Most voters favour higher spending, both personal and state, lower taxes except for the rich, cheaper credit, higher savings rates, a stronger currency, a weaker currency, the right to emigrate, limited immigration, social and religious tolerance, religious intolerance, security, a small military that does courageous things to make them proud, low crime rates, peace, freedom to do as they please, and freedom from the consequences of their follies.

During the heyday of libertarian governments, let us say 1750-1914, countries in the Anglosphere (plus a few enlightened others) had low taxes, a small military that did courageous things overseas, plenty of personal freedoms, and little else on the list above. They were not democracies in the modern sense of the word; the UK, including its colonies, was a Constitutional Monarchy; the US was a Constitutional Republic. These forms of government differ from a democracy in that although everybody is represented in a legislature, the representatives are elected by a few eligible voters.

Today, Argentina is the world’s sole libertarian government, and it is a precarious one. Only the executive, and not the legislature, is libertarian, and the president governs largely by decree. An election this year might change this, but to broaden support for his policies, President Milei needs the voting public to return politicians sympathetic to his libertarian program. If he appeals to the majority’s wishes by satisfying what they favor (see above), he should be successful. Good luck with that.

For argument’s sake, let us fantasize that he broadens his legislative support sufficiently for him to pass libertarian laws. A year from now, Milei will be in the final two years of his present term and looking to return for four more years. Let us dream further and believe that he will avoid the temptation to abandon his principles to run on a ‘strong and stable government’ platform. What, from a libertarian perspective, should be his focus to attract the votes he needs for re-election?

Beyond the obvious—keeping inflation low, staving off debt default, abolishing currency controls—the voter demand Milei most needs to address is freedom from the consequences of their follies.

If you ever ask what brought the death of liberalism (as libertarianism was once known), then look no further for an answer than a widened franchise that sought this demand. The consequences have been welfare statism, high regulation, low economic growth, high taxes, high debt, high emigration, high immigration, sectarian strife, high crime rates, big government, and a military that does things abroad of which nobody can be proud.

Milei can reflect that the West has been here before. At the end of the 70s, again requiring relief from the consequences of their folly, electorates returned Reagan and Thatcher to deliver economic growth with a modicum of self-esteem. As with the voters, neither of these leaders was libertarian, so once economic growth was reestablished, voters turned to past follies while abandoning, gaily, self-esteem as a value.

In 2022, facing an economic meltdown, Argentines opted for libertarianism as a remedy for their past abject follies. It was a wise choice, and so far, disaster has been averted. But once the economy stabilizes and growth is restored, the smart money will go on voters returning to statism. Unless…

As I have argued before, to avoid the fate of tango dancers and forever suffering the dual emotions of loss and regret, Argentines need to undergo a fundamental change in their relationship with the state by opting for self-esteem over state relief.

So, what can Milei do to help facilitate this change? He has argued publicly with puritanical libertarians that, as a political leader (as opposed to an armchair economist), he needs to be practical and patient in implementing his reforms.

For instance, Argentina’s high tariffs need to go, but allowing consumer goods from overseas to compete with domestically produced goods will devastate domestic manufacturing, causing unemployment to rise sharply in Buenos Aires Province, a key state he needs to win in the coming round of mid-term elections.

Blowing up the thieving central bank is a noble aspiration, but for now, ironically, he needs the proceeds of its thievery to pay the state’s bills and balance the budget.

Abolishing currency controls (the notorious ‘Cepo’) without foreign currency reserves will bring back inflation. Thankfully, a solution is at hand.

Once sufficient oil and gas sales from Argentina’s abundant unexploited reserves hit the world market, currency issues hampering debt repayment, the Cepo abolition and an end to the central bank’s nefarious activities will evaporate. Argentina needs time and, as a bridge, it needs the IMF to lend more money to replenish foreign reserve stocks. Good luck with that.

But this does not address the key issue—how to convince people that, like cocaine, the state is an inappropriate vehicle to relieve the pain of life’s shortcomings. If the state cannot compete with the private sector in service supply (imagine state-controlled food distribution), goods creation, entrepreneurial discovery, innovative delivery, or property maintenance, why do people insist it involves itself in these endeavors? Because the state has power and money.

Influence through redistribution has grown with the wealth of nations, and governments of all hues use this to achieve their primary goal—maintaining power. Given these dynamics are not going away any time soon, the pragmatic libertarian Milei can at least recognize the state’s limitations and confine its redistributive powers to funding.

For instance, the state can fund the poor’s education without providing the service. The same is true for healthcare. It can pay pensions to those previously promised while refusing the same promise to new state employees. It can sell any property it owns and lease what it needs. It can insist that the criminal justice system receives its funding through a surcharge on commercial contracts it expects the government to enforce. And, through a reduction in support for and regulation of civil institutions, it can encourage civil governance of the professions, cultural institutions, and charities.

All this a libertarian government can implement with sufficient legislative backing. Milei needs to introduce this debate immediately into the public domain and convince the populace how it will improve their lives.

Nothing in human affairs is determined. Agency permits change, and change provides opportunity. If Milei can convince voters that relief from the consequences of their follies comes not from the state but their endeavors (i.e. the market), perhaps they will support him long enough for him to do his thing while rediscovering their self-esteem through taking responsibility for themselves.

The post Milei’s Dilemma appeared first on Free the People.

We are also informed that Operation Condor targeted communist guerrillas and sympathisers, students, militants, trade unionists, writers, journalists, artists, and citizens suspected of being left-wing activists. Whether these murdered victims were actual participants, innocent or otherwise, in a nascent uprising hoping to take control of the government by force is not mentioned. Neither is the Soviet Union’s leadership of, or financial support for, the impending violent revolution.

