25 Propositions about the New Romanticism
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More than two years ago, I predicted the rise of a New Romanticism—a movement to counter the intense rationalization and expanding technological control of society.
This idea had started as a joke. Oh Beethoven, come save us! And give Tchaikovsky the news.
But when I dug deeply into the history of the original Romanticist movement, circa 1800, I stopped laughing. The more I probed, the more I was convinced that this provided a blueprint for countering the overreach of technology, the massive expansion in surveillance, and the centralization of both political and economic power.
It had worked back then. The Age of Romanticism had seen the abolition of slavery, protections for workers, prohibitions on child labor, a growing respect for human dignity, and a blossoming of the arts.
Industrialists wept. But somehow they survived.
Romanticism had countered cold profit-driven industrialization with human values. And economic growth had actually accelerated in response to this more balanced approach.
Could it happen again? I thought it could. And now, two years, later, I’m convinced that the shift is already underway.
Here’s how I described it back then:
From “Notes Toward a New Romanticism” (November 2023)
I realized that, the more I looked at what happened circa 1800, the more it reminded me of our current malaise.
Rationalist and algorithmic models were dominating every sphere of life at that midpoint in the Industrial Revolution—and people started resisting the forces of progress.
Companies grew more powerful, promising productivity and prosperity. But Blake called them “dark Satanic mills” and Luddites started burning down factories—a drastic and futile step, almost the equivalent of throwing away your smartphone.
Even as science and technology produced amazing results, dysfunctional behaviors sprang up everywhere. The pathbreaking literary works from the late 1700s reveal the dark side of the pervasive techno-optimism—Goethe’s novel about Werther’s suicide, the Marquis de Sade’s nasty stories, and all those gloomy Gothic novels. What happened to the Enlightenment?
As the new century dawned, the creative class (as we would call it today) increasingly attacked rationalist currents that had somehow morphed into violent, intrusive forces in their lives—an 180 degree shift in the culture. For Blake and others, the name Newton became a term of abuse.
Artists, especially poets and musicians, took the lead in this revolt. They celebrated human feeling and emotional attachments—embracing them as more trustworthy, more flexible, more desirable than technology, profits, and cold calculation.
In the two years since I wrote that, the notion of a New Romanticism has spread like a wildfire.
For valuable commentary on the subject, you should check out Ross Barkan, Santiago Ramos, Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, Kate Alexandra, Megha Lillywhite, and Campbell Frank Scribner. That’s just a start.
The new Romanticon Substack, launched in September, is now an important part of the movement.
I see hints of the New Romanticism in the most popular TV series (Severance, Pluribus, Yellowstone, etc.).
The extraordinary growth in romance, fantasy, romantasy and other fanciful literary genres tells the same story. Many readers are seeking an escape from hard-headed realism in the current moment.
I find sympathetic voices among public intellectuals—many of them mentioned here in recent months (Jonathan Haidt, Charles Taylor, Iain McGilchrist, Jennifer Frey, Paul Kingsnorth, Byung-Chul Han, etc.).
These people lack political or economic power. But they reflect the new attitude of the public—and that will become increasingly clear as the US approaches election day later this year.
This movement is not going away. It will only intensify.
For a long time, I’ve wanted to write more on the New Romanticism. Given the growing momentum of this movement, now is probably a good time to define it more clearly.
With that goal, I’m sharing 25 propositions. These will help you anticipate future events—at least that’s my goal.
Others will probably have a slightly different take on this—so I can’t claim any sweeping authority for my statements. These simply outline what this movement means to me, and where I think it’s heading.
THE NEW ROMANTICISM: 25 PROPOSITIONS
1.
The most important things in human life can’t be reduced to software code or numbers on a spreadsheet. Here are some of them: Love, Trust, Compassion, Friendship, Forgiveness, Faith, Hope, Charity, Creative Expression, Integrity, Nature, Kindness, Beauty.
These are the key parameters of the Romanticist life.
2.
In ages of intense Rationalism, these things get marginalized—or in some cases eradicated. It’s no coincidence that people are struggling in the current environment to find love, friendship, trust, etc. The rationalist system is not built to foster these human connections—even the largest data center can’t generate them.
3.
Rationalism has created tremendous benefits for society, but in its final stages it becomes self-serving. The system aims to expand its control no matter the consequences for people inside the system. It starts to feel intrusive and oppressive.
4.
This is happening right now. Rationalism has become voracious and refuses to recognize any limits. It wants to swallow up everything. All human things get turned into an app.
Even art and inspiration get replaced by inhuman data—beauty becomes one more output from a cold unfeeling system. The system now wants you to work to assist the expansion of data. And your own value is reduced to the ways your personal data can get monetized.
But it doesn’t stop there. The system urges you to seek out more data in your playtime. You even have the option of falling in love with a data construct.
5.
We’ve reached an endgame where this process turns into a mockery of language. The word progress no longer refers to actual progress, merely an expansion of technological control—so every software upgrade feels like a downgrade.
The same is true of the word productivity. Productivity gains are now the source of widespread unemployment and impoverishment—because only a few technocrats capture the economic benefits.
The word science also gets tainted. Scientific information is increasingly indistinguishable from propaganda—so much so that the predominant use of new tech is to produce fakery (fake images, fake video, fake books, fake people, all the way to fake answers on a test).
The whole system feels like it’s built on deception in the service of the will to power.
6.
