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!