As we continue to seek offerings, overtures and propositions towards the first issue of the Dark Mountain journal, it seemed like time to open this blog to other voices. Our first guest blogger, Lee Rowland, was moved to write after reading the New Statesman review of our manifesto. Here, he offers a heartfelt defence of Romanticism.
John Gray’s review of the Dark Mountain Manifesto dismayed me for several reasons, but none more so than his suggestion that Uncivilisation is a ‘Romantic dream’. I had recently written for another publication on the subject of Romanticism, and the concept and its history has been a long-standing interest of mine. But what really hit me was the way in which Dougald accepted Gray’s comment, writing on this blog that “The territory we are exploring comes with a danger of sliding into Romanticism – one we may not always have avoided successfully.”
While Dougald has taken up many points in Gray’s review, the Romantic epithet still hangs over the project as an accepted criticism, and it is this that I wish to address. What irks me most is that there never appears to be any explanation accompanying this use of the term as a put-down. It is simply taken as a given: so obviously a sentiment to be avoided or suppressed, heaven forbid that you should relate to such a whimsical notion.
I seek to challenge this use of Romanticism, and instead suggest that it should be a matter of pride.
Before I do that, let us take a closer look at the key sentence in Gray’s review: “The notion that social breakdown could be the prelude to a better world is a Romantic dream that history has proved wrong time and again.”
I have read the Dark Mountain Manifesto carefully, several times, and there is nothing in it that supposes that social breakdown will necessarily be a prelude to a better world. At its core is the challenge of how “people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth.” As the myth of civilisation founders, we are warned that “In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.”
When Gray uses the term ‘Romantic dream’, I suspect he means that the themes of the manifesto, particularly with respect to the above, tend towards the irrational. Romanticism arose during the latter part of the 18th Century as a reaction against the scientific rationalisation of nature under Enlightenment thinking, and one of the key distinctions between the two sensibilities was that between rationality and irrationality. Where the Enlightenment emphasised the primacy of deductive reason, the Romantics prized intuition, imagination and feeling. Their differing views of reality were irreconcilable: the Romantics saw the earth as a unitary organism, whereas Enlightenment thinkers saw it as an atomistic machine.
The rational way of looking at things became dominant, not least because its model of science got things done: it produced technologies and the promise of a better world through greater control of nature. At the same time, the Romantics’ startlingly different view of the world was turned against them, because it did not conform to this rational – and detached – way of treating nature. Yet it is this same detached approach which has led to the difficulties and challenges we now face, the world over. That doesn’t seem particularly rational to me.
As the Dark Mountain Manifesto insists, it is time to rail against the myth that we are somehow apart from the rest of nature. The Romantics saw the human imagination and the natural world as intrinsically intertwined, insuperably dependent on one another. The following lines from two Romantic poets beautifully exemplify this sentiment:
…For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
(William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey)
..The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mont Blanc)
Do we not still look at nature ‘as in the hour of thoughtless youth’? Do we truly understand that something far greater and stronger than us ‘as a law, inhabits thee!’?
One of the great Romantic thinkers, the German polymath, Goethe, united the poet and scientist. His studies on the morphology of plants were a successful attempt (later influencing Darwin) to practice science by saturating nature with the investigator’s own consciousness. He believed that, as a scientist, one should become part of the phenomenon under study, and not detach oneself as a subjective mind studying the objective external world. Recent scientific advances – James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, aspects of atomic physics, and a near revolution on the verge in biology (particularly in genetics) – have seriously questioned the Enlightenment model of reality and the workings of the universe. We may be on the brink of a paradigm shift in the natural sciences and it is a shift towards a model of nature which encompasses a reality far stranger than hitherto believed, and which has rediscovered the essential unity of all things, the subjective and the objective.
As I’m writing this, there is a discussion on the radio about bonfire night. A safety expert warns of the dangers of fires and the need to protect the public through the interventions of authorities, using barriers and other precautions. The host asks in a slightly incredulous tone why we need such things. Are flames not their own warning? How is a barrier a better deterrent than the heat of a fire? It’s obvious to me that people have lost their sense of attachment to the world. People no longer know about their environment, their world, their own bodies. We expect experts to instruct us on everything, and rely on others to provide our material and emotional needs. The Romantic view sought to engage people firmly in the world, to appreciate its translucent mystery, and to become coterminous with the majestic beauty that subsumes us. As Jeffers said: “Love that, not man Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.”
