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”.

What’s In It For Me?

So the princess says, “It’s not over yet” and the smuggler says, “It is for me sweetheart. I’m not in this for you and I’m certainly not in it for your revolution. I’m in it for the money. I expect to get well paid.” She retorts, “If money is all you love, then that’s what you will receive”, she then throws an aside to the farm boy, “Your friend’s quite a mercenary. I wonder if he cares about anything or anybody.”

This scene from Star Wars is supposed to paint Han Solo as a bit of a rogue, but let’s clarify this. Han Solo runs a business providing transportation services of goods and occasionally people. He gets hired to transport some folk who turn out to be wanted fugitives. In the course of events his ship is taken by the military, which he liberates from impound, as well as rescuing this princess, which was never part of the original deal. When all is said and done he expresses his expectation to get paid for his troubles. After all, it’s his business. What does he get? A guilt trip and some emotional blackmail from some rich, idealist bureaucrat who probably never did a day’s work in her life. Does that seem right to you?

And yet today if you were to ask a favour of someone and they answered “What’s in it for me?” You might think of them as being selfish. It’s just is not the done thing. How unfortunate that is.

You see, all human relationships are based on trade. Despite what people wish to be true, we are all motivated by incentives. In other words, “What’s in it for me?” The straw man in this is that money or material gain is the only incentive. This is not true. Incentives can be the good feelings you get from giving money to a beggar because now you feel as if you are a good person, even though this is one of the worst things that you can do for him.

Let’s go back to Princess Leia. Han Solo has troubles. Like every other person he needs to take care of the base of the pyramid in Mazlow’s hierarchy of need: food, shelter, and clothing. So like everyone else he needs to figure out how to satisfy those needs. This is the primary purpose of existence for everyone who has ever lived. Without these things we will most surely die.

Solo decides that the best way to take care of these needs is to start his own transport business. This creates more needs. He has to maintain the equipment required for the business, pay employees, and cover other operational costs. Failure to do so will result in no profits and therefore no food, shelter, clothing, and eventually no business.

Another aspect is that Solo lives in a fascist imperial state, which means that goods are heavily taxed and businesses over-regulated. This is an impediment to his work, but also creates smuggling opportunities. The problem here is that he is now forced to do business with criminals. During one of his jobs he was forced to eject his cargo when the police were on to him, which resulted in a loss to his employer who now seeks compensation that Solo cannot afford. To make matters worse, since all this activity is illegal, his employer cannot go through legal channels and instead places a bounty on Han Solo which could mean his death.

Then there is Princess Leia, the foster daughter of a long-term senator and one of the most powerful men in the galaxy, not to mention that she is a member of the Imperial Senate herself, despite her youth.

When it comes to Mazlow’s hierarchy of need, that base of food, shelter, and clothing had been provided for her by her parents since birth and from there she moved into a high paying political job, so money was never really a concern for her, thus leaving her free to focus of the higher parts of Mazlow’s need hierarchy, psychological needs and self-actualization.

It is easy for a person living in a state of relative comfort to forget that things must be paid for. Sure, they pay for things, but there is never the pinch of saving-up for something or doing without something else to get it. You want, you hand over pieces of paper of which you have plenty, and now you have.

We are meant to see Han Solo as a rogue, scoundrel, or mercenary for expecting payment for what should be his heroic duty for the higher purpose, but in truth Princess Leia is demonstrating her disrespect and disregard for Han Solo by not offering ready compensation. In essence, she is treating him as a slave. If anyone is a scoundrel it is Princess Leia.

Oscar Wilde said, “We think we can have our visions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing visions have to paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine.”

You may think that your high and lofty goals or moral superiority gives you a golden credit card to all the goods and services that you require free of charge, but who are you to demand the sacrifice of others to achieve your purposes? I was going to call such an attitude childish, but sometimes even children know better.

A Scottish traveller through 19^th Century America noticed how the children played. A common phrase he heard was “Wanna trade?” It has been said that America was largely a rural agrarian nation, but more to the point it was a nation of traders. This concept is emphasised in both versions of the film True Grit, but more so in the remake.

