Goethe still has a lot to answer for

[muckefuck]

Mark Twain on Romanticism:

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the silliness and emptiness, shame grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. (Life on the Mississippi, Ch. XLVI)

There was a time when I would've bridled at such a characterisation, but, slowly but slowly, I've experienced my own personal Enlightenment.

One milestone was the Castle Falkenstein campaign. The authors had gone a long way towards establishing a universal aristocratic order, but bunj and I delighted in uncovering opportunities to multiply monarchies (The Kingdom of Patagonia! The Empire of Haiti!) that they had overlooked. Then our GM, princeofcairo made what I thought of as an offhand remark about the morality of the game being "indefensible", but he was simply going to accept and run with it. How can a Victorian-themed RPG be morally indefensible? I wondered, but didn't pursue the thought. It was only years later that I realised that, if I had lived during the Victorian Era, I would have been anti-clericalist and anti-monarchist.

Another was a debate with zompist over Turkey. The details are hazy (probably because I was losing), but I remember him countering a remark about nationalism with the response, "Well then, the West should be careful what ideas it exports, shouldn't it?" It helped crystalise for me the immense amount of damage nationalism--a Romantic idea if ever there was one--had wrought upon the world. I began to see the contradiction of romanticising the Celtic Revival while deploring the Turkish treatment of Kurds or the Cambodian massacre and expulsion of non-Khmers. I was already uncomfortable with the mass of unscientific mythology adopted by most nationalistic movements and seeing the chauvinism inherent in even relatively benign projects began to sour me on the whole revivalist endeavour. Weren't these people--as Twain so admirably points out--actively reversing, in some ways, the progress of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution?

(Of course, around the same time, I was also souring on the notion of Progress as the most positive force in human history. But perhaps that story is too much for one post.)

Still, I can't reject Romantic ideas completely. After all, I was raised with them (predominately in their originally Germanic guise) and I'll never wholly be free of that. This came out in a discussion with monshu last night in which I found myself trying to defend the notion of the path of the Outsider. On the one hand, I agree with him that there's something perverse about rejecting those simple steps to happiness in the name of non-conformism or free-thinking. One the other, I'm leery of this construction called "happiness" and the pseudo-liberal petit-bourgeois mentality that doing your own thing is fine "as long as it makes you happy." Is attainment of "happiness" a surrender to middle-class notions of comfort and acceptability that prevents certain personalities from achieving fulfillment? Or is rejecting these notions in search of some undefined--perhaps undefinable--success outside normal channels a chimaerical quest, doomed to ignoble failure?

For now, I'll have to call myself an agnostic. Like monshu, I still haven't known anyone who achieved what I recognise as fulfillment by following this particular Road Less Taken. But I'm willing to admit that I might be unable to see a successful pursuit of such an unorthodox goal for what it is. (BTW, there's a certain crossover between this and the points about the Left's identification of progressive politics with counterculture Mark Cooper makes in an excellent article discussed by mollpeartree in her commentary for today. [Rather directly linking to the article, I'm steering y'all to her entry because it represents substantial value-added.])

Comments

Mind

[arkanjil.livejournal.com]

some people are at their happiest only when they are perfectly miserable, je?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

We say that, but what do we really mean? The logic goes something like this: Some people seek out and wallow in misery the same way that most people seek out and bask in happiness. Therefore, what we call "misery" must be happiness for them.

But I don't know that we really believe that happiness can be quite that relative. The common prejudice is that such behaviour is really pathological. That is, some tragic flaw in their experience caused them to identify "happiness" with "misery" and they won't ever know true happiness until this short-circuit is fixed (whether by therapy, medication, meditation, etc.). Or that their perceptions and capacities are so impaired that they always aim at happiness, but (1) it's not really where they perceptions keep telling them it is or (2) their capacities simply aren't sufficient, no matter how fixed they remain on the goal.

A nice formula

[arkanjil.livejournal.com]

I saw in a decidely new agey book back in the days of my sorid youth, went like this:


Satisfaction
____________ = Happiness

Desires

The gist being, control your desires, and the measure of your satisfaction is multiplied. It's a nice thought, at least

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Hey, it's more or less my working assumption these days!

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

Bah. "Happiness" is completely subjective. For most people, it's better described as "relative security." Under this argument, the "happiness" of the Outsider can be described as the happiness of sticking a fork in the craw of The Establishment.

I get frustrated with backward-looking Romanticism (see: Why Owlet Never Joined the SCA). "Progress" and science are good things. We like indoor plumbing, medicine, and the Internet. What I always stumble over when talking to futurists, though, is the complete lack of grace. Given how much I sit around in a muddle of "but this! no, that!" I'm nearly approaching this as The Matter of Owlet. Not making any progress, tho.

