What’s Your Story?

I once heard a story about a teacher instructing her young students on the period of Scottish history covering William of Orange, who was no friend to Scotland, when one of the boys shouted, “Our King Billy wouldn’t do that to us” and stormed from the classroom. Obviously, the boy was from one of those families that march every July.

There are two kinds of history. There is the history of the head, dealing with facts, key figures, dates, and legislation, and then there is the history of the heart which has more to do with our sense of identity.

In the film, Blade Runner, the protagonist Rick Deckard realises that the latest model of manufactured humans, called replicants, comes equipped with memory implants. Dr. Tyrell, the owner of the company manufacturing the replicants, tells him:

We began to recognize in them a strange obsession. After all, they are emotionally inexperienced, with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we gift them with a past, we create a cushion or a pillow for their emotions, and consequently, we can control them better.

What memories are to the individual, history is for the group of individuals that we call society or culture. There exists a grand narrative in which we see ourselves to be a part. Within this story we are not simply a part of the existing group but also among those members long dead. It is self-identification.

Just as Dr. Tyrell observed in Blade Runner, controlling how people perceive that history is a key part of controlling them. This is why determining the history curriculum in any school system is critical for those wanting their view of the society to be the dominant one. It is much easier to teach children the history you want believed than to convince adults that the history that they were taught was wrong.

In 1985 a television mockumentary appeared called, “The History of White People in America” presented by comedian Martin Mull. In one scene there is a class where the teacher asks the students to tell their heritage. The black student tells the typical African-American narrative of slavery and emancipation. The Jewish-American student gives the typical Ellis Island story. The white boy she asks is at a loss and described how his family first lived on Elm Street and then moved to Maple Street. The non-white children have a grand narrative of the heart, but the white kids have nothing.

This scene illustrates what historian Professor Niall Ferguson wrote concluding his book, Civilization: The West and the Rest: “…the biggest threat to Western Civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity – and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.”

Pusillanimity is the vice of being timid and cowardly and thus not living up to one’s full potential. So if we go back a hundred years in America we find the grand white narrative of pilgrim forefathers, invention and industrialisation, and Western expansion. In Britain, we see the glorification of an empire upon which the sun never set. Today, those heroes of the past are seen as the villainous murderers of natives and the enslavers of Negros. No wonder the “white race” seems to recoil from its history. The ignorant bury themselves in modern consumption and the learned give only apologies for fear of offending someone. To speak openly and proudly of this narrative is to risk accusations of racism or white supremacy – so best not to mention it.

Imagine if we were visited by an alien race that was a thousand years ahead of us technologically. There are some who welcome such a prospect and look to the stars for salvation. Others fear the threat of hostile invasion from an advanced alien force.

How would these alien visitors perceive humanity? Would they see us as an inferior species and benevolently seek to help bring us enlightenment? Would they teach us their philosophy, introduce their wondrous machines into society, establish advanced government institutions, and extend our ability to produce food, end diseases, and prolong life spans.

Or would they see us as an inferior species fit only for the most menial of tasks? Would they enslave us as a cheap labour force, take our lands from us, defile our great monuments or take them away to their planet. We would fight, but the harder we fought the more ruthlessly they would fight back, especially if we posed a constant danger to their civilians.

The first depiction of such an event came in 1898 with the publication of The War of the Worlds by HG Wells. The author speculated what if Britain was invaded by a superior technology just as it had invaded other less advanced countries. But Wells had the over-simplified view that comes with the history of the heart.

British and American imperialism cannot be so easily reduced to fit either the benevolent bringers of enlightenment or the ruthless genocidal conquerors, although both narratives have been spun and propagated. To focus exclusively on the good creates an appearance of racism whereas highlighting only the bad is to become the victim of racism as the white devil.

Like the alien visitors with technology and social systems a millennium in advance of our own, so too were the European visitors a millennium ahead of the peoples that they encountered. In such a situation the outcome does not bode well for the primitives. If the visitors are predominantly benevolent, then they destroy the native culture. If they are predominantly hostile, then they destroy the native people. There is no version of the story in which the natives are not victims and the visitors not victimizers. It’s just the way the deck is stacked.

Part of the white man’s narrative is our much over-looked “Never Again”. The phrase is the motto for the Jewish Defence League and refers to “never again will we allow another Holocaust”. The same concept emerges among Feminists who will “never again” be relegated to the kitchen or the African-American “never again” returning to slavery and discrimination.

The white man’s “never again” is boldly expressed in the song “Rule Britannia” which declares that Britons shall never be slaves. The song first appeared in 1740 during a critical period in Anglo-American history. Here’s the story…

During the decline of the Roman Empire, people sought refuge from the barbarian raiders on the great estates of the wealthy in exchange for work. This evolved into the feudal system of the Middle-Ages when most people lived short, ignorant, and miserable lives on the feudal estate. However in Britain things were slightly different. The Celtic and Anglo-Saxon tribes of Britain were largely free until the Norman invasion when feudalism was imposed upon the people as part of the conquest, but the spirit of freedom remained.

In time, this kernel of freedom grew and became empowered through the forces of the free market, the rise of mass communication through the printing press, and republican government in the Seventeenth Century. By the time Rule Britannia was penned we are seeing the rise of the common man from slavery moving closer to full expression in the ever growing middle-class challenging the noble order.

From the ideas of the Enlightenment to their manifestation as action during the Romantic Era emerges the central idea of Classical Liberal thought and modern Libertarianism. I am an individual, I am free to make my own choices, and I shall never be enslaved.

This is our “never again”. We shall never again be serfs on a plantation. We shall never again be slaves to the state. This spirit of defiant individuals is what is fuelling the modern global libertarian movement. Those of us who know our history possess an extended memory that transcends the limited boundaries of our lives. We “remember” the slavery that was and how it was fought against and freedom secured. We say “never again” as the signs along the road to serfdom present themselves with ever more frequency.

Yes, some of the people who first made that statement owned Negro slaves and some even made their fortunes trading in them. What is forgotten is that as soon as the realisation dawned that these comparatively childlike primitives, a thousand years behind us technologically, were in fact human, the abolitionist movement began in full force almost over-night. Britain and America turned its back on one of the most profitable industries of the day and fought through the marketplace of ideas and with gunboats to stop the global slave trade. Although the causes behind the American Civil War are debatable, many individuals signed-up to fight and die not just to preserve the Union, but also to free the slaves. White Britons and Americans died so that black men could be free.

So when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown publically apologised for Britain’s role in the global slave trade what he should have said was, “You’re welcome”. But that does not fit in with the popular narrative required of the penitent descendants of the white devils.

The French philosopher Voltaire famously said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”, recognising a human psychological need for the divine, likewise he said that history is a fable agreed upon. This too is a psychological necessity. Each of us carries within ourselves our unique sense of the history of the people we instinctive claim to be our own. It is our own unique history of the heart. Some stories may be vaguer than others and some truer to the history of the head than others. Like the boy and his “King Billy” in my opening story, the history may be propagandistic nonsense, but it serves a purpose. It’s the fable that binds his community together and the same holds true for national cultures.

As for my country, the United States, it likes the fable of being a nation of immigrants. Of course it’s not true. My ancestors were not immigrants to the United States. My story does not fit-in with the nationally accepted narrative. My ancestors were colonist landing on a rocky shore surrounded by a mysterious dense forest from which they built the Plymouth Plantation. It’s more than a question of semantics to recognise that a colonist arriving in a wilderness is not an immigrant arriving in a city. Likewise, the migrants from one part of Britain arriving in another part of Britain are not immigrants. Those people who called themselves the “True Americans” in the 1860’s and their descendants are being white-washed from history in favour of the more popular “nation of immigrants” identity.

I agree with Niall Ferguson that our culture’s pusillanimity will be our downfall. In the name of timidity and cowardice we no longer teach our national story to our children except in the negative. Some participants seek to distance themselves from the perceived sins of our fathers, such as the Scottish National Party trying to teach a history of Scotland that excludes the disproportionately large role the Scots played in the Empire. Another example comes from the city of Portland, Oregon where a statue of a pioneer family intended for the entrance to the history museum was relegated to a residential neighbourhood for fear of offending the Indians. The message to the people of the Anglosphere is clear. Reject your history, denounce the Empire, and condemn the Western Expansion. or be damned as right-wing racists. My answer to that is no.

I am descended from the Scottish Royal House of Dunkeld, the English Royal House of Plantagenet, and the English noble House of Percy. My ancestors landed on Plymouth Rock, one of whom was the first governor of Massachusetts, another ancestor took the first British prisoner of war in the American War of Independence, at least three great-grandfathers fought for the Union during the Civil War, one of whom was the cousin of one of the fathers of American literature, and my grand-father fought in the Great War. I am a proud British-American and “my people” in Britain and America literally created the modern world through their imagination, invention, industry, enterprise, and perseverance. That’s my story. What’s yours?