There is the scene where we see Mattie Ross’s horse trading skills and negotiation, but also little scenes, such as when after her father died the landlady offers to sell her an old flour sack to put his belongings in for a nickel. Modern audiences would expect her to just give her the bag. After all, here is a young girl whose father was just murdered. But Mattie gets it. She knows the rules. Things must be paid for and she invokes this later to get her way with her hired gun. Once he took her money she became his boss. Those are the rules.

I am reminded of the story of the outlaw Curly Bill Brocious. During a gunfight with town marshals a horse in the livery was killed in the crossfire. The following day a messenger from Bill paid compensation to the livery owner for his loss. Today, try getting a parent to pay for an item in a shop broken by their child.

All human relationships are based on trade. Our ancestors understood this. Coming to the table with nothing to offer was seen as an insult, but today the reverse is true. We are morally expected to give something for nothing but that only leads to being taken advantage of more in the future.

Ever see the cliché in Westerns when men refer to each other as “partner”? Let’s think about this for a moment. Now, I do not know if this is historically accurate but using the term fits with the culture of the time. A partner is someone that you are in business with towards mutual advantage. This could be a trading partner or someone in a joint venture. The term signifies the concept of relationships based on trade. Calling people “partner” was assuming either an active or potential trade relationship existed.

So what changed? I believe the problem lies in free money. I apologise for not knowing the correct term in economics, if one even exists, however the concept is that easy credit, insurance, and government hand-outs collectively represent free money. Of course none of it is really free. Money earned through personal production is replaced by money given to be paid back over time, either though monthly instalments, insurance premiums, taxation, or inflation. This creates a vicious cycle. The more free money available; the more things cost, and the more things cost; the greater the need for free money.

On a psychological and social level, free money creates the illusion of wealth. So, like Princess, Leia we are free to focus on the higher levels of the hierarchy of need but we forget the basic facts of human existence and this leads to problems. We forget where real money comes from and therefore disrespect and disregard its source.

The source of money is human production and human production is the result of an individual’s time, energy, and skill. So to devalue money is to devalue human production. It is to take a person’s time, energy, and skill for granted.

Here is an example, which is absolutely hilarious by the way, called Missing Missy. If I read this right, David Thorn is a graphic designer. This is his job. This girl Shannon asks him to do her a favour which involves putting all his paying work aside to serve her purposes. He decides to teach her a lesson which I do not think she quite learned.

We see this often. If we have a friend in some sort of profession that we need the services of, we call on them for a friendly favour in full expectation that since this person is a friend, but more likely an acquaintance, that they will happily render their services for nothing. Nothing is brought to the negotiating table save the automatic expectation of help. The person may even feel guilty saying no because asking, “What’s in it for me?” is just so base, unhelpful, and unkind. What the person asking the favour is really saying is that their need is more important than their “friend’s” time, energy, and skill. To reduce this even further, they are saying, “I am more important that you”.

All human relationships are based on trade. This means working together for mutual benefit. I will trade my chickens for your shoes. I will mow your lawn if you make this poster. In trade, all men are equal. A king may trade his gold for a blacksmith’s sword. Both parties win and are therefore equal beneficiaries. If the king says, “Give me the sword you made because I am king”. Then he has become a tyrant through his disregard, no less than the person demanding favours from a friend. They are in principle the same.

The philosopher Ayn Rand was a strong advocate of what she called the virtue of selfishness. This is quite possibly the biggest error in her career. You see, she was actually advocating what Objectivists today call rational self-interest and sought to redeem the word selfish to mean just that. Of course people thought she was preaching selfishness and her abrasive attitude did not do her any favours. Even today some Objectivists use her philosophy to justify their selfishness.

I once heard a critic of Objectivism ask “should you not come to the aid of someone in need because it does not serve your immediate interest to save them?” Of course you should save them if you are able. In her zeal to point out the evils of altruism she failed to fully emphasis the role of benevolence.