[nashobabear.livejournal.com]

You're on The Right Path here, fer shurr! Monotheistic religion and Romanticism (includes nationalism) and related gunk is what puts diss in dysfunktion...I have also learned to be wary of contemporary "noble savage" traps..things arte NOT better elsewhere, outside the West, at least not because they are untainted by the above Western crap.

Crap comes in every flavor of the rainbow...

[keyne.livejournal.com]

I was already uncomfortable with the mass of unscientific mythology adopted by most nationalistic movements and seeing the chauvinism inherent in even relatively benign projects began to sour me on the whole revivalist endeavour.

"Some critics regard linguistic conservation work as a monstrous intrusion which only encourages nationalism."

Next you'll be telling us that everybody should be speaking English, eh?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Well they certainly shouldn't be banning it, as some Welsh nationalists want to do!

Tell me that, as a rational, critical scholar, you're not uncomfortable with some of the reams of invented crap that get passed off as Celtic "heritage"--particular in this country, where most people's direct connexions to the Celtic Fringe are so tenuous that they'll believe nearly anything soi-disant "experts" tell them. Or that fact that, for many Americans, part of getting in touch with their Irish roots consisted of donating money to a murderous terrorist organisation.

I don't want to see endangered languages die off any more than you do, but I wish there were means of saving them that weren't tarred with the pernicious brush of nationalism.

In Defense of Nationalism

[bunj.livejournal.com]

I don't want to see endangered languages die off any more than you do, but I wish there were means of saving them that weren't tarred with the pernicious brush of nationalism.

But it is a positive, isn't it? Nationalism is a double-edged sword (much like those used by our Celtic ancestors) if there ever was one. Sure, it has produced a lot of "invented crap" but it has also inspired people to research, dig up (often literally), and preserve the real crap. It has also financed a lot of those researches, and given them an audience.

I think it also is a good counter to centralizing and oppressing forces. The same force impelling Turks to mistreat the Kurds is also impelling the Kurds to preserve their language and culture in the face of oppression.

I also want to point out that the Enlightenment doesn't have the greatest track record either. Revolutionary France comes to mind. Perhaps parts of the Enlightenment deserved to be reversed.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I think it also is a good counter to centralizing and oppressing forces. The same force impelling Turks to mistreat the Kurds is also impelling the Kurds to preserve their language and culture in the face of oppression.

That's rather an odd defence of an ideology: It causes a massive, intractable problem, but, in doing so, it also offers a means to exacerbate the problem. Without nationalism, there wouldn't be this particular form of oppression to defend against. And as heartening as it is that the massacre of 600,000 Armenians has encouraged the survivors to compile dictionaries and form folk ensembles, I think that, overall, I'd rather have the half-million dead back.

(Oh, and Twain counters your last objection before he lays into Scott. He acknowledges the wrongs done in the name of Bonapartism and Jacobism, but points out that these can hardly be rectified by rejecting the good things they produced.)

[bunj.livejournal.com]

(Oh, and Twain counters your last objection before he lays into Scott. He acknowledges the wrongs done in the name of Bonapartism and Jacobism, but points out that these can hardly be rectified by rejecting the good things they produced.)

The same can be said for Romanticism. What good came from Bonapartism? I could see a defense of the American Revolution, but I've never been able to find much positive about the French, which I generally consider a botched affair that led to a dictator taking power and conquering half of Europe.

That's rather an odd defence of an ideology: It causes a massive, intractable problem, but, in doing so, it also offers a means to exacerbate the problem.

That was my hamfisted way to acknowledge the problems with the ideology as well as the benefits. I'll agree that nationalism is not the greatest (or least blood-stained) ideas ever created by humanity, but I don't think it's completely worthless, either.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I think I'll let old Sam Clemens answer that:

Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolution broke the chains of the ancien régime and of the Church, and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men, since, and can never be gods again, but only figureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress.

[foodpoisoningsf.livejournal.com]

Nonetheless, social graces, a quick wit, a dazzling coiffure or a smart uniform
are the reasons we're doing Live Journal...

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Are you trying to tell me this is all a very bourgeois endeavour and posting here no longer qualifies me as a member of the fresh and trendy counterculture?

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

I was going to make some glib remark about emotional set point theory (the "wherever you go, there you are" theory of human happiness, as I think of it) and post a link to the latest research, but I couldn't find a good summary online. And it's more complicated than that anyway: here's a very brief summary of the state of happiness research.

[prilicla.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. I was glad to see that the minimum of the happiness curve usually falls at 40, so I have nowhere to go but up, up, up, baby!