I’ve got an essay up at Pajamas Media.
Topic: “Isn’t it Romantic?: suicide, homicide, terrorism, and Romanticism.” That’s “Romantic” with a capital R.
This entry was posted
on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Terrorism and terrorists.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Previously a lifelong Democrat, born in New York and living in New England, surrounded by liberals on all sides, I've found myself slowly but surely
February 2nd, 2007 at 10:11 pm
I like. A lot.
Not only did you tie in the special traits of the Left and the other diseased forms of ideology, but you also connected it to the historical roots of humanity, and therefore gave it a sort of family tree from which we may trace back along.
As you said before. Put in some non-obvious topics like Romanticism, with current events, and some other variable ingredients, put the lid on, and wait until the pressure cooks it into a wondrous mix.
February 3rd, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Nice essay.
One can also supply a critique of the Enlightenment. Many Enlightenment thinkers from Diderot to Rousseau to Mably to Morelly set Nature against Society, and saw Reason on the side of Nature, and from this rejected society because of its false traditions. In addition, there was the belief of people like Turgot, Fourier, and Condorcet that history proceeds by rational laws. Society starts as a child, and eventually grows up and reaches its potential.
So what we have is an axiological critique of all that exists as a false tradition, and a teleological critique which condemns the present in terms of a latent, utopian future. Combine the two critiques and one gets Karl Marx; put them in practice and you get Lenin.
Perhaps the solution resides in distinguishing between Enlightenments. All of the thinkers named above are French, and their thought led straight to the Jacobins and the Reign of Terror. In contrast, there was another Enlightenment — the Anglo-Scottish Enlightement, which was composed of thinkers like David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, Edmund Burke, and so forth. And perhaps it is appropriate to consider the Americans as having their own school of neo-classical thought.
February 3rd, 2007 at 6:41 pm
Beautiful essay
February 3rd, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Loved it! (See my email.)
February 5th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
Good stuff. J.H.B. above hits on some essential historical points, I think. Romanticism was a revolt against rationalism. Rationalism led to man-as-machinery and denied something essential about us. I tend to think of the horrors of the 20th century as the spirit of romanticism mounted on the mechanics of (miscalled) “neo-classical” rationalism.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:16 am
A lot of the links, notably “displaced and/or projected”, “Somealthough not all”, “(see here for a more in-depth discussion of how this might work)” and “Semites and Anti-Semites” dont work.