic cultural movements in Oregon. She later confided in me that in all of her research she found that every line of inquiry that had any value led back to me. I was the centre of everything that was going on, but I was largely ignorant of this position until she told me a year or so later.

It was during this time that I became involved in the Scottish National Party. I served as a liaison with the party in Scotland, formed the new branch, and served as the second and last convenor before it all went bust due to lack of support from Scotland. It was during this time that I met my ex-wife and immigrated to Scotland.

I was never the stereotypical Scottish-America blinded by the image of Scotland, but nothing could prepare me for what I found here. The negative experiences I have had in Scotland led to a complete melt down and one of my periods where everything I once believed in and felt passionate about evaporated. This is when I turned my back on being a bard.

A Scottish-American friend once said to me that everything he had could be taken from him and he could be thrown in a cell, but come morning he would still be Scottish. I agreed with him and took great pride in my self-perceived Scottish identity. However, it was in coming to Scotland and living among the true Scots that I lost that belief. I was not only not one of them, but I also found that I resented much of the dominant culture. I now see that the “Scotland” that I came to love was the Romantic Scotland that grew out of the Scottish Enlightenment. Today’s Scotland takes pride in that heritage, but they worship the symbols and have forgotten the creed.

This is when I found myself returning to the Gothic interests of my youth and I became involved in the Glasgow Goth scene and soon became the convenor of the Scottish Vampyre Society for about four years. Just as I strove to promote the deeper meaning of Scottish-American culture, I sought to do the same for the Goth scene. I could not help but play the bard and try to demonstrate the philosophical underpinnings of the various activities. But alas, few really cared and I never achieved the status that I had in Oregon.

I had been writing a book on the subject of Goth, but discovered that everything that gave Goth meaning was inherent to it as being a piece of the larger Romantic philosophy. This is when my focus shifted to the philosophy of the Romantic and has been for the past four years.

Today, I see that everything that I have ever believed in and every passion that I ever had from childhood learning to be Californian and American, to comic books and certain films, to all things Celtic or Scottish, to the Gothic, to vampires were all manifestations of what I label as the Romantic.

I want to stress that this is my label of the Romantic. The Romantics themselves never called themselves Romantic; that term was slapped on them by late 19^th Century literary critics. If you look-up the word Romantic in the dictionary you will find a dozen different meanings. Last year I created this video to describe my idea of the Romantic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdqD_a1ox74 which is derived from the central premise shared by all Romantics, the belief in the individual over the collective. This is the single defining quality and as Romantics this is what we are fighting for.

So why do I call this the Church of the Romantic? Because Romanticism is NOT an ideology. There is no formal system of beliefs, there is no organisation, there is no hierarchy, there is no fixed scripture, and there is no authority. Instead we have principles. We have a code. It is what Western Civilization is built upon and I am convinced that we have become complacent in these principles and this has given our enemies the upper hand. Our enemies have an ideology, they have an agenda, and without a banner to rally around we will never organise and we will lose what our ancestors have created.

It is my intention to one day make a list of these principles and they will no doubt be familiar to all of my readers because we have been taught them since childhood and we tell the stories of them every day. We take them for granted because we have not had to fight for them in over two hundred years.

There are two great threats. One is internal and one is external. How do you know your enemy? I have a critic of my work who on two occasions has brought up the fact that Adolph Hitler used the language of the Romantic to advance his cause; therefore he concludes that Romanticism is a threat. You can see through the disguise if you understand the principles.

Romanticism emphasises the individual. This translates in practice to promoting and defending the Natural Rights of Life, Liberty, Property, and the Pursuit of Happiness. So if someone like Hitler uses the language of the Romantic to promote the violation of these rights, then you know that he is a liar and the enemy of freedom no matter his justifications. By the same token when a politician advocates the violation of these rights in the name of charity, then he too is an enemy of freedom. If a religion advocates the murder of all unbelievers and has been expressing a desire for global dominance for the past 1,300 years, during which time it has succeeded in conquering vast territories in the name of their god, then they are the enemy of freedom. Thomas Jefferson recognised this threat.