Altruism is the idea that it is a moral requirement to sacrifice yourself for others. This is why Han Solo is seen as a rogue and Princess Leia as having the moral high-ground when in truth she is trying to take advantage of him. This is why people come to the negotiating table with nothing but expectations. Benevolence on the other hand is a choice that a person makes themselves without any moral obligation or expectation to do so. There is nothing wrong with choosing to help others, in fact it should be encouraged, but a person is under no moral obligation to do so. Benevolence is morally preferable but not morally obligatory.

The man who asks, “What’s in it for me?” is not a rogue, a scoundrel, a selfish person, or an evil man. He is simply opening negotiations for the trade. The person that you have to be concerned about is the one who wants something for nothing. He is saying that your time, energy, and skill, and therefore you, are of no value. He is saying that you exist for his purposes and not for your own.

I always associated the field of economics with finance and as something not only beyond me but also incredibly boring. I was wrong. You see, people are most concerned with two things: love and money. We know all about love thanks to centuries of poems, songs, and love stories, but most folk know very little about money, probably because they have the same prejudices that I had.

As a science, economics has more in common with something like sociology and psychology than with mathematics. For at the heart of economics is people and the trade choices that they choose to make.

When you live in a world where nearly everyone is consciously aware of trading values, such as 19^th Century America, you will find that even the most ignorant person in society understands the most basic fundamentals of economics even if they do not have the academic labels for the concepts.

We still have vestiges in our language and manners from this era, such as thanking a person for their time or saying time is money. Both phrases imply the understanding that every human being is involved in the process of production towards their personal benefit. This is still true, but today we do not readily recognise it.

This failure to recognise each individual as an engine of production and potential trading partner coupled with the prevalence of “free money” and the false morality of altruism conspire to ultimately devalue each individual. Mutual respect is eroded, a sense of entitlement prevails, and everyone is out for themselves by any means necessary. Without the mutual investment of trade human society breaks down.

Herein lies the cruel irony of socialism. By devaluing the individual in the name of the collective you devalue the very components of the collective and thus destroy the social cohesion you seek to promote.

The glue is trade. Not just the trading of material values such as money or goods, but also services and emotional values. These are all on the market. And every person trades these things for their own benefit, and seeing as the trade is for mutual benefit, your trading partner prospers too. It’s all about the win/win scenario. Problems arise when people, and government, try to circumvent this fair process with excuses of morality and calls for sacrifice.

I’m going to throw in a couple other disclaimers before I finish. In addition to the fact that trade can be in material or immaterial values there is also the different sort of trade relationship found in an on-going partnership.

Take the institution of marriage for example. In the traditional vows the woman offers her love, honour, and obedience and in exchange the man gives her all the fruits of his production. Again, we see how our ancestors placed a higher value on production than we do today. These days the man’s promise to be the provider holds little weight against the negative associations placed on her promise to recognise his authority. Nonetheless, these days both parties are producers so it is more difficult to define the trade the relationship. It may take the form of one party making dinner and the other doing the dishes, but it is still there. As soon as one party feels that the trade relationship is no longer a balanced win/win situation then the arrangement is ended.

The other disclaimer is really just a reaffirmation of benevolence. We may chose to help the stranger stranded on the side of the road, or give gifts, or do favours without any expectation of reward or trade. These are all good things. The problem is when we expect others to do these things out of moral obligation which is actually merely shrouding an innate sense of entitlement.

How much is something worth? A gallon of milk? A litre of petrol? A diamond ring? A glass of water? A human life? No matter the commodity, its rarity, or the cost of production everything is worth the same price – which is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. When we decide that something is too valuable for the market it becomes not priceless but worthless.  It’s like common land, if everyone owns it then no one does and therefore no one is responsible for its upkeep.

How much is a person worth? Now I don’t mean slavery here, I’m meaning how much is their time, energy, and skill worth? The answer is the same; whatever someone is willing to trade. If someone is not willing to trade, brings nothing to the table, and just expects a favour, then this person deems you ultimately worthless.  You’re just something to use and throw away.