The RMS Titanic and the Romantic Twilight

Today is the 15^th of April 2012, the one-hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. I’m sure memorials will be held in Britain, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. 1,517 people died in the tragedy. Not meaning to sound crass, but by the standards of deaths in the century that followed this number is quite low. So why does this event stand-out? I do not believe that it is just about the body count. It’s about what the Titanic has come to represent. At the risk of appearing melodramatic, the sinking of the Titanic represents the sinking of Western Civilization itself.

This is the story of two centuries, the long Nineteenth Century (1776-1929) and the Twentieth (1929-present) or what I like to call the Romantic Era and the Socialist Era, though some people prefer the terms Modern and the Post-Modern.

The dominant political ideology of the Nineteenth Century is now called Classical Liberalism and the primary economic policy is now called free market capitalism. Both emerged from the Scottish Enlightenment. These ideologies were base on the premise of individualism and upholding the Natural Rights of life, liberty, and property. It could just as easily be called the age of heroes for it was a time when self-sufficient individuals were free to carve their own place in the world and in history and did so.

By contrast the 20^th Century displays a distinct lack of confidence that at times festered into outright panic. This is understandable considering the unprecedented levels of emerging crisis. There was World War I, the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Great Depression, World War II, the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, the Cold War, and now we have the fear of global terrorism. I call this the Socialist Era because now more than in the previous century people look to the government to save them from their fears in the form of social and economic central planning. To fund this salvation, governments tax, borrow, and spend more than ever before and in many countries the public sector is larger than the private sector. The public sector in Britain is now larger than the public sector in Communist China.

I call the transition period between these two eras the Romantic Twilight which dates from 1900-1929. It was during this period when the confidence that characterised the Anglosphere during the Romantic Period began to waiver and the enemies of the Romantic began their ascendency.

The symbolism surrounding the Titanic characterises the split between these two eras. For the Romantic it was a tragedy because it symbolised the failure of our aspirations. For the anti-Romantic post-moderns it symbolised the fall that comes with arrogance. This is a view that has been expressed in many of the countless songs, films, and television programs that have been produced. As recently as James Cameron’s film Titanic this same view emerges and is used to create of false picture of the upper-class passengers.

I found this article 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.

For us, the denizens of the Socialist Era, it probably is difficult for us to conceive the orientation to reality that characterised the Romantic Era. It is much easier to stick to the stereotypes that we are familiar with and portray the events aboard the Titanic as the sort of class warfare that Cameron depicts.

This is called creating a frame, or context, for the narrative. We may frame the story of the Titanic in the Romantic mode and glorify the courage and the morn the tragedy of the person’s involved, or we can frame it according to the socialist narrative in which the wealthy industrialists arrogantly thought that they has created an unsinkable ship and they paid for their arrogance with their lives and the lives of the lower class passengers as innocent victims of this arrogance. If this was a modern tragedy, they would no doubt be calling for greater government regulation to ensure people are no longer the victims of rich industrialists more concerned with profit than with saving lives.

Recently another interesting narrative has emerged from the conspiracy theory crowd. Socialism needs money to work, but as an economic system it does not create wealth, it consumes it. One means to generate revenue apart from taxation is by manipulating interest rates and thus control the money supply. Over time this creates inflation and devalues the currency, but if you can be among the first to get this newly created money before it devalues, then there is a profit to be made – quite literally. Governments accomplish this through a privately owned central bank.

The wealthy men behind the formation of America’s central bank, The Federal Reserve, supposedly faced opposition to their plans from three men who had the wealth, power, and influence to challenge them: John Jacob Astor, Isidor Strauss, and Benjamin Guggenheim. Coincidentally, all three men died on the Titanic. The conspiracy theorists posit that this was no coincidence.

My personal narrative for the disaster is that the Romantic Era was one of boldness, confidence, and faith in both humanity and in truth. The Titanic disaster was one of a series events beginning with the public outcry against the events of the Boer War in 1900 and culminating in World War I that undermined that public confidence and essentially bloodied the waters for the sharks.

Throughout the 1920’s confidence continued to ebb away until the final crushing blow came with the stock market crash in 1929. After this point, supporters of the Romantic values and virtues became a joke to be misrepresented and parodied at best and non-politically correct enemies of the people at worst.

Since then we have seen a gradual decline in standards. A standard presumes that there is a right way and a wrong way. To put it in more philosophical terms, there is virtue and vice, good and evil, true and false. The Romantic Era believed in standards. There were standards of behaviour, dress, education, conduct, and belief. The Socialist Era sees the imposition of standards as being judgemental, unfair, small-minded, and bigoted. As a result we have seen a decline in standards, particularly when it comes to matters of character.

I began this essay with the melodramatic assertion that the sinking of the Titanic symbolises the fall of Western Civilization. I think people are drawn to the imagery associated with that period of history and the standards that made it possible, but at the same time it is alien to them. The sinking ship is the sinking of those people and their rules.

The oikophobics of the Twentieth Century seem to glibly celebrate its demise beneath a sombre veneer. The post-modern Romantics on the other hand mourn the loss of a world that was where men were gentlemen and women were ladies. To them, the corridors of the Titanic seem a far cry from the vulgarity depicted in modern reality television. We wonder what life would be like in a world where people had that kind of self-confidence in themselves, in each other, and their society and culture again. And we know that without that kind of self-confidence we as a civilization are most assuredly doomed.

Twilight Zone Episode: Number 12 Looks Just Like You

This is one of my favourite Twilight Zone episodes and I thought for a change of pace I would share it with my readers.

The Plot (from Wikipedia)

In a future society, all young adults go through a process known as "the Transformation," in which each person's body and face are changed to mimic a physically attractive design chosen from a small selection of numbered models. The process gives everyone a beautiful appearance, slows deterioration due to age and extends a person's lifespan, and makes the recipient immune to any kind of disease.

The motive of the Transformation is social harmony. According to Professor Sig, a psychologist with the Transformation service, "Years before, wiser men than I…saw that physical unattractiveness was one of the factors that made men hate, so they charged the finest scientific minds with the task of eliminating ugliness in mankind."

18-year-old Marilyn Cuberle decides not to undergo the Transformation, seeing nothing wrong with her unaltered appearance. Nobody else can understand Marilyn's decision, and those around her are confused by her displeasure with the conformity and shallowness of contemporary life. Her "radical" beliefs were fostered by her now-deceased father, who gave Marilyn banned books and came to regret his own Transformation years earlier and committed suicide upon the loss of his identity.

Despite continued urging from family, doctors, and her best friend, Marilyn is still adamant about refusing the operation. She insists that the leaders of society don't care whether people are beautiful or not, they just want everyone to be the same. Her pleas about the "dignity of the individual human spirit" and how "when everyone is beautiful, no one will be" have no impact. After being driven to tears by the inability of anyone to understand how she feels, she is put through the procedure and (like all the others) is enchanted with the beautiful result.

Dr. Rex, who operated on Marilyn, comments about how some people have problems with the idea of the Transformation but that "improvements" to the procedure now guarantee a positive result, thus indicating that there may be modifications made to the mind as well. Marilyn reappears, looking and thinking exactly like her best friend Valerie. "And the nicest part of all, Val," she gushes, "I look just like you!" The last shots are of her, admiring herself in the mirror and smiling.

A clip

 

Thoughts

The whole point of science fiction in general and the Twilight Zone in particular is to get you to see the world from a different perspective with all sorts of possibilities either wonderful or terrible.   From when the episode first aired in 1964 to the present we can see how our society is moving ever closer to the society depicted in the story.  It is a question of degrees and with each passing year our world increasingly resembles Marilyn’s. 

The author of the Wikipedia article noted, “It is believed that dating, looking sexy, sex, and marrying or mating is done often, (Val comments on how everyone marries 10 or 12 times). The society is probably sex-centered, since Lana, Val and Marilyn (after being made sexy) are only wearing some leggings and tank swimsuits.”  Since the dawn of humankind women have always used sex and beauty to their advantage.  Here we have a sort of hyper-feminised culture where this natural tendency is elevated to an extreme at the expense of everything else.  Likewise, many of the men portrayed are also feminized.

Notice in the clip the authors that Marilyn had been reading and Dr. Friend denounced as illegal smut.  Most were Romantic poets.  Now what if, just what if, there really are secret masters.  What if they discovered that they did not have to outlaw reading great writers, or certain philosophies, or understanding history and politics.  What if they discovered that if you give people enough bread and circuses that such knowledge becomes deemed unnecessary in fulfilling their desires --  to be beautiful, sexy, popular, and to have fun.  What if they discovered that they did not have to outlaw or burn such ideas, but just make them irrelevant so that people chose not to read them.  Sure, you could have the intellectuals, but they would be weirdoes tolerated by society. 