The Dirty War began nearly fifty years ago, and understanding it properly requires placing oneself within the context of 1970s world politics.

Post WWII, the Soviet Union and China relentlessly instigated, financed, and supplied armed revolutions whenever an opportunity arose and wherever they, or their proxies, were not in power. First in Eastern Europe, then Korea, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and, by 1970, in Latin America, communism was coming to the people by foul means or fair.

With the election of Chile’s Salvador Allende in November 1970, the rapidly spreading worldwide communist revolution gained a foothold on Latin America’s mainland. Henceforth, it had a base to initiate its armed struggle against the evil forces of bourgeoise exploitation in the southern cone.

Despite having no mandate to transform Chile into a Marxist state (he won 36% of the vote, marginally more than his two democratic opponents), President Allende pressed ahead with a revolutionary agenda. After three years in power and no growth in his popularity, evidence emerged that Allende was overseeing the illegal importation of weapons and activists from a sympathetic Cuba. Following a hapless attempt to replace the judges on the Supreme Court, the military, led by General Pinochet, drew a halt to these revolutionary activities, shot Allende and ‘disappeared’ tens of thousands of socialist sympathizers from Chilean society.

How are we invited to understand this today? It seems the accepted mainstream narrative of this period is that brass hats brutally suppressed innocents wishing to progress society because, well, that is what they do.

While studying Chilean history as an undergraduate in early 1980s Canada, I was drawn to why two stable and increasingly prosperous democratic countries like Chile and Argentina should suddenly become violently repressive. Analysis of the coups in both academic literature and the press offered a combination of CIA malfeasance, self-serving big business malintent, and bloodthirsty brass hats showing typical reactionary disregard for the wishes of the nations they served.

No mention was made of how atypical this was for both nation’s militaries and that neither had done this before. With no doubt that what happened in both countries was tragic, I wanted to know what initiated the repression and whether the mainstream interpretation I was being fed was contestable.

Studying post-war communist activity, one learns that struggles undertaken in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Cuba, Colombia, and Peru resulted in countless millions of disappearances and deaths. In the West, supporting these struggles drew no opprobrium, particularly in academia. Did those preaching and supporting revolutionary armed struggle, either physically or verbally, ever consider the cost in lives before doing so?

Looking at the Latin American examples, I thought it only fair to ask that those who participated in the struggles take responsibility for their actions and accept blame for the outcome. Had there been no threat of armed struggle in Chile or Argentina, would there have been Desaparecidos?

I was also curious to understand the thinking that drove the military to act so brutally against so many people when it was their job to protect them. The propaganda claims it was in the beast’s nature—how brass hats acted. Maybe they acted out for self-preservation, knowing that, as with other Soviet-fomented armed conflicts, they would suffer proportionately the greatest losses, whichever side they took. Or had the Generals made the calculated decision to act, as militaries should, quickly and decisively against an identified enemy to the state? In which case, were they not just doing their duty?

No army officer has a constitutional right to depose his president. Yet, after the Chilean President acted so detrimentally to the people’s safety, maybe Pinochet was right to halt an impending civil war.

In Argentina, it is documented that both Isabel Peron and her successor, Italo Luder, ordered the military to act forcefully against the growing insurgency. Whether the various forces commissioned to counter the insurgency subsequently acted proportionately or egregiously is a question for the courts. Argentina has confronted the terrible crimes perpetrated by the Junta by prosecuting various perpetrators and compensating surviving relatives. But not everybody has received closure, justice, or compensation and today, many still ask the question, what happened to the undocumented victims, and why were they ‘disappeared’?

As we are only a generation away from this contemporary issue becoming history, it will soon become an academic question. Certainly, more thorough studies and wider discussions need to be undertaken to understand the events surrounding this painful period. To do this, academia needs to move away from its present narrow Marxist methodology of analysis and stop framing the tragedy of innocent deaths as a left versus right struggle. It is false and leads nowhere good.

The true struggle was not between progressive left-wing revolutionaries and reactionary right-wing military governments but rather between those who sought to live in a peaceful democratic society and those who chose violence and terror to force their ideology on an unwilling populace. Included with the latter are those who, believing they might benefit, gave tacit support to such an outcome.

The innocent dead, through their surviving mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters, have every right to insist history provides answers that might assuage their pain. As the collateral damage of illegitimate violence, their grievances are authentic.

But nobody affiliated with any political movement that sought, through force, to usurp the legitimate government should stand with these victims. Refusing to accept culpability or express remorse for such activity precludes them from the right to demand anything until, at the very least, answers are provided regarding the extent to which they sought to prosecute their aims. Until that happens, they should escape no scrutiny from anybody seeking the truth about what happened.

Argentines are right to mourn the deaths of its innocents. Yet, difficult as it is to accept, they should also count their blessings. It may be of little solace to the grieving, but things would have been far worse had swift action not been taken to quell the violent revolutionary activities taking place. We know in hindsight that civil war, with its potential for deaths numbering in the millions, was avoided and that civil society, with its democratic elections and legal system based on rules, not guns, returned. Finding similar outcomes outside of Latin America is not possible.

The post On Viewing the Desaparecidos appeared first on Free the People.

For over a century, along with all countries in the Western World, Argentina followed a political path towards increased government interference in private life. The consequences throughout the West differed according to time, place, and degree of implementation. Yet the results were the same: in exchange for government-administered security, individuals gradually forfeited their freedoms to trade freely, enter contracts without compulsion, and retain the full fruits of their endeavors.

