Chapter 11.                             Part H 

         Other societies which also operated under world views that portrayed humans as having little ability to control the events of life are to be found in all countries and all eras of history, but we don’t need to discuss them all. The point is that the advancing worldview by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, around the planet, was the one which we call “scientific”, the Enlightenment view.

         The one significant interruption in the spread of the values of the Enlightenment is the era 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 mid-1700's to the mid-1800's).

 

                                                 "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 - to the family, the group, or the state - seem like the only “reasonable” value, the one that should motivate all 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 can be very useful for a whole society when it is spread over millions of citizens and over decades and generations, because even though most of the dreamers allowed to rove free produce little that is of any practical use to the larger community, and some become criminals, a few create beautiful, brilliant things that pay huge material, political, and artistic dividends.

    

                                    drawing of guillotining during French Revolution

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

  

                                photo of aftermath of Battle of Gettysburg, 1863

In the U.S., the idealism of the American version of the Romantic Revolt, in its attempts to integrate the Enlightenment ideals of reason and order with Romantic ideals that asserted the value of the individual, produced some painful excesses: genocide of the native people, enslavement of millions of Africans, and, one of History's worst 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 respect for the law that enables individuals to live together in peace. But the slaves were freed, and the government began to compensate the native tribes (with reserves of land and with 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 right into this era.

            Thus, in the larger picture of all of these events, the upheaval called the Romantic Age wrote into the Western values system a greater willingness to compromise and a deeper respect for the ways of compromise, i.e. the institutions of democracy. The institutions of democracy, people learned, were what was guiding them toward balance and so keeping their various states from devolving into chaos. Democracy was, and is, our best hope for creating institutions by which people may use reason and debate instead of war to find a timely balance in each new generation between the security-loving conservatism of the establishment and the heated passions of the reformers.