The thing is, during the Nineteenth Century, Charles Dickens went on a sold-out international lecturing tour and Lord Byron was a rock star.  Sure, Charles Dickens did not sell as well as the authors of the penny-dreadfuls, but he was popular nonetheless.  He was not quarantined as an “intellectual” as if he was different from everyone else.  Going to a Dickens lecture was mainstream entertainment.

In Celtic faerie tales, the sidh or faeries would cast a spell, usually over themselves, so that they appeared radiantly beautiful to humans.  This deception was called a glamour.  This Scots Gaelic word has moved into common modern usage to mean beautiful, alluring, or having sex appeal, but the word still retains its meaning of illusion and deception.

What motivates a teenager?  All humans need food, shelter, clothing, and property and humans often judge each other according to how well they can acquire these necessities of life.  It is not just about having these things but also having the knowledge and character traits that facilitate such success.  In the real world knowledge is power and a benefit.  But teenagers do not live in the real world.  Their needs are provided for them.  They are judged by the adults by their grades and by their peers by their popularity.  These involve two entirely different skill sets.  Among the teenagers, the geek is the outcast and the beauty gets the crown, but as adults traditionally the geek gets the high paying job and the beauty usually has to marry well to survive.  The value of glamour is a glamour, a passing illusion.

But what if adult life was more like high school?  What if the State took care of you in your adult life as your parents had when you were a teenager.  Wouldn’t the adult world become more like high school where the air-headed bimbo had a high social value because she was hot and the intellectual was an outcast?  I’m not suggesting that society has reached that point, however there is a very large segment of the population conditioned to that way of thinking and it is portrayed often in the mass media as desirable. 

I have read arguments among the feminists regarding a split in their ranks.  One group sees sexuality as female empowerment and another as female denigration, but lets face it, women get more status in society, even among other women, by being sexy than by being a stodgy feminist intellectual.  In his book, Letters From the Earth, Mark Twain supposes that if by magic the old men denouncing sexuality were made young for the day that they would spend that day trying to get some.  I suspect the same could be said of stodgy feminists.

In this episode we discover that Marilyn’s father had committed suicide after the having the procedure.  This was before changes were made to the mind as well as the body.  You can imagine why this might be necessary as the mind is essentially rejecting the new body, just as the body might reject a transplanted organ.  The mind has to accept the notion that being beautiful and sexy is the highest of values in order to fully appreciate the new flesh, but in the end it is only an illusion.

I can see how the benefits offered by the transformation can free mankind from the tyranny of the flesh.  I’ve discovered as I have grown older that my mind has not changed.  As a single man with no offspring my lifestyle has not really changed since my youth.  What has changed is my body.  Like gender dysphoria  where a person believes themselves to be inhabiting the body of the wrong gender, we find our minds trapped in a body of the wrong age.  The mind is young and nimble but the body is old and with that outward appearance comes the social reactions and judgements.  The actions of a young man that society my deem cool and sexy are viewed as creepy when done by an older man.  So age forces you to grow-up and to adopt other values more in keeping with reality.  Would eternal youth produce a society of teenagers where sexuality, status, and fun become the most important things in life?  Perhaps.

Rod Serling closes the episode with these words:

Portrait of a young lady in love - with herself. Improbable? Perhaps. But in an age of plastic surgery, body building and an infinity of cosmetics, let us hesitate to say impossible. These and other strange blessings may be waiting in the future, which after all, is the Twilight Zone.

The Deceit of Sentimentality

The Victorians were not big fans of sentimentality. This has been misrepresented in the popular stereotype of the aloof, stodgy, and unemotional Victorians. One thing I find amazing when reading many Victorian writers is how well they understood human psychology, the works of Samuel Smiles comes immediately to mind. His book Self Help (1855) began the self-improvement movement of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

In 1972, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the idea of a cognitive bias, defined as “a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations, leading to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.”

Since then, about a hundred cognitive biases have been identified by psychologists. The Victorians may not have had such a fancy word as “cognitive bias” but perhaps they had a greater understanding for the human capacity for self-deceit. This concept was widely understood as sentimentality and discouraged in Victorian society as a vice.

Sentimentalism describes an orientation to reality where a person believes that how they feel about reality takes precedent over what is actually true. Sounds silly, doesn’t it, but it is an easy trap to fall into when a person confuses their subjective feelings of reality with reality itself.

I wonder how many people define good and evil according to their feelings. The good is that which makes me feel good and evil is that which makes me feel bad. So, liberals are good because their idea of free school lunches makes me feel good and conservatives are evil because their idea of taking away school lunch programs makes me feel bad. In such a situation, it does not matter if the conservatives, for the sake of this example, can make rational and supported arguments as to why school lunches create more harm than good. Nothing said would change the fact that the idea of not having school lunches makes me feel bad. This is sentimentality in action.

Oscar Wilde wrote, "Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live." This is the path of sentimentality. When a person believes that their feelings take precedent not only over reality but also over the feelings of others, then we are dealing with a person with a severe ego problem, or what philosophy calls solipsism, simply defined as person who believes that they are the centre of the universe and other people are nothing more than animated scenery.

I do not believe that anyone would consciously subscribe to solipsism, but their actions imply this to be their unconscious driving belief. We find this in people who decry the speck in the eye of another, but fail to see the mote in their own eye. A phrase found on the internet, “Your rights end where my feelings begin” also illustrates this perspective.

Words like sentimentality, ego, selfishness, feelings, solipsism, and even arrogance are all part of the same conceptual package. Most of these are considered negative traits with the exception of sentimentality and feelings which in themselves are not bad things. The problem comes when they are put into positions of cognitive power within the psyche; when feelings about reality take authority over the rational thoughts about reality.

Think of it this way. Reason is the king on his throne. Feelings are the advisor whispering in the king’s ear. These suggestions are considered by the king and either acted upon or not according to his judgement. Sentimentality is the court jester who makes us laugh or weep at a movie or indulges fond thoughts of nostalgia, but ultimately the emotions inspired by him are not derived from reality. The advisor is a great advisor. The jester is a great jester. However, neither is qualified to be king.

While the Romantic Era denounced sentimentality the current era has embraced it. People are socially conditioned to it. People are encouraged to follow their hearts, to just believe, and express their emotions. In films, all the guy has to do is express his feelings and the girl comes running. It does not work that way in real life, but we have been socially conditioned to believe it does.

In politics, evidence has shown that more people vote for or against someone according to how they feel about a candidate rather than according to policies. This was never as apparent as in the 2008 US Presidential election where Barack Obama was granted almost divine status because of how he made people feel. He was even given the Nobel Peace Prize less than a month after he took office. In the three years since, his interventionist military policies have been no different than those of his predecessor, George W. Bush who was universally reviled for his use of the military. In the same vein, the global anti-war movement was a powerful force during the Bush presidency, but vanished under Obama despite the fact that he increased troops in Afghanistan. Why? Because people felt bad about Bush, but they feel good about Obama. It’s all about sentimentality.

Another feature of modern sentimentality in society and politics is the use of emotional human shields to defend or promote a political position. These are people that society has good feelings about that a political group associates themselves with so that it is impossible to challenge their politics without looking like you are attacking the people that society loves.

So you cannot be against the welfare state without appearing like you hate the poor. You cannot be against state regulation of the internet when its proponents are doing it “for the children”. You cannot be in favour of English in California without looking like you hate immigrants or that you are a racist. In Britain, you cannot be in favour of cuts to the National Health Service without looking like you want to get rid of nurses. You cannot be against government waste without looking like you hate teachers. You cannot be against political correctness without appearing like you have no consideration for others.

If we define the moral as that which makes us feel good, and we associate ourselves with members of society that make people feel good, then we are on the side of the angels; and anyone who stands against us is evil, and evil must be destroyed so we can all live happy lives together.

In America this largely describes the liberal-type, but the conservative equivalent is not immune to sentimentality. The difference is that the Right is largely Christian and their ideas of morality come not from feelings but from religious doctrine. That is not to say that they do not have strong feelings about that or that they do not use it justify pre-existing feelings. Sentimentality is indeed present among conservatives, however unlike with liberals it is at least counter-balanced with a fixed traditional religious doctrine rather than whim-based emotionalism and social conditioning.

The libertarians tend to draw their moral foundations from secular philosophy. Many of those philosophers were Christians, but others were Atheists or Deists. Religion does not play a major role as the focus is primarily on immediate practicalities. Theirs is the belief that the moral is the rational, whether the rules of reality were of a divine source or not is largely irrelevant to the fact that they are true. This lack of sentimentality makes libertarians easy targets for the sentimental who paint them as uncaring because they do not subscribe to the same emotional motivations that they do.