The negative repercussions of this chosen path in Argentina were so acute an electoral majority became convinced that enough was enough, their path had to change. Faced with the stark choice of continuing with statist policies or moving in a radically free market direction, not offered since Barry Goldwater’s campaign in the 1960 US election, they chose the latter and elected Javier Milei as their new President.

Though widely derided as populist and dangerous, Javier Milei and his party, La Libertad Avanza, made a compelling case for their selection by repudiating the previous direction on moral and practical grounds.

Claiming statism (Milei called it socialism) ran counter to individual liberty, La Libertad Avanza declared it immoral according to Enlightenment principles. Government intrusion into an individual’s economic activity robbed people of their freedom, they explained, and this was something no government had a mandate to do, morally.

For evidence to support their argument on practicality, they pointed to the manifest hyperinflation, widespread poverty, and rampant corruption threatening the country’s present and future social, economic, and political health.

Time and again, Milei claimed that government interference in economic activity was the root of the problem and during his campaign, he wielded a chainsaw to indicate his intentions. When interviewed, he calmly and forcefully made his case on both the moral and practical folly of the past in the manner of an economics lecturer, just as he had been doing as a TV personality for years.

Eight months into his term, President Milei is implementing his mission to move in the opposite direction to the path to poverty. In a race against time with economic growth as his only salvation, he is betting heavily on his free market policies before facing the electorate again.

To repeat an earlier point, Argentina’s woes differ from Western countries in degree only. Despite moving in the same statist direction as Argentina, few are as far along the path as one might think. But, following widespread interventionist actions post-March 2020, they are all too close to bankruptcy. With annual economic growth of 1% celebrated as a success, taxation thresholds at levels that any more will cause protests, and pension and welfare demands no longer sustainable, should a major crisis hit, most countries would face hyperinflation, a spike in poverty, and a rude political reckoning.

Take a financial crisis triggered by a bank failure. These are not uncommon and the cries of desperation from banks (picture a fouled soccer player writhing in feigned agony on the pitch) will initiate finance ministers and central bankers to do what worked in the past and expand the money supply through quantitative easing (QE). The US government, the present custodians of the world’s reserve currency, might get away with QE for a while, but others will not. Currencies such as the Sterling and the Euro, will devalue faster than the Dollar, causing inflation.

Banking crises soon move to the real economy via credit shortages, causing bankruptcies and lower commercial activity. Unemployment soon rises, creating more demand for government handouts. If governments respond by borrowing (selling bonds) they face more problems. Most, up to their eyeballs in debt, will face higher interest rates. As the UK’s short-term Prime Minister, Liz Truss, can attest, borrowing money is no longer an option for a government hoping to finance excess spending.

The UK is a prime example of a vulnerable country not far from Argentine-sized economic woes. It is massively in debt. Its economy has been broadly stagnant since the 2008 financial crisis despite high government spending. It has over 5.5 million people receiving disability allowances as income, countless others living on (unfunded) government pensions which rise with inflation, and still more owning pensions holding government debt whose value is derived from tax-funded interest payments. Widespread demands for the government to make good on its ‘social contract’ while dealing with a decent-sized crisis could prove tricky for His Majesty’s Government.

The options for all Western countries are limited. Tax rises and spending cuts are not politically palatable so money creation out of thin air might be the only response for an electorate unwilling to change. This is exactly what Argentina reverted to, hence the hyperinflation.

As economic circumstances in the West increasingly resemble Argentina, how will electorates respond? Will they realize the errors of their ways and copy Argentina’s path to redemption? Or will they opt for the Weimar solution? How long can the West continue along this same path? Most electorates see no need for radical change and are unwilling to give up the security side of the deal hoping it will all last indefinitely.

And maybe so-called mixed economies are stable. The direction towards ever-more intrusive government, reduced liberty, and chronic economic inertia does seem inexorable, but maybe Hayek was wrong when he predicted this would eventually lead to impoverishment regardless.

Well, stable or otherwise, crises happen. No Western economies are as resilient as before they incurred such debt and committed themselves to unsustainable entitlements. Economic growth is the answer all optimists tout, yet few economies, mature or developing, can realistically hope for the long-term expansion required to meet the growing bills without reform. Besides, when they do, governments fall over themselves to make new promises.

The world is not stable. Mixed economies suffer sharp economic downturns from time to time and the Argentine model, painful as it is, just might prove a decent alternative to what followed the Weimar approach. They should all watch closely and wish them good luck.

Should Argentina’s reformation produce growth long enough to entrench prosperity and restore resilience, others might see this path as an attractive alternative and adopt free market economics as a platform for reform. But to be successful, any reforming government needs to win the argument that socialism is both counter to Enlightenment values of freedom, and impractical. Only then will they gain the vital support of the people President Milei presently enjoys.

The post Economic Reformation in Argentina appeared first on Free the People.

I find this latter remark strange yet common, especially in those who focus their attentions on the so-called social sciences. For sociologists, the individual barely exists, in and of himself, and is relevant only as a particle controlled by the nebulous blob that gives their subject its name. For economists, the individual is but a unit, conceivable for his predictable responses to supply and demand but otherwise irrelevant. When irrational, the individual is uninteresting. For anthropologists, all of us are products of our past, unable to change except in ways determined by the environment in which we and our ancestors have been placed. To the political scientist, he is but a member of a class, his thoughts, his actions, his values, not to mention his wealth, granted him through his relative position in a power-mandated hierarchy. I could go on, but think the point sufficiently made—the individual, that thing we know as self, falls outside the measurable except when seen as part of something conceivably sizeable. Then he is measurable. My interlocutor agreed with my adumbrations, stating that what he meant by measurable applied to the physical universe—that part made up of the 118 known elements, 94 of which occur on earth—with time and space added in.

