Chapter 11         Part E 

       The one significant interruption in this process is the one called the Romantic Age. The meaning of this time is still being debated, but in my model which sees a kind of cultural evolution in the record of human history, there are only a couple of interesting points to note about the Romantic Age (roughly, the 1790's to about 1850).

"Abbey in an Oak Forest" by C.D. Friedrich 

(showing imagination and emotion of the Romantic Age) 

  First, it reaffirmed and expanded the value of the individual when the Enlightenment had gone too far and made duty, duty to the family, to the group, or to the state, seem like the only “reasonable” value that should motivate human beings as they chose their actions. Romanticism asserted forcefully and passionately that the individual had an even greater duty to his own soul. I have dreams, ideas, and feelings that are uniquely mine and I have a right to them. Paradoxically, this philosophy of individualism is very useful for a society when spread over millions of citizens and over decades and generations, as was mentioned above, because even though most of the dreamers allowed to rove produce little that is of use to the larger community, a few create beautiful, brilliant things that pay huge material, political, and artistic dividends.

drawing of guillotining during French Revolution

    In the second place, it is important to note that as a political philosophy, Romanticism produced some painful excesses. The citizens in France and elsewhere were indeed passionate and excited about their ideals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, but they did not know how to administer a state and so, in a short while, they simply traded one autocrat for another. Their struggle to reach a "reasonable" view of what human beings are in their deepest nature and how a system of government that resonates with that nature may be instituted among humans took longer than one generation to evolve. But it did come, or, rather, the French began evolving toward it and are still evolving as I write, as are we all. 

  

photo of aftermath of Battle of Gettysburg, 1863

    Even in the U.S., the idealism of the American version of the Romantic revolt against duty and discipline, in awkwardly attempting to integrate the ideals of reason, order, and good governance (i.e. Enlightenment ideals) with more spiritual ones that asserted the value of every individual human being, produced the painful excesses of genocide of the native people, enslavement of millions of Africans, and the horror of horrors, the U.S. Civil War. 

    America had to undergo some very hard adjustments before she began to integrate the Christian belief in the worth of every individual with the need for order and the sense of duty that enabled every individual to allow every other individual to live his or her life in the way he or she chose to. But the slaves were freed, and the government began to compensate the native people (with reserves of land and cash) and take them into the American mainstream (with opportunities for Western-style educations), or rather, to be more honest, the Americans began moving toward these ideals more and more determinedly, and continue to do so until this era.

        Thus, in the larger picture of all of these events in the history of the Western nations, the upheaval called the Romantic Age wrote into the Western values system a greater willingness to compromise and a deeper respect for the institutions of democracy. Belief in the institutions of democracy, people could see, was all that was keeping their various states from devolving into complete chaos. Democracy was, and is, our best hope for creating institutions by which people may use reasoned debate instead of war to find a balance between the security-loving conservatism of the establishment and the heated passions of the reformers in each new generation. 

        In short, once again, a kind of synthesis evolved. In a compromise, two opposing camps each have to give a little of what they like in order to get a little more of what they want most of all. But what really happened at the end of the Romantic upheaval was more like what Hegel calls a "synthesis", a workable melding between a thesis and its antithesis began to grow. And we can go beyond Hegel and say that it just wasn't a synthesis that any science of history - Hegel's or anyone else's - could have foreseen. Rather, as conditions changed and old cultural ways became obsolete, a new, opportunistic species of society arose.

Occupy Wall Street protesters, New York, 2011

  

    The very idea of democracy evolved till it made the protecting of the rights of every individual citizen the most important reason for its own existence. All of this from the melding of Christian respect for the value of every single human being, Roman respect for order and discipline, and Greek love of the seer, the one who can question the forces of the material world. Participatory democracy was the logical outcome of the Renaissance and Enlightenment world views being applied - in several successively more profound stages - by human societies, to themselves. The adjusting just took a while. And it goes on.