The archetypal sentimentalist is a creature of ego who cannot perceive the world beyond their own feelings, which they feel very deeply and sometimes to the extreme. They exist trapped within a cage of limited perception where they cannot see reality beyond their feelings. In practice, they treat their feelings as a sort of seventh sense [the sixth sense is balance btw] that gives them insight into the world rather than recognising that how they feel is just how they feel and nothing more. They confuse the internal world and the external world, the subjective and the objective, fantasy and reality.

This creature is the Twentieth Century norm and manifests itself to varying degrees in a huge number of variants in all political, social, and religious orientations. The Victorians were right to perceive this level of self-delusion to be a vice. The question is how does one fight a plague that is so wide-spread? I accept that it is not easy. Who wants to tell the crying person to shut-up. She and all her friends might think she is crying for the poor trees destroyed by evil loggers, but you know that she is actually being sentimental and only crying for herself. Who wants to be the cold, cruel voice of reality and be the bad guy for what is right?

So what can you do to save society from this virus? Nothing. Society can mean one of two things. It’s either a word used to describe the interactions between a number of individuals or it’s a collection of individuals on which we impose our unique beliefs about it, just like I’ve done in this essay. According to both definitions, very few people have the means to even try to affect it. But what you do have power over is yourself.

This is where the Church of the Romantic comes into play. The whole point of a philosophy or religion is to make yourself better. In this instance this means learning to recognise sentimentality in yourself and others and not be ruled by it. Learn to recognise the difference between real and fake emotions.

When your girl says she loves you and you feel all gooey inside, that’s real. After she has dumped you and you sit alone in your room mourning what you think what coulda, shoulda, woulda been if only, that’s fake. Real emotional responses are to real things. Fake emotions are responses to your idea of things and therefore have more to do with what is going on in your head than anything real world. Real emotions are sudden reactions to your perception of external stimuli and usually seem to hit you from nowhere.

Here’s another example. When you are watching TV and the commercial comes on with the starving kids in Africa and you get all choked-up, that’s fake. You are getting emotional over your idea of starving kids in general and not the reality of a specific kid you know and have a relationship with starving to death. Yes, there are children starving in Africa. That is real and something can and should be done about it. This action can be accomplished without sentimentality; the kind that makes you reach for your wallet for any aid organisation that comes along without thinking things through.

Edward Bernays, the father of modern marketing and propaganda, understood that people are motivated by their feelings.   If you can control how people feel about a concept, and by concept I mean their idea of a person, place, or thing, then you can control them. These are the strings that control the puppet.  This also works if you know how they feel already and match whatever you are selling to those feelings. If successful, then people will think that this manipulated concept of reality in their minds is in fact reality itself. You see this at work most often in advertising, media, politics, and the cult of personality.

The goal of the Romantic is to condition yourself to see and passionately feel what is and not be led astray by feelings of what is imagined. Yes, we can indulge our sentimentality and it can even help to fuel these passions. Just don’t let the jester sit on the throne lest the kingdom come to ruin.

You Say You Want A Revolution

This past week I was watching some video taken during the Occupy Movement’s demonstrations in Washington DC. The key video is below with the poster’s description.

Occupy DC protesters tried to force entry into the Washington Convention Center on Friday, where Americans for Prosperity was hosting its “Defending the American Dream Summit.” The protesters also formed roadblocks, surrounding the convention center and only allowing non-luxury cars to pass.

What struck me most about this footage was the sheer naiveté of the protestors. I think that this is in fact one of the key issues of our time and needs to be addressed.  In my writings on metaphysics, I explore the three types of reality: Objective Reality, the world that is, Subjective Reality, the world as we perceive it, and the Artificial Reality, the world humans have created. What we see here is a crisis in Artificial Reality.

Imagine a snowy day but you are nice and warm in your heated home padding about wearing next to nothing. This is Artificial Reality. A huge and complex chain of events has made possible the luxury of heated accommodation that you take for granted, but the grim truth is that without the thousands of links that comprise the supply chain you would freeze to death, or at least be less comfortable.

The metaphysical crisis epidemic in our society is that this great machine has become so vast and complex that anyone without a basic knowledge of history and economics has no idea how it functions, is psychologically overwhelmed, and emotionally unprepared. To them, the act of simply turning on the heat creates the heat as if by magic. Of course that is not literally true, but in terms of attitudes and behaviours it might as well be.

As you look around your world, you will no doubts see all sorts of things from bottles to books to bed sheets. All these things are the result of human production involving thousands, if not millions, of people. This concept was illustrated in the essay “I, Pencil” by Leonard Read in 1958 which discusses all the various production requirements it takes to produce a pencil. Artificial Reality is just as vast, complex, and interconnected as the ecosystems we find in Objective Reality.

If you were to ask a child where money comes from, the child may answer, “from Dad’s wallet”. In their tiny subjective world this makes perfect sense because that’s where they see it come from. This is their immediate contact with money. They do not understand the labour markets, budgetary constraints, or other complex economic systems that brought that cash to the wallet. If Dad refuses to give his money, this is perceived as an act of refusal rather than what might be an economic necessity.

I believe that our understanding of the three “realities” of the Objective, Subjective, and Artificial is critical and we are constantly balancing the three. For many people the balance is off and too much emphasis is placed on the Subjective. This predominantly subjective orientation to reality produces solipsism where the world is evaluated and acted upon solely on the basis of personal perception, experience, and feelings. They have in essence a child mind and this is what I see in most modern protestors, including the Occupy crowd.

I have identified seven forms of power. Power can be defined as the means by which we work our will in the world. The seven include: characteristic, physical, material, social, legislative, titular, and time. I want to focus here on social power.

When protestors gather they are exerting social power. The more numbers they can produce the more powerful the protest. A large number of people with a singular intent can be a very intimidating force if you are not one of them and a strong visceral event if you are. This makes them dangerous.  It is essentially a show of force and a threat. That is what a protest is, whether you call it peaceful or otherwise.

Unfortunately, post-1950’s protestors in the West, particularly in America, do not see this fact. In understanding Artificial Reality it is important to recognise a luxury rather than take it for granted. Objective Reality is the norm and anything good beyond the norm is a luxury. So a man-made fire in a cave against the cold is a luxury. Likewise in human conflict the kindness of an oppressor is a luxury and not a moral given. If a child punches an adult man and the man does not respond with physical force, then he is being kind. The child is foolish to think otherwise.

Ghandi and Martin Luther King both successfully used non-violence as a tactic to achieve their goals. People tend not to realise that it was a tactic and one that worked well against the sentiments of the British and American governments respectively. The same tactics would have failed against Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union.  Historically, revolutionary change is achieved through extreme violence. That is the norm and anything better is a luxury.  Modern protestors in the West take the luxury of the non-violent protest for granted as the norm when it is not.

The June Rebellion of 1832 is known to most people through the book and the musical Les Miserable. When the students took to the barricades they did so with rifles in hand and prepared to die for their cause.  Contrast that concept with the Occupy protestors. Their tactic was to harass their fellow citizens. This included those either going to a public gathering, as is their Natural Right and a right as per the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and by blocking traffic, particularly what were deemed luxury cars. The protestors appear to believe that they could engage in these actions with impunity and responded with outrage when their victims did retaliate.  Whereas the students of 1832 fully expected to shoot and to be shot at.  They understood the basic fundamental of action/reaction as any adult brain would.

I’ve seen this same behaviour in footage from protests in London where a pregnant woman was injured by the mounted police and a demonstrator expressed moral outrage. In another video from the same Occupy protest above the camera man is questioning the morality of the protestors bringing children along. He did not challenge the protestors or their right to protest. He was simply pointing-out what I am illustrating here. The reality is that all protests have the potential to cause physical harm. Therefore, it is not a safe place for pregnant women, children, and those who are not prepared to be hurt for their cause, and that harm is in itself a luxury compared with the historical norm where you would possibly be killed protesting your cause.

There are powerful forces at work in world. There are governments who command armed soldiers adept at killing resistors. There are mega-corporations, media moguls, central bankers, and special interest groups who have monetary resources beyond your wildest dreams at their disposal. There are entrenched politicians, adept at manipulations, which use their positions to acquire vast wealth and influence. All these forces are aligned to promote their agenda and the status quo. Then you have your fellow citizens who just want to live peaceful, productive, and plentiful lives – yes, the “comfort zone” is also a powerful force.

In the face of this you have a growing number of people calling for revolution. The most visible are those belonging to a protest subculture dating back to the 60’s. These are people who enjoy the thrill and group dynamic of protesting. They hold up their signs, make outrageous demands, harass anyone in their way, and then go home patting themselves on the back on how they are changing the world. More and more we see people joining this subculture who find that vandalism is also fun and they can get away with it because of the perceived moral imperative of their cause.