Romanticism flips the equation—the system is forced to serve the people, instead of the people serving the system.
7.
Just as there is a New Romanticism, there is also a New Rationalism. A typical exponent is the criminal financier Sam Bankman-Fried, who mocked Shakespeare (although SBH would “never read a book”—so how could he judge literature?), and tried to reduce human values to a kind of maximization problem on a math test.
Other exponents of the New Rationalism are individuals who seem strangely drained of emotion and human connection—Thiel, Musk, Altman, Zuckerberg, etc. This is the Rationalist character type—a zero degree of personality. They are people you would trust with a spreadsheet, but not to babysit your child or care for an elder.
8.
This zero personality type is obsessed with AI—the god created in its own image—which becomes the defining technology of the New Rationalism. But no matter how smart AI gets, it will never create an app that can forgive. Or fall in love. Or feel the pangs of parenthood. Or grieve the death of a loved one. Or grasp the sublime.
9.
It will try to mimic all these things. That’s the travesty of the dominant data-built system—a built-in dishonesty. You can tell that Rationalism is now reaching its breaking point because of the intense level of deceit and pretense it now requires to expand its sphere of control.
10.
This pretense is also an admission that AI needs that human dimension—human feeling is essential to its goals but impossible to achieve. With every move it makes, the technocracy shows its hunger for the same humanism it’s working to destroy.
11.
This rationalist world has gradually been drained of enchantment. The shift to life via digital apps and interfaces represents the final stage of disenchantment.
12.
People now feel the horror and claustrophobia of this imposed disenchantment. This creates a hunger for magic that the system cannot provide.
13.
Romanticism aims to recover enchantment—at first for individuals, but ultimately for groups and communities.
That’s why Romanticism nurtures creativity, storytelling, self-expression, emotion, ecstasy, aesthetic awe—things that can’t be manipulated like data and content.
14.
Rationalism tries to compensate for its lack of a soul by imitating a religion or cult. It establishes its own dogmas and rituals with the fervor of true believers.
Tens of thousands of people already treat AI as a kind of god. That’s not happenstance, but symptomatic of this tendency. The participant in the rationalist belief system also needs a higher power, and finds it in the machine.
15.
Systematized rationalism is about total control. That’s inevitable in any worldview without a moral compass. So it doesn’t respect human limits—but has an inherent urge to expand its sphere of control, no matter what consequences ensue.
We are in great danger when science and technology grow faster than our moral awareness of how to use the tools they create. The same thing happened during the Industrial Revolution—until the Romanticist backlash imposed constraints and reforms.
Until that took place, factory owners and plantation bosses treated humans as mere inputs in a cold rationalized process. The similarities with our current situation are hard to miss.
16.
At some point even the scientists lose control—as we learned when they invented nuclear weapons or gunpowder or coronaviruses. The people who built the atomic bomb could only hand it off to the most powerful politicians. That inevitably happened in every country where nuclear weapons were made.
If AI achieves the degree of power its proponents predict, the same handoff will happen. It will become another tool of control for entrenched rulers. To expect otherwise is naive.
17.
Romanticism is the opposite of all this. It is about maintaining some small space of freedom from total control. It protects people, not a hierarchy of machines and machine owners.
18.
Ages of intense rationalized control do not last forever. They create an inevitable backlash by pushing to extremes. This is why the industrialization of Europe led to the great age of Romanticism.
The Romanticists demanded protections for workers, laws against child labor, an end to slavery, and other defenses against total control of a rationalized system. Something like this will happen again.
19.
A counterculture is always inherently Romantic. It resists the overreach of the dominant system.
A society that doesn’t listen to its counterculture—or, worse, tries to silence it—has destroyed its most valuable feedback loop.
20.
The dominant system today is built on analysis. And it’s worth remembering that the root meaning of analysis is the reduction of things into parts.
Holistic thinking, in contrast, is always inherently Romantic. You can also call this visionary thinking.
21.
The goal isn’t to stop Rationalism. The goal is to make it serve human ends. Instead the system is moving hellbent in the opposite direction.
22.
Even Romanticism can be pushed to dangerous extremes. When it rose as a counterweight to the Enlightenment, circa 1800, the Romanticist impulse had a healthy influence on society for a period of roughly fifty years. Then it got entangled in intense nationalist rivalries and other dysfunctional trends. So anything I say in favor of Romanticism is solely with regard to the current context.
At the present moment, it would provide a healthy corrective. But that doesn’t mean that the Romanticist impulse is beneficial in every setting.
23.
Healing begins with each individual. This is still possible, even in repressive situations. Rebellion emerges first in the inner life—which the Rationalists can’t control.
That’s always the initial step in Romanticist eras. Individuals nurture their inner life. Then they can form communities and push for more humane policies and institutions.
24.
Rationalism appears powerful, but is actually vulnerable—because it’s empty inside. It lacks a heart and soul. In any real conflict, this is a huge weakness—because conflicts are won by the most passionate, not by the most rigorously analytical.
25.
The New Romanticism is more than an intellectual movement. It will be promoted by people who don’t even recognize that label. They will demand a more human-oriented society. They will care about creative expression. They will seek to nurture their souls—and do so without apologies, not worrying about what can be quantified or measured. They recognize the value of intangibles, and the dead-end of a data-driven life.
This is already starting to happen—the movement is gaining strength even at this very moment.
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I will revisit this subject in the future. Others will too—because this conflict in worldviews is now too large to ignore.