I call it Romanticism. Others call it Western Civilization or Modernity. Some call it “our (Classical) Liberal tradition”. You might even call it Anglo-Celtic-Americanism, or the Anglophere for short. When I express the Romantic I am sometimes dismissed as being “an American”. It’s a fair cop. The foundations for the American system of government and culture are the same as the foundations for the Romantic – the Enlightenment.

Romanticism is often portrayed as being in opposition to the Age of Enlightenment and Neo-Classicism that came before it. I disagree. The Enlightenment created the foundation and the context that made the Romantic Era possible. The Romantic is the outgrowth of the Enlightenment. It is thought (Enlightenment) put into passionate action (Romanticism).

The two places where the principles of the Enlightenment were put into the greatest action were Britain and America, but it was in America where it became most institutionalised and socially conditioned into the population. This is why the popular images and ideas of the Western genre are in many ways the greatest expression of the Romantic. Since I consider the Romantic as a work in progress, it is not enough to focus on where it started but to look at its development in practical reality and more and more the image of the American West seems to typify the Romantic.

It is a common expression in the United States to discredit something by saying that it is “Un-American”. What they are saying is that something is not in keeping with the principles that American was founded upon. The problem is that being an American allows some licence to decide what is or is not American. Consequently, you have plenty of proud Americans who hold beliefs and take actions that are arguably un-American.

Last time I checked, being an American was a political designation and not the consequence of subscribing to a philosophical system manifested through the culture. This is why it is important to codify these principles as being something other than “American” and I choose to use the word “Romantic” as most expressive of the meaning.

As far as the Romantic principles are concerned, I write about Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Love as a nice summary, but these concepts are open to interpretations whose conclusions are not always Romantic. I also write of the 7 Romantic Virtues. I have yet to uncover the principles, but here is a starting point.

Recently, economic historian Niall Ferguson created a list he called the “Six Killer Apps” that made the West the global power:

1. Competition

2. Science

3. Property Rights

4. Medicine

5. Consumer Society

6. Protestant work ethic

The point Ferguson makes is that by losing the monopoly on these apps we are under threat from competition, but more importantly if we abandon these apps or cease to value them, then we shall fall. Every one of these “apps” is currently being destroyed from within on various levels and to varying degrees. I would argue that each of these apps corresponds to one of the Romantic Principles and for the first time in our history we have to fight for these if we want to keep them. To fight for them we need to know them and be passionate about just, just as a devout follower of an ideology would for their beliefs.

Gary North created a list of “Five Principles That Made America Great”. These can equally be applied to the Romantic. They are:

1. God helps those who help themselves.

2. Mind your own business.

3. Live and let live.

4. Let's make a deal.

5. Our kids will have it better.

And in his book, American Cultural Baggage: How to Recognize and Deal with It, Stan Nussbaum lists what he calls The Ten Commandments of American Culture. They are:

1. You can't argue with success. (Be a success.)

2. Live and let live. (Be tolerant.)

3. Time flies when you're having fun. (Have lots of fun.)

4. Shop till you drop.

5. Just do it.

6. You are only young once. (Do whatever you can while you have the chance.)

7. Enough is enough. (Stand up for your rights.)

8. Rules are made to be broken. (Think for yourself.)

9. Time is money. (Don't waste time.)

10. God helps those who help themselves. (Work hard.)

You may notice some over-lap and repetitions. One that I would add is “If you can; you may”. This references the idea of equality of opportunity rather than the equality of outcome. No one should be discriminated against based on any recognised, imposed, or adopted category or group. If they can do the job, then let them, but do not lower the standards to accommodate them. Everyone deserves a shot to prove their worth.

