Millennials As Romantics (Not Postmodernists)
By: Matthew Mckeever
Tags: Literature, Culture, Postmodernism, Philosophy, Politics

How do you think you would have reacted born into a world where these were the recent intellectual developments? Where so much knowledge and learning was on display, and humans were using it to master the natural world and philosophy as well as create sublime art? Well, let’s see what the Romantics thought.

Science and Civilization Suck — Rousseau

Let’s begin our tour of the Romantics with Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). The awkwardness of intellectual history is evident here since he’s been called both a proto-Romantic as well as an influence on the Enlightenment, but regardless of what we call him his voice is, perhaps more than any other, one that chimes with ours.

One could be forgiven, surveying the 17th century, for feeling good about humankind, thinking that our achievements in science, philosophy, and art, were to be celebrated. Rousseau kinda disagreed. Here’s what he has to say in any essay about whether the progress in the arts and sciences was good for morality:

Astronomy was born of superstition, eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices; we should be less doubtful of their advantages, if they had sprung from our virtues…where is the man who sincerely desires to find [scientific truth]? … who among us will know how to make right use of it? …. If our sciences are futile in the objects they propose, they are no less dangerous in the effects they produce (‘A Discourse On The Moral Effects Of The Arts And Sciences’, here)

Let’s just emphasize this: this isn’t Foucault or Derrida or some other postmodernist, calling into questions our motives (calling into question the idea that we are disinterested truth speakers, as opposed to, say, people attempting to wield power as the Foucaultian would have it), or questioning whether science will know how to deal with the effects they produce (which one might imagine Foucault saying of the Manhattan project, or a contemporary leftist about AI in light of its racist biases).

No — this is Rousseau, writing almost three hundred years ago. A mistrust of science isn’t new — it’s been around since science really started picking up steam, and the thought that it’s definitive of our age is just wrong. Noticing that we should be skeptical of the thought that we are going through some particularly new and baleful moment in the history of ideas. We’re not: we’re just retracing arguments that humans seem, perhaps just as a matter of temperament, to be inclined to trace. The contemporary leftist who responds to those who want to use, e.g. blockchains for social good by pointing out bitcoin’s ecological cost, or who responds cynically to data about how fewer people are living in extreme poverty thanks to capitalism by pointing out that, well, thanks to capitalism, in not so long, fewer people will be living full stop thanks to climate change can, I think, be viewed as giving voice to the same sort of anti-progress viewpoint as Rousseau. It didn’t take Derridean differance to enable people to wonder about the negative effects that progress entrains.

In another early and major work, Rousseau also rails against what he calls ‘moral or political inequality’, the inequality that arises when people come to live together in cities. He seems to think, in particular, that civilization is a big scam instituted by the rich to protect their wealth from the more powerful — because more numerous — poor people, and attributes a lot of the problems of modern life to the institution of private property. It should scarcely need to be said that this is something that would resonate with the modern leftist, and so even if Peterson’s (nonsensical) postmodern neoMarxism hadn’t come along, it’s plausible they’d still have the same attitudes towards capitalism.

Perhaps more than anyone, Rousseau’s perspective chimes with that of millennial leftists (public domain image from wikipedia)

Wordworth and Other Voices

Recall Milton’s epic canvas and fancy verbiage. One way to look at that — although it sounds a bit anachronistic and weird — is that he is speaking with the weight of tradition and power behind him, using privileged-people language to discuss things of interest only to people with great swathes of education.

Much contemporary leftist agitation is concerned with letting speak voices other than those traditionally heard, and portraying the lives of people other than straight white people. Again, some think this can be explained in terms of postmodernism with its leveling of different ways of speaking in combination with its views about how power has malignly influenced who gets to speak.

But, again, we can see something like this concern with opening up at least what gets spoken of in the Romantics. William Wordsworth (1770–1850) famously wrote a preface to a collection of poems he and Coleridge wrote, Lyrical Ballads, in which he defended his use of normal language and his speaking of normal people in normal situations (as opposed to, literally, making up words based on Latin to talk about God and the devil). The passage is a bit long — feel free to skim:

Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. The language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression. (available here)

Although he didn’t really do much in terms of diversifying the cannon — it’s not as if he enlisted livers of ‘humble’ life to speak for themselves — at least one could argue that he was concerned with changing the shape of poetry to more evenly represent life in its varieties, a goal that many on the left, concerned with representation, could agree with. Here again, then, we arguably see the precursor to today’s young people in the Romantics.

Everyone:

Rousseau: I have a spanking fetish!, or, why millennials talk about private things publicly

One thing that people have noted about the millennial generation is their tendency to speak freely (often right there in their social media bios) about things older generations wouldn’t speak about in public, or at all. (I don’t have any article to link to back up that people have noted this, and can’t be bothered googling to find one, but I’m sure they have.)

Thus it’s not unusual to see people talk about their sexual preferences or physical or mental health conditions on public-facing platforms like twitter, and, moreover, for most people there’s no stigma attached to it.

Can we explain this feature of contemporary habits? Well, I guess one could try to say that the perspectivalism encouraged by postmodernism, by determining one’s capacity to speak to an issue by one’s position with regard to it, mandates such disclosures.

But I think we can do better. We’re just a generation that is open about talking about feelings and related things. And again we can note that this is something we find in the Romantics. Thus, to return to our old friend Rousseau, he wrote what some consider the first autobiography. And one might think, you know, to the extent that talking about oneself was this new thing, that he would be circumspect.

But … no. After a bit about his childhood and reading preferences, it doesn’t take too long to get to this passage (both from here):

I found the reality [of being spanked] much less terrible than the idea, and what is still more unaccountable, this punishment increased my affection for the person who had inflicted it. All this affection, aided by my natural mildness, was scarcely sufficient to prevent my seeking, by fresh offences, a return of the same chastisement; for a degree of sensuality had mingled with the smart and shame, which left more desire than fear of a repetition.

He goes on to mention how his kink, in addition to his shyness, made it difficult to meet women:

This folly, joined to a natural timidity, has always prevented my being very enterprising with women, so that I have passed my days in languishing in silence for those I most admired, without daring to disclose my wishes. To fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon, were for me the most exquisite enjoyments, and the more my blood was inflamed by the efforts of a lively imagination the more I acquired the appearance of a whining lover.

If you think that self-disclosure is a typically millennial thing, I recommend skimming through The Confessions.

I think — though I’m somewhat less sure about this — that a concern with mental health can also be seen in the Romantics. No less an authority than Goethe tells us that ‘classicism is health, romanticism sickness’, and there is often a concern in Romantics with what we would now call depression (wiki backs me up here). Thus consider the first lines of Keats’s (1795–1821) ‘Ode To Melancholy’, where the poet considers — in fancy speak — suicide:

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d

By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be

Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;

For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul

Or, you might take a look at this article that lists some of Shelley’s ‘super-emo’ poem titles.

In general, there’s something about the Romantics that makes them more open to the darker aspects of life. My tentative suggestion is that a similar tendency in millennials explains mental health talk.

(It’s kind of important to note, I think, that this willingness to talk about mental health and more generally feelings openly seems like an unambiguously good feature of the modern era, so that even were one entirely on board with the enlightenment criticism of the contemporary left it would still be worth wondering whether this good is outweighed by the other bads.)