“What’s in it for me?” is not a statement of greed, selfishness, avarice, or selfishness. It does not mean the person asking the question is a bad person. It does denote self-respect as well as mutual respect. It says, “let’s trade as equals”. Throughout human history trade has been the basis of friendships, marriages, national alliances, and, according to Classical Liberal theory as expressed particularly through Prime Minister Gladstone and Prince Albert, it is the path to world peace.

The final word is never trust someone who offers you something for nothing because chances are they want to make a slave of you. Never trust someone who wants something for nothing, because they’re after the same thing. You are an engine of production and your success in life all depends on how well you can trade. So never be afraid to ask the question, “What’s in it for me?”

Walk Like a Romantic – A Gentleman’s Guide

Exactly two weeks ago Prince William married Kate Middleton. I watched the ceremony as did millions, if not billions, of others on televisions and internet connections across the world. One thing that struck me as I watched the guests arrive was Prince Harry’s horrible posture. His shoulders lurched forwards and as he followed his brother to greet guests I thought of some Pete Lorre style minion. In all fairness, William was only slightly better. By contrast, when members of the old guard arrived they were, well, stunning. Straight, solid, erect and commanding in movements executed with effortless grace and style.

I was reminded of a reality television show a few years back called, Diets That Time Forgot. The plot was that twelve fat people are locked up in an old rural mansion and divided into three groups each representing an historical era: the Victorians, the Edwardians, and the 1920’s. Each group was subjected to the diet regime popular in their particular era. Not only did the participants have to dress the part; they also were taught how to walk the walk.

Every era has its own unique ideas concerning behaviours. Collectively, this creates a sort of temporal culture or zeitgeist, meaning “Spirit of the Age”. This is most obvious in the manner of dress associated with a particular era, but it also includes body movements. The experts in the television program pointed out that each era had a particular gait and bearing that was unique: Victorian bearing was noble and regal, the Edwardian was military, and the 1920’s was loose and flowing.

This is evident in the clothing of the period. As someone who wears Victorian styles daily, I say with absolute confidence that you do not wear the clothes rather the clothes wear you. Everything is forced firmly in its proper place, this goes for men as well as women.  I am by no means uncomfortable in my clothes, but the cry from the casual shirt, T-shirt, jeans, and trainers brigade is that they are comfortable clothes. Comfort is seen as the primary value in modern fashion, particularly men’s fashion.

When I first conceived to write this article my intention was to write on the subject of Victorian, Neo-Victorian, and Steampunk fashion but it took a detour in my mind. Mostly, I was distracted by my own perceived cleverness on the title which led to the brief discourse on posture. I console myself in saying that they are all part of the same picture. It was yesterday afternoon that I decided to focus on men’s fashion and this is why.

I saw a few women on Glasgow’s main drag, Buchanan Street, yesterday. One wore tight fitting brown leather trousers, brown boots, and I believe a white top and a short jacket that I do not remember. Another woman, possibly thirties, was wearing a calf-length brown skirt, brown boots, and a light brown/green military style jacket. A third was the female companion of an acquaintance of mine. She wore a black gothic lolita style dress, black tights, and calf-length white military gaiters, a fashion accessory in recent years employed by the Steampunk designer Kate Lambert, also known as Kato. All of these clothing choices could be labelled Neo-Victorian or Steampunk.

However, we can go a bit more subtle and mainstream with this. Every few years or so elements of Victorian fashion come into style and can be found in everyday shops. One example is the pagoda sleeve blouse. A fashionable woman can not only get away with indulging in such diverse expressions; she is expected to.

Men are far more limited.  For example, I may wear my winged-collar shirt with a thin black cravat tied in what is known as the American knot. This is perceived as strange. Male neckwear is not fashionable outwith a work environment and on top of that all forms of male neckwear other than the standard modern tie have been banished. The winged-collar was once a common alternative collared shirt, like the pagoda sleeve blouse for ladies, but now it is reserved only for formal wear and weddings.  Consider my earlier description of the women on Buchanan Street. Many of the elements are traditionally male garments. The boots, the military styles, the gaiters, the trousers, and yet today any man wearing the comparable male clothes would be the subject of stares and perhaps novelty or ridicule.