I am not a Freemason. I just had to make that clear. In his essay, “The Age of Enlightenment and Freemasonry”, W. Bro. Ronald Paul Ng, a master mason, writes “There is no doubt that many of our precepts arose at the time of the Enlightenment. The only question is, which is the cart and which the horse”.

It has been said that the United States did not win its War of Independence, rather Britain lost it. The support for this theory is that many on both sides were Masons and many of the ideals the colonists were fighting for could be called Masonic ideals. Members of Parliament, such as William Pitt, supported the colonist’s efforts. Even someone like the British general Cornwallis (a Mason) was a brilliant military leader before and after the war, but strangely not during it.

In the afore mentioned essay, the author continues:

The Craft is supported by the Tripod of Brotherly Love, Relief and Truth. It is not just about Fellowship, it is not just about Relief and it is not just about Truth. It is about all three together. No doubt fellowship and charity play a very large part in our Masonic lives, but let us not forget the intellectual and spiritual parts.

Tonight I have demonstrated how intimately our Craft is linked to the Enlightenment Period of European history. Many of our forefathers were at the forefront of the thinking of their day.

I have a challenge to issue today, are we like Tamino in Mozart’s Magic Flute, fearlessly going forward to face the trials of our life in search of Wisdom, Virtue and Truth, or are we Papageno, who would rather have wine, women and song and abandon the search for wisdom and virtue?.

The Romantic ideal is not that dissimilar to the American ideal or the Masonic ideal. When I write of the Church of the Romantic I envision people with the same dedication to a set of principles that we see in the self-representation of the Masons. We simply replace their “Brotherly Love, Relief and Truth” with “Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Love”. Like the Mason, there should be a commitment to these principles and a willingness to fight for them and to defend them.

Our ancestors fought and died to end authoritarian governments and religious supremacy over the rights of the individual. They won, but if we forget those principles of the Romantic, that many scholars argue created the Modern world, then we will return to the state of serfdom from which we came.   Perhaps it is the Romantic in me, but I like the idea of an organisation dedicated to work towards these end whether they be out in the open or in the shadows as a secret society fighting for the freedom of all against tyranny large and small.  Perhaps that is my true bardic calling.  Afterall, the motto of Clan Logan is Hoc Majorum Virtus – This is the Virtue of our Ancestors.

The Green Lantern: Romantic Icon?

I’ve never been much of a DC comics fan. I use to collect Marvel Comics, but I do not think that I have purchased a DC comic in my life. That is not to say that I do not like the characters. I have seen a good chunk of the animation and live-action creations and yes, I even have my favourite characters. High on the list is The Green Lantern.

The origin story is pretty simple. An alien crash lands on Earth mortally wounded. Before he dies he sends off his power ring to choose a new Green Lantern and it chooses test pilot Hal Jordan. The power ring is a tool used by an army of over 3,000 intergalactic cops called The Green Lantern Corps with each Green Lantern patrolling an assigned sector. The source of the ring’s power is a battery shaped like an old lantern which is linked to the main battery, on the corps’ headquarters planet of Oa, containing an energy source called the green element. With the ring, the wearer can create solid light-based constructs. Here is the important part. The strength and force of the constructs depends on the will of the user, and the variety and complexity of constructs is limited only by the user’s imagination.

There is another factor. Every superhero needed his weakness, his Kryptonite. For Green Lantern, the ring would not work against anything that was the colour yellow. Yep, pretty stupid. Fortunately, the writers finally got around to explaining the weakness and came up with something brilliant.

There was a yellow energy impurity in the main battery. Just as the green energy responded to will, the yellow energy responded to fear. Eventually all the colours of the light spectrum where shown to have a corresponding emotion: Red is anger, Blue is hope, Orange is avarice, Violet is love, Indigo is compassion. The main point here is the battle between Green and Yellow – Will vs. Fear.

The philosophy of the Romantic can be reduced to a single word – I. Romanticism is all about the individual. I think, I feel, and I act. I am a human being. This opens up quite a few questions. Am I my heart? My mind? Who am I? And what does it mean to be human?

