Are We Taking a Romantic Cultural Turn?

Maybe not? I don't know!

Note: I’m currently looking through my Substack drafts, trying to decide if I like any of them enough to publish belatedly. I wrote this one a long time ago; at first I thought it was too inconclusive, then too late to the party. But it does contain some basic points about the way I approach historical periodization and the “theory of the present.” I’m going to say what the hell and publish it now, even though it missed the conversation it was originally intended to be part of.

That was the the question

Daniel Oppenheimer

addressed on a now months-old episode (I’m behind) of

Eminent Americans

, his (excellent) podcast on the state of American intellectuals and contemporary discourse. Oppenheimer, joined by

John Pistelli

and

Ross Barkan

, catalogues signs of a romantic revival in contemporary culture: the escalating backlash to the domination of tech; the widespread alienation from the large, rational systems represented by politics and science/medicine; the flowering of weird online spiritualisms; the total absence of a vocal atheist and/or rationalist current on the contemporary intellectual scene; and the recent fetishism of previously dead physical mediums. (They don’t mention these, but I’d point particularly to Gen Z’s revival of vinyl records and cassettes.) Pistelli and Barkan, who are both vaguely religious and gently anti-rationalist, have cautiously positive takes on these developments, though the general tone is neutral and observational.

The group begins by defining historical romanticism. Oppenheimer asks what the politics of romanticism were, and Pistelli gives it a shot. He walks right up to it—the failure of the French Revolution, the defeat of Napoleon, the reassertion of a reactionary order—but stops shy of the correct answer: nationalism.¹ The most characteristic political expression of European romanticism was nationalism, the defense of particular (not universal) identity, of local specificity, of irreducible complexity against the (supposed) Enlightenment project of flattening, homogenizing, universalizing. This is not essential to the discussion, but it is worth noting, as it potentially gives the concept of romanticism more purchase on our own moment. Nationalism is famously slippery, a force both of bottom-up emancipation and top-down authoritarianism. It could be helpful to analogize the present to an earlier period in which rapid, universalizing technological change produces a bitterly fracturing, potentially violent and deadly, obsession with particularity.²

Fortunately, this group doesn’t fall too far into the “Enlightenment vs. Romanticism” trap. Romanticism indeed understood itself as a backlash to the culture of the Enlightenment, but as a matter of historical reality, the two cannot be reduced to “rationalism vs. irrationalism” or “science vs. mysticism.” The Enlightenment was riven with weird spiritualisms and esoteric rationalities, and Romantics were often hyper-modern technology enthusiasts. This is why I think that, while we could find it useful to identify “romantic” currents in the present, romanticism probably fails as a general descriptor. In my dissertation, for example, I used the modernist vs. romantic binary to characterize the flavors, the vibes if you will, of 20th-century sociologists. Certain camps in social science branded themselves, militantly, as “modernists” and castigated their opponents as “romantics,” but there was not really any such thing: all of the camps were some admixture of the two. So was Durkheim, so was Marx.

After referencing my own dissertation, let me get one notch more indulgent and illustrate the point by reference to my own intellectual development, as Oppenheimer and his guests do. I’ve always felt my tendencies to be a contradictory assemblage of rationalism and romanticism, which can probably be located quite directly in my fundamentalist Christian upbringing. Fundamentalist evangelicalism is romantic in certain respects, for example in its belief in awesome supernatural forces and its insistence on the smallness and weakness of “fallen” human beings. But it is also a profoundly rationalist style of religion, a mirror of the Gilded Age progressive scientism against which it originally arose as a backlash. The Bible is not a historical document, it is an inerrant scientific text which contains unassailable rational arguments against every secular claim. As a young-adult Christian nationalist, I had impressed upon me not only the awesome, unknowable power of God, but also that we were going to defeat his enemies with facts and logic that did not, as the saying goes, care about your feelings. In this case, a fundamentally irrationalist faith takes on a rationalist packaging, it behaves like a rationalism—just like the counter-Enlightenment behaved like the Enlightenment.

I would go on to alternate in emphasis between the two: I had a liberal rationalist phase, a Heideggerian mystic phase, then a Marxist rationalist phase. But while they were indeed distinct phases in their moment, they have all remained, blended together or stacked on top of one another. The practical place I’ve ended up is probably that of a basic old European bourgeois: too rational to believe in God or anything metaphysical, but too sentimental—too human—not to long for some kind of greater, more dramatic and awe-inspiring source of meaning. And like the basic old European bourgeois, I bracket the metaphysical in philosophy and politics and redirect those impulses into art and love. I eventually realized those two tendencies are in tension but are not true opposites; they are in more of a dialectical relationship, they turn ceaselessly back into each other. (Thus, rationalisms can also take on irrationalist packaging: the New Atheism ended up being a dogmatic cult, and the apparently rationalist ideology of the AI titans in Silicon Valley is ultimately a neo-spiritualist worship of “intelligence” beyond the human, turning computers into a new God.) At the risk of self-justification, I think a healthy political perspective is probably found in never quite giving in to either of these tendencies. We should try to balance a healthy respect for human finitude, for our smallness and weakness before the terrible powers of nature, with a respect for the miraculous results of our agency. In other words: we should believe in progress, but we should recognize that it’s also kind of a miracle.

The ultimate point of this personal digression was that our contemporary historical era seems to be kind of like that: an assemblage of contradictory replays of the past, recycling of shards of vibe from earlier eras that (may have?) had more distinctive, coherent vibes. This is what gives the present its frustrating, decadent, immobile feel, its flavor of frenetic, anxious paralysis: the fact that it doesn’t have a clear character, it’s just everything everywhere all at once, puriteens and marriage boosterism and sex-negative feminism and, at the same time, OnlyFans and polyamory. It’s locked into this tail-swallowing dialectic that can’t seem to move forward or ever get anywhere. It’s hard to characterize that as clearly “romantic,” even if certain recognizable styles are once again manifesting themselves. Maybe “romanticism” can give us some kind of grip on what seems like an extreme degree of fractured inwardness, suspicion of and resistance to any universal project of a common humanity. Or maybe it’s just one of the those modern styles that comes in and out fashion, ultimately not telling us much.

1. Our panelists, alas, seem to know their Brits better than their continental Europeans.

2. There was a brief moment pre-pandemic when big-name intellectuals were kind of thinking in this direction; see, for instance, Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger (2017) and Fukuyama’s Identity (2018).