I moved the conversation on to make the point that in the known universe, the individual is the only collection of said elements able to make the statement, “shit, look at all this; and I’m here to conceive it!” I state that fact in the vernacular because anybody with conscious ability could, no should, be capable of thinking it. Education, with its requirement to learn an obfuscating argot, is not essential; the individual making the statement needs only to be conscious, nothing more.

As far as we know, we are the only self-conscious conglomeration of elements to exist in the universe and the scientific method dictates that until disproven, this hypothesis stands. Those versed in probability may well argue that the universe, given its size, provides a high degree of possibility that other life-forms have evolved to reach, or exceeded, our own level of consciousness, but I remain unconvinced. It was a pretty chancy thing our evolving to this level. Besides, whatever the probability other conscious creatures do exist, we’ll never know them. Time and space limits our conscious existence to such an extent that they could be not be our neighbors even if at some point, somewhere, they did/do/will exist. We are on our own.

So we are here, existent in the universe, unique for our consciousness. So what? Well, that so is a lot. Think of our solar system. It is huge. And yet its outer limits—Pluto’s orbit (or Neptune’s) that marks the outer-most boundary of it constitutes only a tiny part of our galaxy which itself is only one of countless (my interlocutor disputed this obtuse number) galaxies that make up the universe. In all that knowable space, only we have consciousness, only we know indubitably that the universe exists. What is not us is just stuff made up of the same elements that, if we believe in Big Bang, make up the rest of the unconscious and unknowing universe. Our unique knowledge of this, until proven otherwise, is the most important thing in the universe.

And we are not small because of this knowledge; we are enormous. If there is an overriding value higher than all others in the universe, surely it is the realization that the whole darn thing is here? Until recently, only gods knew of the nature of our universe’s existence. We could see it, to a limited extent, but not know it, not like now. Now we can look deep into it and wonder (admittedly, to a limited extent, but then we have just started trying) more widely at its existence. It looks good but it is not like us. It doesn’t know itself or us. Only we know this and that is big.

This knowledge, previously ascribed to gods exclusively but clearly apparent in all of us, is the starting point in all our thinking.

Our knowledge of the universe and what it holds, is collectively gained but individually realized. Only individuals think on this subject and marvel at its relevance. When somebody asks, what’s the meaning of life, the only answer is, make of it what you will, it’s up to you. You can think of it as incomprehensible, absurd, an inconvenient burden best left for others to contemplate but that won’t help you come up with answers and add to your understanding. And what a waste such conclusions would be! What a shame! What an abnegation of one’s nature to deduce such conclusions when so much more is available. True, we all have different talents and aptitudes; few of us have Aristotle’s, Newton’s, Beethoven’s or any other such genius’ abilities to thrust mankind’s understanding of the universe forward, but that shouldn’t deter us. It didn’t stop them from thinking on the subjects at hand, thank goodness. And what they left us was beneficial, placing us further ahead in the quest for what comprehension means.

Start with appreciation. This ability of ours is no mean thing, so why the self-loathing? If individuals could be better, or have done better, why denigrate them as simply flawed when they are clearly capable of improvement? Improvement? How is that measured? Well, if cognition of the existence of the universe is what sets us apart, then knowing more of our it, and knowing it better, is an improvement. Understanding how we are part of the whole yet distinctly unique for that knowledge is an improvement, by any measure. We don’t have to be perfect, just capable of better.

The universe is not perfect; it is what it is, expanding and evolving, and each of us is part of it—its brain. Consciousness is not a sin, but believing it to be so corrodes our self-esteem and distorts our point of view, leading us to untrue assumptions. We don’t need that; it doesn’t help. What we need to do is to make sense of it.

Appreciating our place in the universe is an important first step, but an insufficient one. Just as measurement is not knowing, recognition is not understanding. We need to make sense of this universe of which we are a momentous part because to do otherwise is to contradict our very essence. It is not easy. Our essence—self-consciousness and the capacity to understand—makes us the most complex thing in the universe, distinct from both the animate and inanimate. The scientific methods we employ to further our understanding of the nature of that which is not conscious, tell us only so much about ourselves. The same is true of biology. Biology can teach us how our bodies work, how our brains function mechanically but not how we think, how we reason and how we conceptualize. It is wrong to deny (as the humanities and social sciences do) the essence of the individual mind by placing him in an inanimate group to make him measurable, understandable, predictable as the social sciences invariably try to do. This method takes us in the wrong direction by denying the existence of individual consciousness as a distinct and valuable attribute with conceptualization, through the correct application of reason, as its methodology.

And of the right direction, we can say this. The individual must adopt values to guide him in his understanding and pursuit of truth. First and foremost is the value of individual thought and life—how precious it is, how unique it is. Just as important is the individual’s freedom to think and act in a way that enhances his life in order that he can pursue his understanding of the universe in his own unique way and by his own choosing.

Only the individual mind exists for perceiving the universe. Each of us would do well to remember this and respect it during our short, precious time as conscious beings.

The post Measuring the Individual appeared first on Free the People.