Looking back over the history of this protest subculture we find that they have been amazingly ineffective. This is not hard to believe given their naiveté. They are successful in expressing their opinions, but not in changing the world. They did not end the Viet Nam War, the Cold War, the Gulf War, or the current wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. They have not changed monetary policy or even affected grand social change through their protests.  For the men and women in power playing Risk or Monopoly on the global scale, the concerns of protestors means nothing unless it serves their interests.

A common trend seen over the last century is illustrated by protests against short-haul railway fares in the United States during the 1890’s.  For long-haul fares multiple operators brought fares down due to competition, however for short-haul there was sometimes only a single operator in a particular area and this made fares more expensive.  In answer to the protests against high local fares the United States government created the Interstate Commerce Commission to address the problem.  The victorious protestors, satisfied that the issue was now sorted, moved on to other concerns.  Thomas Cooley, a lawyer for the railroad industry, was named the first ICC commissioner in charge of regulating the railroad industry.  The solution to the fares issue was to raise the costs of long-haul travel to match local levels thus increasing the corporate profits for the long-haul railroad companies.

The pattern is this.  People protest something in society that they do not like, if government takes notice they agree to create an agency for dealing with the problem, the protesters see this as a victory and move on because they have no real vested interest in problem, and then those who do have a vested interest, such as the companies and industries affected by the problem, move into the newly created government agency and regulate themselves to their benefit and against the interests of potential competition and the public at large.  So when the protesters “win”; they loose.

Where the protest subculture has succeeded is in promoting their ideology in the fields of education, media, and politics, but once there they are subject to the same social and market forces that they preach against and thus are perceived as hypocrites biting the hand that feeds them, but still taking the food and becoming very wealthy and influential in the process.

The Occupy Movement has achieved a great deal in raising public awareness and bringing key issues into public debate. Unfortunately, the group lacked any real ideological cohesion; many of those who rallied to the banner had no understanding of the complex social and economic systems of Artificial Reality so they made outrageous and childish demands like, “abolish money”; some engaged in acts of violence and disorder with no achievable goal in mind and with no understanding or accepting of the consequences of those actions. In other words, the movement devolved into a university frat party.

Let’s take a look at a couple of true revolutionaries, Lenin and Trotsky. They were chess players. The people of the Occupy Movement would be their pawns, fodder to throw into the fray as foot-soldiers. When Lenin returned from exile to Finland Station he declared that the Communist Revolution was to be non-violent. Why? Because the other side had all the guns. Once he drew a significant portion of the military to his cause, only then did the revolution become violent, as with all revolutions with few exceptions. It is estimated between five to nine million people died in the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War that followed.  The pattern in revolutions is this.  All the small dogs join forces against the big dog.  Once the big dog is defeated they turn on each other.  This is why revolutionary outcomes are so unpredictable and deadly.

So you say you want a revolution. You want to tear down the system. Fine, but remember the system has the guns, the money, the power, the resources, the influence, and it does not want to be torn down.   Also, whatever it is that you are revolting against might just be connected through the interconnected supply chain to something that you either hold dear or are dependent upon.  If you go ahead with the revolution,  first you will be ignored, then you will be ridiculed, and then gassed and beaten. These are all luxuries, acts of kindness and tolerance. Your protests are nothing more than a minor annoyance played for entertainment value on the 24 hour news cycle and then forgotten. If you become too violent, then you will be hunted down and shot as terrorists. Revolutions are not a game or a party, and they don’t end like in the movies.

Successful revolutionaries play it smart. They understand the Artificial Reality and how the world works. They know the resources at their disposal and how to use people and materials coldly and effectively. They adopt whatever tactics are necessary with a full understanding of the effort and sacrifice required, sacrifices that they and their followers are willing to make.

Even then, most successful revolutions fail in the long-term. Lenin’s Soviet Union collapsed after only 72 years. Eighty years after the American colonist fought against a central government authority they fought each other over the same issue. The French Revolution only traded King Louis for Emperor Napoleon.

History demonstrates time and again that real change comes from cultural, social, economic, and legislative evolution, not revolution. But if you want a revolution, at least accept what you’re signing-up for and don’t go crying when you reap what you sow.

Finding the Centre — Romanticism, Equilibrium, and Masculinity in Rudyard Kipling’s “If”

When I was a child I had a vinyl recording from the folks at Disney that contained two Rudyard Kipling stories – “The Cat Who Walked By Himself” and “The Elephant’s Child” both from the The Just So Stories. I cannot say that this was the beginning of a lifelong love of Kipling’s work, but it did secure him a place in my heart and I would visit him from time to time in the decades that followed by reading (or watching) The Man Who Would be King or a poem here or there.

You might then be able to imagine my shock when I discovered from an acquaintance attending university that Kipling had been banned from the curriculum for being a racist and an imperialist. It appears that Rudyard was too politically incorrect for the 1990’s and beyond, and yet, his poem “If” was voted Britain’s favourite poem in a poll taken in 1998. Of course, I have been familiar with the poem most of my life, but it was only recently that its full measure was revealed to me.  If you need to refresh your memory of the poem click here.

In my more frivolous moments I describe myself as a preacher of the Church of the Romantic. To put that more seriously, I am an outspoken advocate and writer on the subject of the Romantic philosophy. What I mean by that is that from roughly 1776-1929 a culture dominated Western Civilization built upon the ideas of the Enlightenment. The first burst came in the form of art, what is called the Romantic Period. From there it entered the mainstream to form what today we call “the Modern World”.

In contrast, the post-Romantic Era from 1929-the present is often called the Post-Modern. I call it the Socialist Era because of the cultural shift from Romantic Individualism to Collectivist Socialism in the sense that social planning on the state level is seen as preferable to individual responsibility.

To illustrate these two cultural worldviews imagine two men walking down the street and they encounter a down-and-out homeless man. The Romantic stereotype would say, “How horrible that this man has done this to himself.” The Socialist stereotype would say, “How horrible that we live in a society that allows this to happen to this kind of person.” The Romantic sees the world as individuals and the Socialist sees it in terms of society and groups.

In my studies of the Romantic I discovered the work of the French-American cultural historian Jacques Barzun and read his book, Classic, Romantic, and Modern in which he makes a very interesting point that I had long over-looked. This is the idea of equilibrium. When I had studied the Romantic in school and university I was given a list of topics that characterised Romanticism. It included things like Nature, Love, Death, drug use, etc.. One of these qualities was extremism. This shows the ignorance of whoever compiled this list. Barzun demonstrates that Romanticism is not about extremes, rather what he calls equilibrium. 

I will confess that it is a difficult concept to grasp.  Barzun describes the Romantic as bringing "into tense equilibrium many radical diversities".  So it is not balance per se, or compromise, or even an amalgam, but rather apparent opposites in mutual existence, like light acting as both a wave and a particle.  David Hume illustrated this concept when he wrote that, "without passion, no idea has any force".  This demonstrates the equilibrium between the perceived extremes of emotion and reason.  Passion without reason has no brain and Reason without passion has no heart.  Neither extreme is desirable, so instead we seek that point of equilibrium.

For another example, Romanticism is all about the individual; however we cannot deny the legitimate demands of the group in which the individual is a part. So there needs to be an equilibrium between the extremes of the individual and the collective.  Anyone seeking to adopt the cultural philosophy that I have labelled here as “the Romantic” must focus on attaining equilibrium.

So in the Church of the Romantic is seems reasonable to adopt Kipling’s poem “If” as a sort of prayer or creed to guide us down the path of equilibrium. Here are a few lines to illustrate.

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;

The word Romantic is often associated with fancy, imagination, and delusion. The origin of this lies in the origin of the word Romantic. The word originally meant Roman-like to describe the Latin patois that would eventually become the Romance languages of French, Spanish, and Italian. In time the word Romantic came to describe the popular medieval stories in these languages. These stories usually featured supernatural creatures and persons, like dragons, fairies or wizards. So the word Romantic came to be associated with the fantastical.

There was another element to these Romances and that was action. The brave hero knight acted to reach resolution. To make a more modern example, think of Star Wars as a Romance. There are fantastic creatures and magic powers and this is what we think of when we think of Star Wars. The action seems secondary. For action films we look to Die Hard. This is unfortunate because action is at the heart of the Romantic.

Dreams and thoughts are key components of the Romantic, but we cannot forget that their purpose is to drive action. The man who makes dreams his master is the Comic-con geek who is lost in fantasy. The man who makes thoughts his aim is the academic always looking for new ideas or refining his thoughts. Neither man has balanced these dreams and thoughts with action.