Aristotle taught that we are what we repeatedly do. We live in a world of action and reaction, of cause and effect. The Hindu word for this is karma. This is the world of karma and all that is in existence made by humans is the result of action and consequence. Who are you? Your thoughts and feelings drive and direct your actions, but ultimately you can choose to exert your will to either act or not act. With each action or inaction there are consequences that shape your world and effect the worlds of others.

As for what makes us human, there are two schools of thought. One is that it is emotions that make humans unique among all the species on the planet. Another is that it is our ability to reason. Is Man primarily an animal that feels or an animal that reasons? Adam Smith proposed that what makes humans unique is our ability to reconstruct reality in our minds as concepts that can be both manipulated or used to trigger emotional responses. What makes us human is our imaginations. Without which there would be no emotion or reason.

So what defines Hal Jordan as the Green Lantern is what defines us all.  The will that makes us who we are and the imagination that makes us human.  The strength and the quality of our life constructs depends on the these two character qualities.  The only thing holding us back is fear.

I subscribe to the theory that there are four root emotions from which all the variety of feelings emerge as variations on these four themes. All living organisms have the same basic concern. Can I eat it or will it eat me? Gaining a value is good and losing a value is bad. When we gain a value we feel happiness and when we lose a value we feel sorrow. Imagination provides the next two root emotions. To imagine gaining a value evokes desire, but the imagined loss of a value evokes fear.

Part of the human experience is regularly coming to terms with our desire and our fear. Desire drives action but this is tempered by fear. I desire the hot girl, but I fear approaching the person because I might lose the value of my self-esteem if I am rejected. I desire a new job, but I fear losing the job I have.

Some superheroes are born with power, like Superman. Some develop powers naturally, like all the mutants whose powers emerge as teenagers. Some work hard to achieve their powers, like Batman. Some create their powers, like Iron Man. And some have their powers thrust upon them, like Spider-man.

In the case of the Green Lantern, sure, he is given the ring, but the ability to use it powerfully is derived from the innate character of the person wielding it. I think that this makes Green Lantern unique. In the recent film adaptation Hal Jordan fails as a Green Lantern when he tries to be fearless and only succeeds when he stops trying and just trusts his innate ability to face and work through his fears. He is not afraid of fear, rather he is more focused on his desire – what he chooses to accomplish through his will.

Frank Hurbert writes in the book Dune that “Fear is the mind killer”. When a person is afraid they become like a startled deer trapped in the headlights. The mind shuts off.  The will that defines us as individuals and the imagination that makes us fully human simply evaporates.

This is why we need heroes like the Green Lantern.  Sure, he is not a moral iconic like Superman, or a feminist icon like Wonder Woman, or a brooding badass like The Batman.  Not only is he not one of those “Big Three” in the DC Universe,  Hal Jordan is not even the only Green Lantern from Earth, the others are John Stewart, Guy Gardner, and Kyle Rayner and that’s not even counting the original Green Lantern, Alan Scott.  If Batman had a power ring he would be, well, over-powered because he has the required character qualities in abundance.

In a sense Hal Jordan is special because being the primary titular Green Lantern we are more involved with him as a person and he is often touted as the greatest of the Green Lanterns.  From another angle seeing Hal Jordan as just one of many Green Lanterns reminds us that he is symbolic of everyman.  We all have will and imagination, but the measure of a person is how they use it.

We are all engaged every day of our lives in the battle against fear.  Those who seek to live life consciously rather than on autopilot must exercise their will and imaginations if they want to prosper.  Yes, it is easy just to sit back and let the river of life just carry you along, turn-off your will and your imagination and follow the herd.  But this has never been the path of the Romantic.  Those who choose this road less travelled must be creatures capable of harnessing the power of their will and imagination and employ this against their  fears and in the construction of their realities.  It is this power that makes the Romantics the larger than life characters they are in both fiction and reality, or as I like to say quoting Rob Zombie, “More human than human”.