Romanticism is important because of what it says about individualism. But what is meant by Romanticism, and where did it come from? On my bookshelf are two works on the Romantic movement as it emerged in the latter-half of the 18th century. Typical of what a second-year humanities student might have found on a supplementary reading list for a course covering the subject, both are long-winded, turgid, unenlightening. One concentrates primarily on painting; the other follows the emergence of the Gothic revival in literature as represented by Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe. Neither gives adequate time to discussing why the genre came to be; and when they do, they mostly get it wrong. Both more-or-less say Romanticism was brought to the people by an elite group of artists reacting to the formal, sterile Augustans who had taken the Baroque down a cul-de-sac that would end in pretty rococo paintings and the highly structured couplets of Pope. Placing the emergence of the movement in a historical context, they make no mention of the revolutionary times during which Romanticism was at its height, or how those upheavals might have influenced the sensibilities and tastes of the consumers absorbing what the artists produced. Instead, they give lopsided credence to the artists’ relevance in influencing popular proclivities, completely ignoring that same group’s natural propensity to cater to critical and consumer tastes; a propensity which might explain why modern artists refrain from the Romantic style today.

Isiah Berlin described Romanticism as “the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West,” and I am inclined to agree with him, but for different reasons. Berlin, discussing (in lectures available on YouTube) the essence of Romanticism, drops some names even his graduate students might have found obscure before mentioning better known characters about whom he adopts the “study the artist to understand the genre” method of analysis. By looking at Chatterton’s, Byron’s, Keats’ and the Marquis de Sade’s disreputable behaviors, he provides his explanation of Romanticism and why it was popular. Quite apart from denigrating by dubious distinction, his view is taken from the wrong end of the telescope, leaving me to think he does not quite grasp the essence of his subject. When he eventually states Romanticism begets Fascism because, along with a passionate belief in their own rightness, they share nationalism as a value, he ceases to be interesting.

To better understand Romanticism, regard it not as a movement, a genre in art, but as a point of view.

Henry Hazlitt asserts that once such a point of view is held widely enough, it becomes the “spirit of the age,” and Romanticism was indeed the spirit of the age. So widely held, so markedly different from that which preceded it, it was something more than a mere concoction contrived by an exclusive group of artists. The prevailing point of view for an age&mdashthe people’s spirit—emanates from those people at large who have the time and wherewithal to reflect upon their thoughts and draw their own conclusions on the subjects at hand.

The number of such thinking people in the 18th and 19th centuries was admittedly small (I leave you to ponder whether it is any greater today) yet it nonetheless contained a pantheon of individuals who changed their point of view markedly from the one held by their recent and ancient forefathers. This was because the universe as they knew it was markedly different. Brought about by the Enlightenment, which began roughly a century before Romanticism emerged, Western man’s view of the universe shifted at this time from a theological perspective to a scientific one.

Cultures differ, in time and place, by the degree to which the individual is relevant. This degree is what differentiates Western Civilization from other cultures. But it also holds within cultures. Key to understanding a characteristic spirit of an age, and to differentiate it from other spirits in other ages, is the perspective taken on the individual’s place in the universe. In the King James Bible, a widely read (and even more widely heard) piece of literature written just prior to the Enlightenment, the perception is of the individual as a sinner prone to mistakes, particularly when thinking or acting for himself. Mankind’s struggle is to act, even when it seems counter-intuitive to do so, according to God’s will, or else! In Greek and more recently, Elizabethan tragedy, the intrinsically flawed individual, regardless of his temporal powers, is also shown as helpless in the face of gods and fate. Think of Hamlet, Shakespeare’s thinking man. Afforded the attributes of acute observation and deep understanding, Hamlet remained uncertain in the face of his own rational faculties and despite intelligence and perspicacity, incapable of action. Shakespeare renders him impotent and eventually crushes him under his own melancholic indecision.

This view of man as a mere pawn of greater powers who, despite his intellect, could not change his destiny, shifted after the Enlightenment because it contradicted the reality of his existence. Discoveries in the natural sciences had exorcised ancient superstitions; applied reason made God’s work comprehensible; nature’s scarce resources, manipulated through the adoption of new methods of transformation, rendered more from less and so inventions increased productivity. If thinking people (growing rapidly as the Enlightenment progressed, thanks to the development and widespread use of one such invention) viewed man as a doer, a maker, an achiever capable of understanding and accomplishing more, why not present him that way in art? Why present a protagonist destined to fail when it was in his control to overcome life’s “slings and arrows”?

The sense of individual importance in the great scheme of things grew throughout the Enlightenment. Capable of reasoning, understanding, volition, it followed that the individual had inalienable rights to his life, his property, how he chose to live. Though the philosophical views expounded by Locke, Paine, and Voltaire mostly pre-dated the art form in question, they nonetheless emphasized a point of view that was Romanticism’s essence—individualism. And a side effect of individualism was the encouragement of Romanticism’s most memorable feature, the celebrity status enjoyed by Romantic artists. Chatterton (posthumously) Byron, Beethoven, and Hugo were celebrated like modern pop idols for who they were, not just what they did. Is it any wonder Romanticism held such an attraction to the would-be artist?

Skeptical readers will claim Romanticism was a reaction to the Enlightenment, not a result of it. They will claim the Romantic poets and painters eschewed modernization and industrialization, perhaps in contradiction to the thinking people who espoused it. Well, if artists viewed the dark satanic mills as wreckers of an idyllic countryside, they could scarcely ignore man’s growing reluctance to cringe in the face of his existence. Indeed, they themselves believed they had discovered a greater appreciation of what life offered and advocated throwing off the limiting bindings of classicism (and, yes, reason) to create new forms of expression that reflected their inner yearning for some higher state of consciousness and meaning. In fine art, they sought the unattainable, the ideal, the transcendental, not through any great belief in such things, but because this was how a man must think to truly experience those elements of life’s wonder that seemed beyond rational comprehension. Their audiences thought so, too. Romanticism remained popular well into the 19th century.