I believe that the Romantic view needs to be reclaimed by those who still see its worth as a fitting response to the world. It is a far nobler approach than the rational Enlightenment edict – it is altogether edifying, in fact, a warm antidote to the cold rationality of those who only see life in terms of solutions, progress, advancement, and improvement in material conditions. I do not suggest that it is a panacea to all the world’s ills, for it too has limitations. In extolling the human mind and human imagination as primary forces, it is redolent of humanism, but I think a far more balanced version than the one offered by Enlightenment thinking.
Let us embrace Romanticism for its conception of nature as multifaceted, ultimately unknowable in mechanistic terms, in flux, wild and uncontainable. The Enlightenment assures us that nature is predictable and therefore can be controlled and manipulated as an object of experimentation. In flouting these conventions, the Romantic strives to enter and unite with nature, and in so doing the Romantic invents the world, not simply works it out. The world remains as perplexing a mystery as it ever was. There will be no bright neon-lit future. The project of Uncivilisation helps us face the shattered promises that await us.
Gray ends his review by asserting that ‘stoicism will be needed if civilised life is to survive an environmental crisis that cannot now be avoided. Walking on lava requires a cool head, not one filled with fiery dreams.’ His advice was pre-empted in the Dark Mountain Manifesto – where, for example, Uncivilised writing is evoked as “Human, inhuman, stoic and entirely natural. Humble, questioning, suspicious of the big idea and the easy answer.”
I feel strongly that the Romantic view be represented. It is too easily thrown around as a criticism – much like calling someone a ‘hippy’ or a ‘Luddite’ – without anyone explaining why this should be disparaging. We are not isolated from the world, but ceaselessly enmeshed in it. The rational among us might argue otherwise, but that is precisely the belief that brought us into this mess.
Lee Rowland has been a Royal Marines Commando, a pearl diver, a musician, and a lecturer in psychology and the scientific method at Oxford University. He currently lives and works as a science consultant in London. He is also an incorrigible Romantic.
Congratulations on this first guest post! This is a good idea and this post makes some very important points.
I’d like to expand on some of what Lee has laid out. I do so not to criticize his thesis. I find his formulation refreshing in many ways that are not often seen elsewhere, and that belong at the heart of the Dark Mountain.
To begin, I agree that certain terms are commonly thrown as epithets and that this short-circuits discussion and closes off any elucidation of deeper questions. This is a rampant problem affecting most public discourse today. It is yet one more sign that it is not that we are asking for, or even hoping for an end to the current civilization; but merely witnessing it’s destruction all around us. The confusion of our witness as a stand-in for actively looking to cause harm does more violence to our condition than does our desire to make plain what is there to be seen.
Lee does a good job of lifting Romanticism up out of the mire and of laying out the distinctions between Romanticism and Enlightenment thinking. These are key points concerning the struggles that have led us to our current conditions.
Where I would like to take this further, resting on his shoulders really, since without his points established I’d not have a place to stand. There is behind this whole argument an assumption about historical periods. They do not exist as a firm consensus of what was thought at any point in the past, but within a continuously shifting perception of what we imagine people at other periods of time to have thought and felt. By close reading and immersion we can get a sense of how a past period’s thought can be useful to us, but to expect anything else is problematic no matter whether the period in question seems to support our sense of right or wrong.
Part of the pathological state of modernist thinking is expressed in a belief that the past is a smorgasbord from which we can adopt stances. We can no more adopt a Romantic pose than we can a Newtonian pose. We’re not there, and more importantly, we have the curse and the benefits of all those years of experience beyond what they knew. We cannot ignore any of that or put it aside. The attempt – not that I’m saying Lee has tried to do this, but it is another assumption floating around the ideas we struggle with – An attempt to use Romanticism as anything beyond a guide, is doomed to fail by its willed naivete.
I would say that much of the reaction that took place in the twentieth century, that supremely reactive time, was just such an effort. Within the overall reductivist mode of thought, various anti-rational movements rose and fell in succession in reaction to the consequences of modernism, consequences that were fully visible to those with eyes to see by September 1914. Many of these movements attempted to resurrect Romanticism, including the Hippie-hood of my youth. They were, each more and more quickly than the last, subsumed and co-opted by the modernist juggernaut and metabolized into mere fashions and intellectual posing. We have the advantage of having all the horror and thwarted yearning of that century behind us. It is our responsibility to take these lessons to heart and not repeat their failings.
There is a related issue, also brought to light by Lee’s post. The use and misuse of the term “myth.”
Once again, one of the keys to the Dark Mountain Project is that the question of myth is addressed directly, and rightly in my mind, as central to what needs to occur today. The deterioration of the idea of myth, especially in the last hundred or so years, is at the heart of the current pathology. Once again, we have the benefits of experience. We look back at how this came to be and what it has wrought. We are in a position our predecessors did not have available to them. We have an awareness of the dangers and the results of the slippery slope they fell down. We are in a position to recast and reformulate myth as a force that had been central to the human enterprise for most of our several hundred thousand year existence as a species.