I once saw an episode of the program Grumpy Old Men, a show where older men complain about modern life. In this particular segment a well-known Briton aged in his sixties was complaining about youth fashion, but not as you might think. He was upset that it was so boring. Everything was a mass market rehash of styles pioneered by earlier generations of youth. Perhaps I’m being a grumpy old man myself when I say that there has been nothing interesting of worth from the youth scene since 80’s goth, though I will admit that in many ways the Naughties manifestation was an improvement on the theme.

In the world of youth fashion the goal is not necessarily causal and comfortable, though this may apply to the more mainstream teens. In the world of the alternative teen and young adult market the goal is to dress to impress and comfort be damned. Of course when the shows over the comfort clothes come-out, especially when the main show of youth is over and they join the ranks of the mundane. The problem being that developing a personal style takes time far beyond those provided in youth, and so many young people get it wrong and give up before they ever get it right.

My purpose here then is a brief guide for men who want to walk the walk of the Romantic, because women have enough social leeway when it comes to fashion.

First off, fashion begins in the heart and not the in the eye. What you choose to wear and how you carry yourself in your clothes is ultimately an expression of your soul. For this reason you need to find that soul of yours. There are two questions that you need to ask yourself. What is? and What ought?

I’m currently reading the book Northern Lights by Philip Pullman on which the film The Golden Compass was based. The story is set in a world where a person’s soul exists outside of themselves in the form of an animal called a daemon. I read this great passage where a sailor is discussing the relationship between a person and their daemon.

“There’s plenty of folk as’d like to have a lion as a daemon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they’re going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling that is.”

Stylists say that you should put a paper bag with eye-holes cut out over your head and look at yourself in the mirror. Analyse your body and accept it for what it is. Nothing worse than a fat girl dressed like a skinny one. She is far more attractive if she dresses for her size and body shape.  The same goes for the soul, that is, your psycho-emotional make-up. First know thyself. Know who you are and what you have to work with. If you do not start from a point of self-acceptance then no amount of clothing with change anything. It might just make it worse.

The next question is “What ought?” Who do you want to be? What image do you want to portray? For this I refer you to my theory of herotypes. The gist is this. Psychological tests have found that students taking a test while surrounded by pictures of scholars and intellectuals perform better than those without, but more importantly, they perform better than those being watched by a photo of Albert Einstein.

The human mind is subject to limiting self-beliefs. In many cases a person cannot perform because they believe that they cannot perform. The images of the stereotype scholars made the test takers feel a part of that group so their minds allowed them to perform better, but the image of a specific intellectual, like Einstein, represents an unattainable goal, so the mind gives-up.

Herotyping is simply surrounding yourself with images, objects, and cultural consumables (like films, books, etc) relating to a particular stereotypical group of which you want to be associated with. This includes clothing and bearing. Herotyping is a means of telling your subconscious mind the type of person that you want to become and letting that unconscious master at the switches do the rest without the conscious mind worrying about self-image.

A person can have many herotypes. A dominant one for me is “the gentleman adventurer”. This probably stems from my youthful connection with Indiana Jones, the respected scholar who goes on adventures. Others in this group would include Doc Holliday from Tombstone, the educated Southern gentleman and deadly pistoleer; or Lord Asriel from Northern Lights; and most Victorian heroes, such as Sherlock Holmes, Phileas Fogg, and others of note.

I once worked briefly showing homes and apartments in Beverly Hills. On one occasion I was riding to a site in my client’s car. He was not much older than me, but unlike me he had a very expensive car. Definitely from a wealthy family in contrast to me from a lower middle-class background who had gone to wealthy schools.