Notice the phrase, how a man must think. Key to the search for the elements of life’s wonder was action by the individual. In literature, such a point of view demanded the protagonist confront life with bravado and confidence. Exit Hamlet, enter the Byronic hero: rebellious, self-aware, confident, successful; a man of action, guided by convictions and individually capable of changing things. Recently, while watching the BBC television series Luther, I was struck by the degree to which the titular character embodied so many of the essentially individualistic traits celebrated in Romanticist literature: thinking for oneself; working alone outside of a stifling bureaucratic methodology; refusing to veer actions from convictions’ narrow path while all the time remaining steadfast in the righteousness of those actions; and all in the face of a ridiculous array of obstacles placed by those both trusted and opposed. Luther’s ethnicity, gender, or background are irrelevant. His struggle is that of the individual, not the persecuted member of a self-proclaimed identikit tribe. Luther the man, living in a thoroughly imaginable modern setting is an unadulterated Romanticist.

Staying with television, and in a similar vein to Luther, we find the not-so-different-as-you-think characters Christopher Foyle, in Foyle’s War, and George Gently in Inspector George Gently. Notice how the hero is named in the title. These programs are not principally about the plot line (usually murder) or their historical settings (the south coast of England during World War II and 1960’s Tyneside, respectively) but about the characters themselves and how they act virtuously regardless of time, place, or antagonism. The themes in the stories, neither simple nor callow, provide enough moral ambiguity not to leave the audience feeling intellectually insulted (thereby qualifying them as interpretive literature) and emerge through the choices made by the protagonist. The heroes’ destinies are not determined by circumstance, though they might claim otherwise, but through their own actions; any pain they endure comes from their own choices. I think it likely these programs will remain popular and will spawn imitators, suggesting Romanticism, in this medium at least, is still alive.

But what place does the Romantic hero hold in serious contemporary art that purportedly comments on the state of mankind as it exists in today’s reality? Can Romanticism even be used to explain mankind’s apparently parlous state? Is it not folly to think the individual can, and will, prevail against the odds? Is humanity in its modern guise not beyond seeing the world through vehicles of childish, escapist tales where the hero prevails, evil is thwarted, and the good live happily ever after? Don’t grown-up thinkers deserve better? Surely, they want an adult’s understanding and insight in art, not childish reassurances and happy endings.

Naturalism, the dominant intellectual movement of literature today, purports to provide this higher state of thinking by offering its perception of man’s place in the universe. It sees the individual as a victim, impotent in his opposition to forces beyond his control regardless of the choices he makes. “Look at the world,” their critical theory demands, “individuals are not heroes, they are victims of a struggle that they have no hope of conquering alone; highlight their struggles but not their individual successes, for these are gained at others’ expense and so perpetuate the struggle.” Such thinking eschews individual rebellion, heroism, and sublime emotions (unless induced by artificial means), and replaces them with conformity, self-deprecation, and numbed bemusement. Flawed man, a tragic figure destined to fail, is controlled by dominant groups and collectivist conflict. Where we are provided glimpses of individualistic volition, such actions and ambitions are thwarted for the sin of reaching too high, unless they are self-sacrificing. They swap gods and fate for dominant races, genders, or classes who rig circumstances in a malevolent system to foil justice. Against such forces, volition is futile; destiny, tragic. For the individual, remedy comes from recognizing the forces arranged before him, growing resentful, and identifying as oppressed. Along with being the antithesis of Romanticism, Naturalism is a refutation of the Enlightenment.

But how did this all come about? How did we move from Naturalism to Romanticism and then back to Naturalism? And why?

By the middle of the 19th century, the great exhibitions, displaying the best science had to offer, surpassed the art world in leading people’s fascination. It was the practical application of reason and scientific methodology that was seen to improve mankind’s development, not understanding in the humanities. Lamenting this loss, popular writers like Tennyson, Eliot, and Dickens decried the changes they saw and questioned whether things were indeed improving. Whatever material changes were wrought by science, some thinking people saw no improvement in mankind. But they wouldn’t. For them, individuals are not for improving. Naturalism, the artform of the collectivist, does not recognise the individual as heroic. The protagonist’s worthiness is not measured by the degree to which it overcomes its antagonists, but by how much suffering it is forced to endure. Exit the Byronic hero; enter Little Nell and Sidney Carton.

By the end of the 19th Century, Hugo was dead, Zola was in fashion, and the exuberant expression of the Romantic poets, as represented by the trite foppery of Beardsley and Wilde, proved insufficiently attractive for the growing mass of consumers clambering to indulge in artistic culture. Spying a growing audience keen to indulge in the arts, a movement emerged at the turn of the 20th century that hoped to assert its influence on what people liked through an epistemological legerdemain designed to confuse. This movement, a self-appointed establishment and commentariat, seeing the popularity enjoyed by the Impressionists, sought to direct consumer tastes further from the comprehensible and closer to the confused. By presenting banal items as art and heralding them as insightful commentary on mankind’s shameful modern existence, they took advantage of a new, credulous audience desperate to be seen indulging in higher culture. Playing on its doubts, it invited this public to join them, the anointed establishment, in seeing a new vision of art. That this was nothing short of a reactionary putsch, a throwback to when art appreciation and consumption were the exclusive preserve of a tiny elite who dictated taste and fashion, escaped most thinking people. The unwitting consumers, keen to be in tune with the establishment, fell for the folly and followed.