I tend to see what we are going through as an opportunity to mature as a species. We come out of a long and mostly forgotten childhood followed by a rather brief and startling adolescence. As adolescents we gained incredible powers that outstripped our maturity. We took on poses of cynicism and irony that attempted to shelter us from our fears of what we did not understand. Also, as with any adolescents, left unchecked, our powers have become fatally destructive and anarchic. We must now strive to grow towards a maturity that is not a “return” to childhood, but a consolidation and integration of our powers with an increased sense of responsibility to a longer view, to a life-affirming ethos.
Our chances of success don’t enter into an assessment of whether we must do this, a sense of tragedy as central to the human condition needs to replace the egotistical, adolescent wishes after immortality and no-fault “happy endings.”
The reduction of the term “myth” to a pejorative is a prime example of the immaturity we need to overcome. We cannot accomplish this by attempting to go backwards, fitting ourselves into memories of consolations from childhood. We need to forge new, aware relationships to myth, and develop myths and rituals – practices – that lead us to living within the realities of our human condition.
Ideally – this term itself a concept that smacks of reductive habits of thought – we would like to be going through this maturation at a time when our prospects for its accomplishment were more propitious instead of at a time of epochal crisis; but that’s not our situation; and perhaps, as with any initiation from adolescence to adulthood, it cannot be accomplished without a “fear and trembling and a sickness unto death!” We don’t have a choice in the matter, but it is possible that without this crisis we’d not have had any chance for this “initiation!”
To recap: I agree with Lee that we need to look carefully with nuance at historical movements of thought, so long as we maintain a clear sense that they are not available as “costumes” to be put on. Along with demanding a discourse that doesn’t rely on short-cuts to discount opposing views, we have a necessity to delve deeply and be ready to learn from the past.
We need to keep our eyes firmly on the underlying question, as illuminated in the Dark Mountain Manifesto – Manifesto, that quaintly archaic term held lightly as a warning of the traps the last few centuries’ manifestos have fallen into.
We need to take myth away from its current misuse as a disparaging term of derision and establish it in its rightful place as the mechanism by which humans find and share a sense of meaning and establish norms of behavior that act to channel effort into paths that are life-affirming in the broadest sense. We need to do this while maintaining that while linear notions of progress are unrealistic, we live within linear time and must fit our actions to our conditions today. Whether our prospects are rosy or dire, we achieve maturity by facing all that our reality puts in front of us.
This is a fine argument, Huxley and Lawrence would be proud.
Excellent post, thank you.
I’m reminded of the 1990 film “Mindwalk”. The dialog between the three main actors, especially their discussions of looking at Man as a part of the system as opposed to a separate entity are incredible still now when watched.
IIRC, the film isn’t available on DVD but luckily it’s up on Google for anyone who would like to watch it.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9107401959308808776&q=mindwalk#
I had a email exchange with Fritjof Capra, whose work the movie is based on, and who was happy to see the film was available for those who wanted to see it.
I´d recommend anyone interested in this topic to read the german philosopher Ludwig Klages; maybe beginning with his essay on “man and earth” – (I don´t actually know what the English title is, so the German one is “Mensch und Erde”.)
The problem stated in the article by Lee exceeds the frame of “enlightment” and “romanticism”. (BY the way, in Germany, nobody would ever dare calling the late morphologist Goethe a romanticist, for he is the German Classics Prototype itself. He himself said on the topic of the Classic and the Romantic: “Das Klassische ist das Gesunde, das Romantische das Kranke.” [The Classic is the healthy, the Romantic is the ill.] (trans. by myself; please note that I am German and thus not the best at translating German into English))
To get back to topic: I agree that Romanticism was indeed a movement in order to reclaim the given pre-subject-object flow of life that was lost by the means of greek philosophy transported in Christianity.
I do, at this point, rather not like to inform you about all of the thoughts thought by German philosophers in order to reclaim a natural state of perception. The stream of them is not appreciated and is called “Lebensphilosophie”. Philosophers of this stream are: Carl Gustav Carus, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry Bergson, Ludwig Klages, Georg Simmel and Wilhelm Dilthey.
One might probably know, that Nietzsche strongly criticized Romanticism while himself being called a Romanticist by Thomas Mann. Anyway, I do not agree to understand Romanticism in the way Lee does, due to the fact, that Romanticism is a cult of weakness celebrating after-life.