Douglas Murray is, like myself, a staunch defender of Western Civilization, as the title of his 2022 book “The War on the West” clearly implies. This of course does not mean we agree on everything.
On May 21, The Free Press published a piece by Murray celebrating the amazing zest for life of the 19th C. Romantic poet, Byron. I do not have access to the full article but its opening paragraphs are flattering not only to Byron, but to the Romantics in general. Oddly, however, it was the Romantics that actually started the War on the West, their juvenile self-indulgence being a precursor of what we have now come to know as “wokeness.”
Byron bragged that on his sojourns in Greece he had had sex with over 200 prostitutes, both men and women. His personal life and indeed that of many of the Romantics, was rife with promiscuity, betrayals, suicides, syphilis, etc., all a result of a sense of Entitlement utterly at odds with the traditional Western notion of Morality. William Blake’s assault on the concept of Objective Truth, his insistence that it was a fiction invented by Rationalists which ought not to deter Man from fulfilling his every need, was in fact a recipe for self-indulgence and an obvious precursor of the Postmodern notion that all “truths” are merely “social constructs.”
The quest of the Romantics to “soar” beyond the strictures of conventional morality resulted in some truly wonderful poetry. But at the same time the Ethos they were promoting was utterly degenerate. Apparently enchanted by the Romantics, Murray suggests their often strife-ridden lives were the product of their exalted aspirations. Hence his assertion that: “Those who travel toward the sun, burn up, yet leave the air “signed with their honor.”
But the notion that the Romantics “burned up” because, like Icarus, they metaphorically flew too close to the sun, because their poetic vision transcended the “oppressive” strictures of this mundane realm, is but a disingenuous way of saying that they were unable to deal with the exigencies of the real [Objective] world, that they were in fact self-indulgent children incapable of moral restraint. As I have said repeatedly throughout these blogs, their degenerate sensibility came into prominence only in the 1960s because of the two World Wars and Great Depression that dominated the first half of the 20th Century. Woodstock more or less marked the official reinstatement of the Romantic Sensibility which has since taken us to a point where biological and historical facts are routinely ignored out of deference to those whose feelings might be hurt by them.
Yes, I was born with a penis and weigh 200 pounds but now insist you must treat me like just another woman. If you refuse, it’s because you’re a transphobic monster!!!
Yes, most of those sold into slavery in the Americas were dispatched by Black Africans, but I’m saying it was Whites who were fundamentally responsible for the abomination of Slavery. If you dare disagree with me, it’s because you are a White Supremacist jerk!!!
On and on it goes. The Objective facts of History and Biology no longer matter. William Blake must be so proud. Our “progressive intellectuals” have made Feelings rather than Intellect their vehicle to the Truth and the results are truly outrageous to anyone of simple common sense [“conservatives”].