Like any good market maker, this arm of the art establishment quickly recognized an opportunity when it saw it. Self-identifying as progressive, labelling itself modern (thereby subtly implying the art of the past was somehow out of step in a rapidly changing world) they pushed their cause to increase their influence. The complex, the glorious, the melodic, maligned as old fashioned, increasingly found itself pushed aside in favor of infantile exhibitionism, atonalism, and downright fraud. The primitive, its hidden sagacity undiscovered, was lauded for its sophisticated expression. Form, having mutated into distortion, meant anything was sculpture, you just had to present it as such. And what of beauty? Why, they asked, was its inclusion in art ever thought to be important? Difficult to define, it excluded pieces with an alternative message, obstructed artists whose talents lay elsewhere, and hamstrung commentators who had to explain modern art’s actual quality. I like to think these knaves had a sense of humor and secretly laughed at their audience’s credulity, but in all probability, they believed their malfeasance to be legitimate thought.

Art is an essential element of culture. Today, culture is deemed the new religion. Certainly, one can observe objectively the popularity of fine art and classical music throughout the world. What is difficult to discern is whether the populous knows what it is accepting on faith. Good art, whether it be music, literature, painting, or architecture, is difficult to access and takes effort, concentration, contemplation, and knowledge to identify, let alone appreciate. But it is within most people’s ken, if they try. Many are aware that a fraud is afoot, yet feel insufficiently capable, intellectually, of calling out the play. They should not. When somebody heralds a kitsch piece as fine art, they are only demonstrating their own level of deception, or deceiving you. Disregard them, they will not help you to understand art.

If a basic understanding of art, which can be taught quite easily, is not difficult to acquire, who can deny that everybody should try to some degree, for it produces beneficial consequences, not the least of which is increased self-awareness? Understanding why a piece of art appeals tells the consumer (of art) something valuable about himself, provided the understanding is not gleaned second hand. “I like it because everybody says it’s good,” or “it’s good, it’s a so-and-so,” is not appreciating art. I say appreciation is not difficult to acquire, because it is not. But the consumer needs to know certain things to facilitate understanding; things that are common to all pieces of art. Like an Ordnance Survey map, once you learn the basics of how to read it, you can make sense of it to find out where you are and where you are going. Without that basic knowledge, the map doesn’t mean anything to you.

To understand art, you need to know that any art requires a theme and a style. Without these, it is not art. You need to recognize the point of view taken in the theme and ask yourself what you think of what the artist is saying. Don’t be shy. The artist has declared his audacity by confronting you with his thoughts and emotions. He wants your attention. Take a stand. Have a view. What is he saying? How does he say it? What style does he adopt? How effective is he at evoking your emotional responses? Later, through contemplation, you can find out more about the piece. If it is good art, there will be much to contemplate that won’t be immediately apparent.

Unfortunately, politics has entered the realm of art in a remake of the unholy alliance of religion and power. Such an alliance, opposed and denounced by Enlightenment thinkers and reviled by Romanticists for its compulsion towards groupthink, is more entrenched in the art world today than before. As a concrete example, when the late Roger Scruton, a philosopher and commentator on art, questioned mainstream views by pointing out that much of modern art was a hoax, he was hounded from his job of advising the government on the enduring importance of including beauty in buildings. That he was simply doing his job by telling the truth, mattered not; his views were heresy and heretics deserve everything coming their way. A spate of such occurrences labelled “cancel culture,” followed. Celebrated writers like J.K. Rowling were denounced by the modern equivalent of the Inquisition for pointing out a fact that contradicted a narrative championed by the art establishment, among others. Imagine her fate had Rowling promulgated and championed her opinions in her books, rather than on Twitter. Of course, she wouldn’t; her publishers wouldn’t let her. But what do Rowling’s views on transgender identification have to do with art? My thoughts, precisely. What more proof is there that politics has infested art appreciation?

Returning to our original question, why modern interpretive literature seems so averse to Romanticism, some of the responsibility must lie with education. A review of books assigned for reading by English departments in secondary schools across the country is telling. I see Lord of the Flies endures? I’ve met only one person who admitted to liking it. Of Mice and Men is still there, too, with its unashamedly Marxist view of Depression Era California. Is it really that good? Steinbeck has two other books on the list. Marxism’s glorious contribution to artistic style, Social Realism, or kitchen sink drama as it became colloquially known in Britain, gets further tribute through Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. How relevant is Willy Loman today? Running down the list, only Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter can be claimed as Romantic, the rest are Naturalist with strong ideological messages on subjects such as race, misogyny, and class. None have especially heroic protagonists.

I have no objection to such books being read widely, but why purge the antidote by ignoring individualism? If Steinbeck’s books on the horrors of dustbowl America are considered a valuable time capsule of the 1930s, why not Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which I remember being assigned in grade school? Accessible and short (essential attributes for teenage readers), it paints a vivid picture of the horrors of the gulag in Stalinist Russia. Perhaps it is considered too painful a memory.

It doesn’t get any better for English literature students at university. They can only look forward to further brainwashing at the hands of a faculty touting Critical Theory with its vile assaults on anything written that does not conform to its canon of antihuman values. One student said to me recently, “You can’t say that; all truth is relative.” Really, I thought? Ignoring the absurd contradictory reasoning in such a statement, I wonder how relative and arbitrary her professors consider truth in the methodology of their Critical Theory? She would do well to ask them.