During the journey, I noticed something protruding from the bottom of my boss’s briefcase that I had borrowed and instinctively put my finger to it. Turns out it was a razor blade used for cutting carpeting away to show hardwood floors beneath it. So, I sliced my finger and simply pressed another finger against the wound. I mentioned it to my client and he went in hysterics and carried-on about going to the hospital. When I convinced him that it was not necessary, he says, “Don’t bleed in my car.” So here is this guy who over-reacts at the first sign of difficulty like a child, but when the difficult passes he’s more concerned about his upholstery.

For me, the gentleman adventurer herotype as it is expressed in the real world is someone who can move in well to do circles, be the scholar, and be well-dressed, but he is not feckless fop or coward like the client in my story. He is the man in the suit that you do not want to mess with. I discovered this fascinating little website of tropes (“a conceptual figure of speech, a storytelling shorthand for a concept that the audience will recognize and understand instantly.”) that includes examples of the Gentleman Adventurer. Quick disclaimer though, the site includes the parody figure of “the upper-class twit adventurer” in the mix, needless to say, this is not what I mean.  On the site I discovered other herotypes of mine that are apparently also tropes, identified as the “Rogue Scholar” and the “Badass Preacher”, both are intellectuals who have either rejected or are rejected by the academic or religious authority and bring their message to the people.

Concerning the Gentleman Adventurer, here is a description of Lord Asriel from Northern Lights:

“Lord Asriel was a tall man with powerful shoulders, a fierce dark face, and eyes that seemed to flash and glitter with savage laughter. It was a face to be dominated by, or fight; never a face to patronize or pity. All his movements were large and perfectly balanced, like those of a wild animal, and when he appeared in a room like this, he seemed a wild animal held in a cage too small for it.”

I believe that there are those who see me in a similar light, but I am by no means convinced. For me, this is the person I would like to be, but alas I am not. One important thing to remember about self-development in the Romantic vein, it is not about reaching your destination but rather closing the distance between your starting point and your unattainable goal.

I share this with you, my dear reader, by way of example. It is for each person to find their own herotypes and to consciously fill their lives with images, artefacts, people, and experiences that push them towards the goal of manifesting in the real world the thoughts and feelings of their inner world.  Romanticism begins with the self and it is your actions that define that self. Your thoughts, your feelings, and your mind are not you. They simply support and drive your actions. They are a means to an end and ultimately manifested through action.

So when we look at the clothes and the bearing of the Victorian, Edwardians, and the 1920’s folk as presented in the television series Diets that Time Forgot we see the zeitgeist of the eras. In the zeitgeist we see the individuals involved that compose it. The noble bearing of the Victorians demonstrates the Romantic virtue of pride born of accomplishment and self-respect. The military bearing of the Edwardians is that of the builders of Empire: militarily, culturally, and economically. The 1920’s style represented a relaxation after work as industry brought more leisure time to more people.

All three groups of people subscribed to the belief that “we live to work”. Through work the common man could rise through the ranks, through work empires are built, and through work more leisure time can be afforded. As denizens of the Romantic Era, all three group recognised that you are what you do and what you do is your work, so do your best, hold your head high for your accomplishments and honest work shall be its own reward.

Today, the West holds the opposite view. Today, “we work to live”. Work is a necessary evil that cuts into playtime. Extra work is penalised through taxation. Men and women of status and accomplishment achieved through hard work are scorned by those envious of their honestly earned profits and positions. And we all dress as though we are off to play at a moment’s notice. The common view these days is that you are what you feel, not what you do. So everyone must do what they can to feel good and make every moment count regardless of tomorrow.  The price that they pay is enormous consumer debt.

This casualness is reflected in the popular style of dress evident in most anywhere.  Unlike in a film or television program that has the benefits of a costume designer, real life fashion tends to be fairly routine, monotonous, and uniform.  Should you doubt me, go to any populated area and notice how many people are wearing the jeans, casual top (including T-shirts), and tennis shoes combination.  Once you’ve done that, start noticing how they move.

