Posted by
Andrews on Monday, March 24, 2008 1:33:45 PM
Recently I have written
essay after
essay about the decline of our culture after we decided to embrace youth over experience, novelty over tradition, and, basically, chose to worship the youthful and sensational over the established and tried. The one thing my essays so far have failed to explain is when this change happened and why.
Well, I blame the Romantics.
If you doubt me, read Goethe's
The Sorrows of Young Werther*. It is a brilliantly written book, as one would expect. But it is also the beginning of the end for western culture. When you read it, if you have the imagination to do so, you can see in Werther the grandfather of all those mopey goths, all of Anne Rice's troubled vampires, every Nine Inch Nails song, all the trendy "emo" music and fiction that litters our culture today.
It was the Romantic movement which first codified the two principles which seem to be destroying us. The Romantics were really the first to push the idea that youth was superior to experience, and it was the Romantic movement which first embraced the primacy of emotion. Without Romanticism, I doubt we would have ever been able to give serious intellectual credence to the idea that emotions should be given any weight at all. But, thanks to the Romantics, we now have many supposedly serious disciplines which place feelings on a pedestal while denigrating reason.
The only mystery is why it took so long for the Romantic movement to catch on. I suppose we can blame both the conservative nature of the day, and the slow pace with which ideas spread in the pre-electronic era. It really shouldn't surprise me that it took centuries for the Romantics to thoroughly infiltrate the intellectual elite to enough of a degree that they could begin to control popular culture. If it took until the late 19th or early 20th century for the Romantics to fully control universities and intellectual movements in general, then another 50 years or so to control popular culture is not so surprising.
This may actually merit a bit more writing, as my time is limited today. I just wanted to point out the origins of all these bad ideas with which we are afflicted, as it may prove helpful to know their origins if we ever hope to be free of them.
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* By the way, I do not single out Goethe here because of any animosity, I am quite a fan of the man's writing. I use
Young Werther because it created such a sensation among young readers at the time of its release. It was sort of the Harry Potter,
Star Wars and Rolling Stones of its day. Kind of Franz Liszt without the piano. So it seemed a perfect example to make my point.