Whatever the reason for the paucity of Romantic novels being published, one should remain optimistic. Individualism as a point of view has not gone away, and so fertile ground remains. Isiah Berlin’s description of the emergence of Romanticism as:

is not just an apt (and eloquent) description of late 18th century Romanticism, it pertains to all of man’s existence. Individualism has always been with us and Romanticism won’t go away while the restless spirits of artists with their unappeasable yearnings for unattainable goals still live. They just need to up their game.

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As with the aforementioned afflictions, woke won’t change the long-term direction that society moves. It is far too limited, self-obsessed, and unattractive to sustain itself in the open much beyond this bloom it presently enjoys. I know, it has been around a while, this latest protuberance a mushrooming flower of a larger, sinister fungus existent beneath the visible landscape of mankind’s estate (revolutionary Marxism as promulgated by the Frankfurt School). But consider this moldy metaphor; it is well-chosen. Underground, amorphous and almost alien, this ideology feeds on dead matter and yet procreates, as most living things must, by exposing itself in the open. Needing to promote itself to disseminate, the prolonged exposure causes it to wilt quickly because it is vulnerable to light and scrutiny.

Like myself, those who attended university in the early 1980s were exposed to these views (the latest iteration of Plato’s denial that humans can know truth) via some exotic sounding French intellectuals who were popular at the time and whose criticism of western society and gauche self-promotion gave them a credibility beyond their worth: Foucault, (all aspects of society are driven by a power dynamic) who would be posthumously outed as a pedophile after dying of AIDS in the 1984; Derrida (deconstruct something to understand it) disappeared into obscurity shortly after; and, Barthes (logic ends in a dead end) who was mostly influential among an increasingly esoteric world of abstruse literary criticism. While their oblique (I am being kind, they were unreadable) thoughts seemed beguiling to gullible, conceited tutorial students who wished to sound more enlightened than their peers and teachers, in the end it all proved no more than a fashion—the essential nihilism taking us nowhere—and was soon forgotten by those looking to get on.

Yet here it all is again, repackaged for consumption by the masses as political correctness—an oxymoron if ever there was one—on steroids, manifesting itself within institutions that should have long ago gained immunity from such viruses. Much has been made of Rudi Deutchske’s prediction of “the long march through the institutions” to indicate the intentions of this neo new-left’s efforts to destroy bourgeois society and to understand it in the context of Marxist revolutionary movements. If there is any truth to this then it is a dangerous movement warranting attention.

But then if wokeism really is part of history’s pre-determined direction as posited by these charlatans, why worry about it?

Outside of two decrepit, despotic, ancient eastern empires, the failed states on their boundaries, or client banana republics in Latin America, Marxism has failed to take root in any nation state. It has certainly never usurped a bourgeois society (without the aid of Soviet tanks, anyway) nor made a mark in a national election. Other than in some inner-city councils, student unions, and the upper echelons of trade unions, Marxism has not gained power anywhere where it can be exercised with any influence. Of course, it is very prevalent in academia, where it now appears to be influencing students requiring less qualification for entry in what is being served up as education, but it was ever thus.

Those institutions where the march has made it through are weak and sickened by underlying morbidities. Academia, inner-city councils, trades unions, quango-led trusts, moribund political parties, established churches, state-financed media outlets, all suffer the same affliction—their leadership’s overriding philosophy does not reflect those they purportedly serve. This is a part-problem, the weak part. The sickening underlying morbidity part is that the institutions’ influence and relevance has so diminished that they no longer serve a useful function. Academic knowledge and understanding, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, can be gleaned elsewhere; city government, despite the election of mayors, functions within limited boundaries; the rest, though enjoying access to people through media, mostly espouse elitist liberal views to display virtues that lack substance or support. How many rank and file members of the two major political parties on either side of the Atlantic take comfort in seeing their leaders “take a knee” in support of eradicating racism? Surely, eliminating anti-Semitic sentiments or the increasing hatred of the white male patriarchy within their own parties would align more closely with their supporters’ beliefs? But an elite that by definition believes itself superior to its supporters is never likely to adopt such a bottom-up posture until its very existence is threatened. For now, don’t expect such weak institutions to reform.

And if they do not reform and they sicken further, or die, what then of woke? To propagate, woke will need to find new institutions to infect and, like a disease spreading through a population, settle on stronger victims than the first time round. Provided those victims are healthy and avoid the mistakes made by the first-fallen unfortunates, woke will lose its virulence. Institutions yet to be weakened can learn from what has come before; they can strengthen themselves from the infection; reconsider their value to their supporters. They can listen to their supporters, all of them, and not just the noisy ones, while remaining open to woke sentiments. Girding themselves from the apparent onslaught by pulling up the bridge is not necessarily the best approach.

Taking on poison regardless of the dose (goes the analogy) does not make you healthy; it poisons you. But if we view woke not as a corrosive poison but a virus, perhaps immunity can be gained by adopting some of what they say. The first wave of woke came in the form of an insistence to adopt politically-correct language. Much of this was absurd and fully-deserving of the ridicule it received; but it made us stop and think—was the language already adopted through surrounding channels harmful to others without my knowing? Whether or not the answer was yes, we thought about it, which is never a bad thing. Oddly, it also weakened woke by forcing it to become more aggressive, more outlandish. Maybe some of us did wonder whether we were holding racist views, but surely few of us lost sleep worrying whether we were white supremacist? And as for terms like man-hours, now that more women are in the workforce actually doing the hours these are no longer just inappropriate, they are inaccurate and so adjustment is correct. But does their continued usage indicate an adherence to a philosophy of misogynistic male-patriarchy, or just an indifference born of a new found immunity?

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