Romanticism or Renaissance?

The Pendulum Keeps Swinging

Both Ted Gioia and Ross Barkan (among others) have observed cultural stirrings that indicate we might be moving away from rationalism, in ways similar to the sea change from Enlightenment to Romanticism around 1800. Count me intrigued.

Back when I started working on Internet technologies in the mid-90s, there was great hope that they would be a force for human liberation (re-read John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace if you need a reminder of those utopian visions). It hasn’t worked out that way. Over the last five years of my technology career, I saw the degrading effects of big tech up close while working on anti-tracking mitigations and pro-privacy protections at Mozilla. And that was even before the emergence of LLMs, which threaten to not only violate your privacy but also turn your mind into mush.

Yet the Internet is far from the only causal factor at work here.

For one, the reign of technocratic experts is over — COVID-19 put the final nail in that coffin when public health officials around the world quickly turned their backs on the previous scientific consensus that society-wide lockdowns were ineffective.

For another, the institutionalization of the avant-garde has run its course. When the early modernists exposed the bankruptcy of much late-Romantic artistic production, their wild experiments with form and content made sense (although I’d argue that there might have been more constructive ways to move forward). But at this point the shock troops have commanded the cultural heights for a hundred years, with little to show for it. How many modernist and post-modernist composers, writers, visual artists, and architects will be fondly remembered 100 or 500 years from now? Very few, I’d wager.

At the root of this failure was a misguided progressivism - of the aesthetic, not political, variety. No one has put this better than Glenn Gould:

We have never really become equipped to adjudicate music per se. Our sense of history is captive of an analytical method which seeks out isolated moments of stylistic upheaval — pivot points of idiomatic evolution — and our value judgments are largely based upon the degree to which we can assure ourselves that a particular artist participated in or, better yet, anticipated the nearest upheaval. Confusing evolution with accomplishment, we become blind to those values not explicit in an analogy with stylistic metamorphosis. ~ The Glenn Gould Reader, p. 342.

All this speculation about a return to Romanticism exposes an expectation that here we are at yet another moment of stylistic upheaval. However, the fracturing and mixing brought about by the Internet and a more global culture might militate against a thoroughgoing turn in any one direction. Nowadays, anyone can choose which way of life or artistic subculture to follow; many observers bemoan the resulting echo chambers, especially politically, but it’s unlikely that we’ll put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

That said, there are hopeful signs of a humanistic awakening, from a renewed emphasis on deep reading outside the universities to tech-industry parents encouraging their children to pursue careers in the arts. Moreover, hyper-rationalist movements like Effective Altruism and transhumanism, though never broadly appealing in the first place, have lost their luster. Even philosophy as a way of life is making a comeback!

On the other side of the ledger, secular humanists are still fighting the last war, algorithms rule the world, profound craft knowledge was lost across all the arts during the modernist interlude, and many people these days have never acquired the habits of in-person friendship and community.

We have a long way to go before classical, human-centered ideals of life and art hold sway again. Indeed, more than a return to Romanticism we might need a veritable Renaissance. The evident exhaustion of the modernist project gives me hope that new beginnings are possible. All we can do is try!

Photo by Jack Hunter on Unsplash