Suicide of the West_How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy by Jonah Goldberg

Author:Jonah Goldberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Conservatism & Liberalism, Democracy, History, Ideologies & Doctrines, Politics & Government, Politics & Social Sciences, United States
Publisher: Crown Publishers
Published: 2018-04-24T03:00:00+00:00

11

POP CULTURE POLITICS

Godzilla, Rock & Roll, and the Romantic Spirit

And their children wept, & built

Tombs in the desolate places,

And form’d laws of prudence, and call’d them

The eternal laws of God.

—WILLIAM BLAKE, THE FIRST BOOK OF URIZEN (1794)1

The fate of our times is characterized by intellectualization and rationalization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

—MAX WEBER, SCIENCE AS A VOCATION (1917)2

“Don’t write about romanticism.”

In the course of working on this book, I heard that advice—if not always in those words—from my wife, a brilliant writer and editor; my actual editor (who cleaved the original manuscript in half); and any number of trusted friends. Sometimes they just said it with their eyes. There’s something about the word “romanticism” that elicits both an eye roll of the soul and a reflexive crouch of the mind. What is romanticism again? I had to learn about that in college, but I never really got it.

The academics haven’t helped. It’s a term that has been stretched and twisted like taffy. No word, not even “fascism,” has proved more difficult to define, particularly among the scholars who study it.3 For starters, every country has its own kind of romanticism, because romanticism expresses itself in the language and culture in which it appears. Thus, romanticism is often found everywhere and nowhere depending on whom you listen to. Adding to the problem, romanticism often manifests itself most acutely as a rebellion against definitions, distinctions, and classifications. The romantic is usually quick to say, “Don’t label me, man.”

Even Isaiah Berlin began his seminal 1965 A. W. Mellon lectures on the “Roots of Romanticism” by declaring he wasn’t going to make that blunder. “I might be expected to begin, or to attempt to begin, with some kind of definition of Romanticism, or at least some generalisation, in order to make clear what it is that I mean by it. I do not propose to walk into that particular trap.”4 In 1923, the philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy gave a lecture to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association of America titled “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.” After getting some laughs by recounting all of the different people who’d been declared “the father of Romanticism”—Plato, Saint Paul, Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, etc.—he then listed all of the different kinds of romanticism and declared: “Any attempt at a general appraisal even of a single chronologically determinate Romanticism—still more, of ‘Romanticism’ as a whole—is a fatuity.”5

In his acclaimed book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, David Brooks argues that modern American culture is suffused with romanticism. But perhaps because he was better at taking editorial advice, he rejected the term in favor of “bohemianism.” “Strictly speaking, bohemianism is only the social manifestation of the Romantic spirit,” Brooks writes. “But for clarity’s sake, and because the word Romanticism has been stretched in so many directions, in this book I mostly use the word bohemian to refer to both the spirit and the manners and mores it produces.

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