Now imagine the scientist inspired by Star Trek to invent some new technology. This happens all the time. Or imagine the soldier who performs an act of heroism because he is unconsciously inspired by Captain America or Wolverine. This is the balance between the inner world of dreams and thoughts and the outer world of action required by the Romantic path. Now let’s look at the next coupling.

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

Here we are presented with extremes of Triumph and Disaster. One theory of human emotion is that there are four root emotions from which all other emotions flow and these fall into two categories. One set is reality based. These are happiness and sorrow as the gaining or loss of a value. The second set is imaginary. These are desire and fear as the imagined gaining or loss of a value. These can be divided in another way between gaining-based emotions and loosing-based emotions – Triumph and Disaster.

So how are these imposters? I remember reading an article from a man who wrote about how happy he was when he bought his first Mercedes. He felt as if he had arrived. However, this triumph was short lived because after about a month his vehicle ceased to be his Mercedes and simply became his car. Likewise when disaster strikes it is a singular event that passes and when it passes it is in the past and the only life it has comes from dwelling on its memory.

The sense of triumph may inspire your confidence to greater victories or it may make you complacent as you revel in the memory of past deeds but accomplish nothing more. The sense of disaster may cripple your confidence to inaction or it may inspire you to fight harder. But in the end all that matters are the actions of the now. Past triumphs and disasters once passed are equally nothing but memory and both are imposters to the present. So the trick in balancing the extremes of life’s ups and downs, whether you get the bear or the bear gets you, lies in accepting that there is no bear. All that exists is how you choose to feel about it.

The previous two examples dealt with the balance between the inner world of thoughts and emotions and the outer world of action and consequence. The last example I would like to give pertains to social equilibrium.

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

Again we are presented with opposites and we are admonished to find the equilibrium. The word I would like to focus on here is virtue. In Aristotelian ethics a virtue is defined as a positive habit and he encourages us to cultivate these positive habits. Virtue is to be found in “the Golden Mean” which is the balance of extremes. For example, courage is a virtue however too much courage is rashness and too little courage is cowardice.

I believe what Kipling is advocating here is Pride. Now pride is an often misunderstood and ill-defined concept. Going back to Aristotle, pride is seen as the crown of virtues. It is the reward for living a virtuous life. The opposite is arrogance where someone demands the reward without earning it.

So pride is a self-belief and self-confidence born of experience. When a man is admired by the group it is very easy for him to be swayed by them because he wants to keep the praise coming. The same holds true when important people treat him as being important. It’s natural to want to keep that positive feedback coming. The danger lies in abandoning those virtues which are the source of his pride in order to please the crowd or the king. When this occurs his pride transforms into arrogance.

I mentioned my humorous self-conceit as being a preacher in the Church of the Romantic and that the Romantic period ran from 1776-1929. Well, I also dress the part. My clothes are all custom made from 1880’s patterns from my trousers, to my waistcoat, to my frock coat. So you can imagine that I get noticed publically.

If someone on the street was to call me a cabbage, then I would certainly be puzzled. I might try to figure-out what they meant by that, but I certainly would not be hurt. Several years back I boarded a bus and some teenage girl in the back shouted, “get a grip” and she and her friends laughed. That hurt.

I have dressed in this manner for about twenty years now, though the style has been refined over time. For me, these are just my clothes and as normal to me as another’s jeans and T-shirt. Like them, I dress in a manner that suits my tastes, personality, and beliefs. This does not mean that I am immune to the social mirror. I am very much aware that I am different and I dislike it when that difference is pointed out.

So if someone was to call me a cabbage, it would be nothing to me. However, if someone was to challenge my grip on reality or perceive me as a joke then they are tapping into my innate sense of alienation from society. They are essentially putting salt into an existing wound.

Eleanor Roosevelt, who was one ugly woman, famously said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” I mention her looks because it adds gravity to the quote. Foes can only hurt you when they have an ally in your psyche. So once more we are back to the concept of pride. If you believe in yourself, and have the virtues to back-up that self-estimation, then you are inoculated against such threats of harm.

Assuming that the harm from foes is in the form of destructive criticism, we may also assume that the hurt from loving friends is constructive criticism. Nobody is perfect. Sometimes we get it wrong and sometimes it takes a friend to tell us when we are acting like a complete ass. The question is how we take it. Do we feel hurt and hold it against them, or do we take their criticism under advisement to discover if there is truth to it. Pride comes from virtue and virtue comes from balance. It may seem strange to put it this way, but if you respond to your friend with pride then you are not hurt by their remarks but grateful, because they are helping you maintain your balanced virtues and therefore your pride.

The final phrase, “If all men count with you, but none too much;” is a counter to this one. On the one hand there is criticism, either destructive or constructive, and on the other there is praise in the form of allies “counting with you”. Over the decades I have been praised as a writer. Every now and then someone comes along who praises a bit too much and too often. At this point I start to doubt their sincerity. It is good to have many friends and allies, but dangerous to be surrounded by “yes men” or to compromise yourself.

Social equilibrium is the balance between man the individual and man the social creature. Humans as a species are neither solitary tigers nor hive-minded ants but a little of both. So how does the Romantic individualist balance the needs of the self and that of the other selves that compose society?

Kipling does not give us a nice and neat answer. I do not see this as an omission on his part because there is no fixed answer. It is a question of balance. Sometimes you must walk with kings and other times you are in the crowd. Sometimes you take the rebuke and other times you take the praise. The only constant is you, how you choose to perceive, respond and act.

The Hindus teach that ours is the world of Karma. The West has mystified this concept, but all it really means is action/reaction or cause/effect. In “If”, we see Kipling repeatedly arguing for equilibrium between the inner world of thoughts and feelings and the outer world of action with the balance favouring the latter. Ours is the world of physical action with thoughts and feelings playing a vital but auxiliary role.

To this end Kipling encourages us to take risks, build something of value, and to persevere regardless of success or failure. Likewise he discourages us from being too subjective by judging the world according to sentimentality, which can often lead to self-harm and delusion. Most importantly, he encourages pride born of virtue.

The word virtue has the root vir meaning Man. You see, men are not born but made. Every man instinctively knows this. This is why we have the phrase “be a man” and every culture has its rites of passage into manhood. Women can just be, but Men must become and it is the balanced life of virtue that is the path to manhood.

I have argued here that Romanticism as a concept is actually masculine despite the modern belief that it is feminine. We see this in the Romantic concepts laid out by Kipling to his Victorian readers during the Romantic Twilight.   According to Matthew Sweet in his book, Inventing the Victorians, the Victorian man struggled with this crisis of masculinity just as much as modern men do. I recently discovered that my personal role model, my father, lived in the shadow of his dad just I live in the shadow of mine.

So what makes a “real man”? From the sublime to the ridiculous, these are some lyrics from the song “Now You’re A Man” by the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. “What makes a man? Is it the power in his hands? Is it his quest for glory?... Is it the woman in his arms?” These are the answers given by the modern media. Think of the stereotype of the football jock, the popular tough guy with hot girlfriend. This is the role model we have been given.  Kipling and the Romantics reject this premise.

The quest of masculinity is the quest for virtue, and this is to be found when each man finds his unique centre, his balance, his equilibrium. It is this portable inner strength that allows him to walk with kings or move in the common crowd. He does not need to curry favour to feed his ego through overt shows of power or in pursuit of fickle female admiration. Nor does he loose his way in the tumultuous waves of dreams, thoughts, or sentimentality. He is, quite simply, an oak.

It is this solid grounding of the self, born of virtue, which leads Kipling to conclude his poem with the assurance that if you can accomplish all these things:

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Who Killed the Romantic?

When I was younger, my friends and I use to sit at Denny’s till dawn solving the world’s problems over bottomless coffee and French fries. Nothing unusual about this. People have been doing it for centuries. The Son’s of Liberty use to meet in the pubs of Boston to formulate revolution, students in Parisian cafés did the same. The Salons of France, the Coffee Houses of Britain, and yes, even the American Denny’s restaurant chain all served as meeting grounds. Today, we have the internet. I would wager that 99% of all the world solving ever conducted amounted to nothing. But then there’s that one per cent.

This is the story of a group of friends, a bunch of rich college students with affluent and powerful parents, who changed the world, and it all started with regular meetings at a friend’s house in central London. Or perhaps I should describe them as co-conspirators to a murder – a murder I suspect that they would admit to with pride were they alive today. The victim here is the Romantic.

Apologies to my long-term readers, but I have to bring the others up to speed.

By Romanticism, I am referring to the zeitgeist, or temporal culture, of the era from 1776 to 1929. Historians have different methods of chopping-up history into manageable chunks from movements, to periods, to eras, to ages and providing different reasons for their choices and different labels. Sometimes it can become a nightmare of semantics.