A future episode of Diets That Time Forgot, say sixty or seventy years from now, will no doubt have some historian describing how people walked in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.  There is plenty of room in the zeitgest for variation, but generally the body will hang naturally for its type.  For example, I am very tall and slender.  Tall people tend to hunch, lean their heads forward, and if they swing their long arms too broadly it gives the impression of an ape.  If you followed my experiment, you might noticed that the chin position angles downward as opposed the the upward slant of the Victorians or the straight gaze of the Edwardians.

To press my point, this is not universal.  You will no doubt witness swaggering men and poised women perambulating down the avenue communicating the desirable qualities of their particular gender and I applaud them for it.  These people, be they in casual attire or not, stand-out in contrast against the grey backdrop of the mundane.  But men, too much swagger, as seen in what I must call the either the street, ghetto, or gangsta walk, makes you look like an ape – no racism intended.

It has been said that casual clothing leads to casual thinking.  What is lacking is purpose and casual has very little purpose apart from comfort and uniformity.  The same holds true with casual body movements.  There is no awareness and no direction.  I have noticed the same phenomena paralleled in causal speech, where a thought is not fully considered and developed before someone tries to speak it and word meanings seem pretty much made-up on the spot.  Of course this is not universal, but I seem to be noticing this contingent in society growing.  Some call it casual, but I would presume that more traditional thinkers would simply call it laziness.

Here is another illustration from my personal life. I am often asked by people if I am going to work, a formal occasion, or to an event. In other words, in their worldview no one would dress like me unless they had to and the reasons that someone would “have to” are work, a formal occasion, or an event (which is playtime dress-up). I was once asked in all seriousness if the rodeo was in town because this man honestly wanted to attend. How does one answer that?

For there is the ever present danger of falling into the trap of wearing a costume.  Sometimes that’s something that you just cannot get around as so much depends on the perceptions of the viewer, but there are a few tricks.  The first thing I have already covered and that is self-believe.  Do you believe in yourself and in the image you are portraying?  If not then you will appear uncomfortable and thus more likely to lead people to believe that you are just a pretence.  Remember, part of this is bearing and attitude.  Without it, then you’re just playing dress-up.

Next point.  For men there are two rules – masculinity and elegance.  I did not makes these rules.  They come from Beau Brummel, the man who invented the men’s suit back circa 1800 and basic men’s apparel has not changed since.  Dressing masculine does not necessarily mean not dressing feminine, like the fops that Brummel and his fellow dandies brushed aside.  It also means not dressing like a boy.  What does that mean?  I honestly do not know, but I know it when I see it.  It’s a certain je ne sais quoi.  I will say that some track suits remind of a toddler’s romper suit.

Elegance is more easily defined.  To dress elegantly is to dress streamlined and purposeful.  So unless you are an aeronaut ditch the goggles and other pointless paraphernalia.  Think of it like the prat who wears sunglasses at night or in a dark club.  One silly bit of foppery from the Goth scene is the men’s trousers with buckles and straps to nowhere.

I once knew the son of the Duke of Carlisle.  He was the kind of person that everyone liked as soon as they met him.  A great guy.  I remember one night I was at a Goth club and he had just arrived from work wearing naught but black trousers, a white shirt, and I believe a plain black jacket.  From a fashion stand point, he out shown every guy there.  How?  Of course he had bearing, but more identifiable was his simple masculinity and elegance.  The moral of this story – don’t try too hard.  Keep it simple.  Think of your clothing as a mask that your soul speaks through.  If people are too distracted by the mask, then they cannot hear you.

Romanticism is not just a style of art; it is a style of life.  Walking like a Romantic means walking the true path of the glorified self of achievement.  My preference is the herotype of the Gentleman Adventurer.  It represents a masculine and elegant style the evokes my Victorian and Romantic values, but it is by no means the rule of law.  I am outspoken against the ubiquitous denim in our society, but I admit that there are some who exude masculinity and elegance in that attire just as there are those who are scarcely noticed when dressed the same . They say that clothes maketh the man.  This is true to an extent, but ultimately it is the quality, character, and strength of the individual man that maketh the clothes work.