In the early 20^th century the world changed. Some people say the old world ended with World War I, whereas I say it ended with the on-set of the Great Depression in 1929, but either way, something changed. During the 1920’s it had become fashionable to refer to this new era as “the Modern”. Culturally, the so-called Moderns were those girls who shorn their long tresses into Louise Brooks style bobs and entered the urban job market leaving their corsets behind.

The Modern was the new world labelled by the very people who lived it. The problem here is that it’s not easy to see your own age in context. Since the 1950’s we have been in the Atomic age, the Rocket age, the Computer age, and the Information age. It has become fashionable since the late 1960’s to say that we live in the Post-modern, thanks to Michael Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard.

Here’s where the semantics problem kicks in. The word Post-modern originated in the early 20^th century among philosophers who saw the 19^th Century, or the Romantic Era, as “the Modern”. Even those philosophers seeking to understand the cultural revolutions of the late 1960’s identified the Modern according to 19^th Century terms. What they appear to have missed is that the cultural shifts of the 1960’s were simply a widespread manifestation of what began in the 1920’s. So really, what we call “Modern” is really “Post-modern”, and what we call “Post-modern” is actually nothing new.

The key to understanding the shift from the Modern (Romantic) to the Post-Modern is in understanding the different zeitgeists involved between what was and what is now. The thing about culture is that it is difficult to truly see and understand when you are in it.

When I was about nineteen I was philosophising to a friend in a pub telling him how the world works. He said to me, “You were born and raised in Los Angeles; this isn’t the world. You need to get out.” He was right. We all have a hidden cultural bias that affects our perceptions. This also applies to zeitgeist as a sort of temporal bias. We are children of our age and that cultural perspective influences our cognition as a bias.

Important cultural elements are often simply taken for granted as fact, if they are even noticed at all. But the zeitgeist is just as important to understand when looking at a time period as understanding a culture when looking at a contemporary group of people. The zeitgeist, or as Rousseau saw it, the General Will, drives the culture forward.

To illustrate, in 1834 the concept of socialism emerged. The idea was canonised by the perpetually unemployed Karl Marx and the rich kid Frederick Engels in 1848 in The Communist Manifesto, but it soon became out-dated. Many of the legitimate concerns raised in the book were already on the road to recovery. As a consequence despite socialists and socialist groups popping-up throughout the remainder of the Nineteenth Century nothing ever came of it. The soil was not fertile for this particular ideology. It took seventy years for a government based on Marxism to emerge in 1917.

As the expression “An idea whose time has come” illustrates, the conditions have to be right for an ideology to take root and flourish. When one looks at the 1927 campaign for the US presidency, the American Socialist Party only received 6% of the vote, but within fifty years every one of their economic platforms became law. The Twentieth Century was ripe for socialism. It’s time had come because the zeitgeist was favourable to it.

Bearing this is mind; it can be argued that the zeitgeist produced people who in turn drove the zeitgeist. Socialism emerged at a time when the industrial revolution was still largely negative, faded when conditioned improved, and then re-emerged when the old Romantic zeitgeist became severely wounded by the First World War.

In the post-war years, Europeans blamed the Romantic zeitgeist for World War I and its devastations, so they chose to completely reject it. Classical Liberalism that defined the previous century was replaced by two great political forces. International Socialism, known as Communism, and National Socialism, known as Fascism.

But the true end of Romanticism was the Stock Market Crash of 1929. This was portrayed as the failure of free market capitalism. During the 1930’s it appeared as though the two socialist camps had it right. They prospered while the rest floundered. So countries like the United States and Britain, former bastions of Romanticism, embraced central government economic planning and thus crossed the Rubicon into Socialism, albeit in the form of a “mixed economy” seen as the best of both worlds, but over time the socialist aspects of this mix became dominant.

This is why I make the distinction between the Modern Romantic Era and the Post-modern Socialist Era. A shift occurred in the zeitgeist that was begun in World War I, identified and encouraged in the 1920’s, institutionalised in the 1930’s, and became the accepted cultural norm in the 1960’s.

If we mark the end of the Romantic period as 1929, we find that as the generations grew old, died, and were born, the first generation born into the new socialist zeitgeist were the children of years after World War II. For them, the previous Romantic zeitgeist was a myth but one fashioned by the very people who killed it. They learned that it was a dark time of classism, poverty, child labour, disease, slavery, inequality, genocidal imperialism, robber barons, and sexual repression. They were taught to despise their grandparents and love their enlightened and progressive parents. The cultural revolutions of 1968 were a reaction against Modernity (Romanticism) in favour of the Post-modern Socialism that they were raised to believe in.

So who killed the Romantic? It takes more than a handful of people to change a zeitgeist, especially if the ground is not fertile for such a change to occur, as illustrated by the slow growth of socialism. However, there was a small group of people who have demonstrated enormous influence over the zeitgeist as people over the past century have elevated them to a position where we might call them the founding parents of the Socialist Era. This was the Bloomsbury Group.

What does the Nineteenth Century British nobility and Spider-man have in common? They both subscribed to the belief that with great power comes great responsibility. The children of the British elite were raised to see themselves as responsible for the well-being of the nation, through politics, academics, economics, or even the arts. Furthermore, they had to set an example to the rest of society.

This lasted for many generations until the coming of the Great War. If your parents participate in a colossal fuck-up, it is very difficult to respect them let alone value their guidance. During the 1920’s in Britain a new form of nobles emerged who denounced the responsibility of their class and decided to play instead. The represented a fundamental shift from knowing what is true because your choices have a profound effect on others to knowing what I feel is true because it has a profound effect me.

Of course this is not how it was presented. The philosopher G.E. Moore summed up the Bloomsbury ethos: "one's prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge". On the surface, I might agree with this statement, however it is a recipe for solipsism and ego.

Romanticism is all about the individual; however it also recognises that the individual lives among other individuals with whom they must trade values to promote their existence. If I was to say that my pleasure comes first, whether that pleasure is derived from love, art, or study, then I am denying certain facts of life, like the need to make a living or the considerations of the consequences of my pleasure.

The amazing thing about the Bloomsbury Group is the way the members can be seen as representative of the key forces of the Socialist Era. For example, in Virginia Woolf we have the Feminist archetype, Lytton Strachey gives us revisionist history, John Maynard Keynes gave us the economic model for the era, Roger Fry gave us modern art, and E.M. Forster would provide the biased social narrative in literature.

Collectively they represent what today we might call hippies. They all met at college, had left-leaning politics, despised anything before their birth as part of the old order including the idea of the nation-state, they came from wealthy upper-middle class backgrounds and yet despised middle-class values, they promoted free-love and all had sex between them, and then upon reaching adulthood exerted a profound social influence.

Virginia Woolf wrote that the modern world began when Lytton Strachey saw a stain on the dress that her sister Vanessa was wearing and asked, “Semen?”. Woolf’s intention here was to illustrate the new openness concerning sexuality, but the passage reveals more. If I could assume the Victorian approach, the stain would be recognised without judgement but not mentioned for fear of embarrassing Vanessa. The truly sexually enlightened would recognise the stain, but not mention it because it was no big deal, as it might as well be a mustard stain for all they cared. What we have here is self-conscious sexual openness conveyed in a certain smugness compounded by the shear solipsism to declare this incident to be the birth of modernity for all of Western Civilization.

One’s native culture is largely imperceptible. It exists as a sort of background music ever present but rarely noticed and experienced in the vague sense of mood. A zeitgeist operates the same way. There is only a collective sense or mood.

The post-World War I zeitgeist created the Bloomsbury Group and allowed their influence to thrive. In this sense the zeitgeist creates people in order to perpetuate itself. In 1921, Sigmund Freud published, Beyond the Pleasure Principle where he outlined the concept of the Pleasure Principle as the drive to satisfy psychological and biological needs in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of suffering. The opposite of this is the Reality Principle in which pleasure is deferred for a greater outcome. He associated one with childhood and ego and the other with adulthood and personal responsibility. By defining the Pleasure Principle Freud essentially defined the primary driving force of the post-Romantic era as embodied in the Bloomsbury Group and then all who followed in their wake.

The Pleasure Principle was also invoked by Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, the father of modern PR, marketing, advertising, and political propaganda, his 1928 book, Propaganda, was the playbook for the Nazi Party. To simplify his approach, Bernays sold products and ideas by linking them to people’s desires. The BBC produced an awarding winning documentary in 2002 about Bernays called, “The Century of the Self”. A more accurate title would have been, “The Century of the Ego”.

In his essay, The Rage of Virginia Woolf, Theodore Dalrymple observes:

In her descriptions of this class, self-pity vies with snobbery. Her reply to the philanthropist who requested a donation to buy evening clothes for professional women vibrates with outrage that the daughters of educated men should find themselves in financial difficulties (which, in her view, should properly belong only to social inferiors). “Not only are we incomparably weaker than the men of our own class,” she writes to the eminent lawyer; “we are weaker than the women of the working class.” “Economically, the educated man’s daughter is much on a level with the farm labourer.” “Society has been so kind to you [the educated men, one of whom is her interlocutor], so harsh to us [the daughters of educated men, of whom she is one]: it is an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.” It must therefore be destroyed—presumably by those whose will has been fettered and whose minds have been deformed.

The passage reminded me of George Carlin’s take on Feminism:

I've noticed that most of these feminists are white middle-class women. They don't give a shit about black women's problems. They don't care about Latino women. All their interested in is their own reproductive freedom...and their pocketbooks.

A key feature of Modernism (Post-modernism) is the idea of destruction. Jacques Barzun touches on this in his book, Classic, Romantic, and Modern. Traditional and established virtues, values, ideas, and education must be destroyed to allow for the new world we envision. We see this feature repeatedly in Progressivism.

As Dalrymple observes from Virginia Woolf from her book Three Guineas where she gives her answer to the request for a donation to a women’s college in Cambridge.

“No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan. . . . [T]herefore the guinea should be earmarked ‘Rags. Petrol. Matches.’ And this note should be attached to it. ‘Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows [before, presumably, being burned to death] and cry “Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this education!”

Apparently, the college “should teach the arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people’s lives and minds, and the little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery that are allied with them” or be burnt to the ground.

Her Bloomsbury fellow Lytton Strachey has been singled out by two authors that I have read, Jacques Barzun and Matthew Sweet (Inventing the Victorians), as dealing the death blow to Romanticism with his book, Eminent Victorians in which he presents his biased view as history. That in itself is no crime, but the book proved to be very popular and influential in creating the modern preconception of the Victorians as hypocritical, stodgy prudes.

Today, the word Victorian is used in two contexts. One to describe heavy-handed moralism, as in “we need a return to Victorian values”, and the other to describe a bleak period of white male oppression against women, children, the poor, and minorities. Both characterisations are false. However, if your desire is to move forward you must first discredit all that came before you by burning the bridges.

I call this “the end of history” where people act as if nothing of value preceded their own time except when taken as a sort of pastiche for the sake of personal entertainment. In America, the past is seen as nothing more than a bunch of old white guys dominating others. This simplistic, arrogant, and self-centred approach fosters ignorance, and in ignorance there is bliss (or so says the fool).

The final member of the Bloomsbury Group that I would like to touch on was John Maynard Keynes. When I write of the Socialist Age in which we live, I am not referring to Marxism. Rather to the notion of economic and social central planning. The Socialist mind believes that the purpose of government is to control society and to take care of it members. In contrast, the Romantic mind sees the government as a sort of night watchman who makes sure everyone plays nice but provides no specific central plan.

The economic theories of Keynes laid the foundation for the modern mixed and centrally planned economies. In terms of macroeconomics, Keynes wrote the modern playbook. It would be foolish to say that Keynes himself was as driven by the pleasure principle and solipsism as were his Bloomsbury fellows, however I find it interesting that his economic theory encourages both the pleasure principle and solipsism.

This is not the place to go into his general theory, but I will touch on a few points. A key feature of Victorian values was the idea of thrift. It was seen as important to accumulate savings. Keynes calls this the paradox of thrift in which by saving money there is less money circulating in the economy and when less money is in the economy, then the economy declines. So the paradox is that we save money as security against hard times, but the act of saving money creates the hard times.

Keynesian economics encourages spending. This can be personal spending or government spending. All that matters is that there is money in the system. This is a recipe for driving the Pleasure Principle of mass consumption and of course government waste. The downside is of course debt. Despite the Keynesian stimulus packages as the governments currently pump money into the economy in hopes of keeping the economy vibrant, the only result is greater personal and governmental debt.

So who killed the Romantic? Was it the failure of Classical Liberalism at the onset of World War I? Was it the failure of Capitalism in the Great Depression? No. Both are innocent of the crimes for which they have been historically accused.

It has been said that it is impossible for a third party to break-up a stable relationship. According to this line of reasoning, any relationship divided by an interloper was destined to die anyway. I have read that the key to a stable relationship is mutual respect. Let’s call it faith. The relationship ends when one party stops believing in the relationship.

After the Great War and during the Great Depression people stopped believing in the Romantic. The zeitgeist shifted from a focus on individuality to a focus on ego. Normally, I would describe this as a shift from individualism to collectivism, but that is not wholly true. Society is a concept. You can point to an individual, but you cannot point to “society”. As a concept, every person has their own idea and feelings regarding the nature of society and what is best for society. This is often the product of ego.

I would like the blame the Bloomsbury Group for killing the Romantic. However, they would not have been successful if people had not lost faith in the Romantic. Virginia Woolf’s rich, white female peers wanted her to be right. Lytton Strachey’s readers wanted to see Victorians as he portrayed them. People and their governments wanted Keynesian economics. As Edward Bernays understood, people want their desires to be fulfilled, even if it is just a mirage.

Besides, Romanticism is not dead. Rather is it slowly being starved in the attic like some embarrassing old relative hidden from public view. I would like to think that it will return, but the current zeitgeist is not ready for it.

I read recently a comment made by an actress in period dramas who mourned the end of chivalry, but her comment illustrated that she did not understand the true meaning of the word and wrongly used it synonymously with the word gallantry. Instead she referred to the heightened respect for women as meaning chivalry.

An up-to-date definition of chivalry is “an ethical use of strength”. So this old-fashioned heightened respect for women observed by this actress is in fact a demonstration of kindness by the strong (men) towards the weak (women). We cannot return to the age of chivalry as a culture without accepting the premise that women are the weaker sex that must be cared for and treated as special because of it. When chivalry does not come from a position of strength then it is no more chivalry than paying taxes is charity. Now, women have to walk through the muddy puddles just like men do – as equals – and yet they still expect special treatment.

We live in an artificial reality largely disconnected from the previous Romantic zeitgeist where some people long for what was but do not recognise the inconsistencies between then and now. To embrace Romanticism is to reject the Post-modern world and to treat it with the same contempt that the Bloomsbury Group showed to Romanticism. So, for example, this means rejecting the Feminist premise that men and women are equal. This is not to say that one gender is superior to another but rather accepting that they are different and therefore cannot logically be equal any more than saying that an apple is equal to an orange aside from both being fruits.

Ultimately what unifies and distinguishes a culture, whether you label it an age, an era, a nation, a club, a tribe, a subculture, or a nation-state, is a number of largely unconscious assumptions about the nature of reality. Upon these premises are built the values, virtues, and vices that define a people as a recognisable unit.

In fiction, particularly in Science Fiction, there is this trope of “the Others”. They are those beings who are not us. In Nineteenth Century fiction, the Others were usually savages, in either Africa or America, portrayed as unsophisticated, superstitious, and emotional. In Twentieth Century fiction, the Others were cold and calculating aliens or machines.  The Others illustrate cultural difference, not only in the Us versus the Others within the story, but also how we have changed from the pragmatic and utilitarian Victorians to the sentimental Post-moderns who value ego over self.

You see, it’s not about emotion versus reason. All emotion is subjective. It’s personal. Championing emotion as a values and a virtue is to champion not feelings in general but personal feelings and therefore ego. Rationality on the other hand endeavours to be as objective as possible, thus making it more universal and less egotistical as the Self seeks equilibrium with other Selves regardless of personal feelings that get in the way.

The novelist, L. P. Hartley wrote, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." The Romantic Era is dead. It was killed not by a handful of spoiled upper-class students in Bloomsbury. It was killed by the General Will as the zeitgeist shifted away from the values and virtues of the Romantic Era towards those of the Socialist Era. The Bloomsbury Group simply facilitated the change and gave it voice.

This is not to say that Romanticism is dead. Simply that it is no longer a gift bestowed from one generation to the next in large proportion and taken for granted as just the natural way of things. The Romantic is now something that must be aspired towards and fought for against a zeitgeist that hates, fears, and misrepresents it as either folly or political incorrectness. Romanticism is no longer an unconscious product of social programming but a conscious decision to adopt and defend the general premises upon which the values and virtues of this cultural period in history were built.

When I was younger my concept of the Romantic perhaps would have been typified by a work done by of the Romantic poets. Today, I believe that I have a better grasp of the subtleties and premises involved to present the Romantic zeitgeist not in the light of its dawn but in the wisdom of its twilight.

The poet and novelist that I have in mind was always a favourite of mine and I was surprised in the 1990’s when I was told that he had been banished from the university curriculum due to his political incorrectness, thus depriving future generations of his works. I have read comments on this particular poem where people spoke of this as an evening prayer. Perhaps in the Church of the Romantic where Romanticism is a conscious ideological choice, it is.  So long as people continue to make that choice, then Romanticism is never truly dead.

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!