Published in The Times’ International Weekly this past Sept., the article I am about to discuss was entitled: “An Old Philosophy of Oneness Can Guide Us Today.” It was written by Andrea Wulf, author of “Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.”
She begins by citing the late 18th C. teachings of Friedrich Schelling whose basic idea was that the Self and Nature are identical. This Truth, according to Wulf, had been impugned by the rational, scientific predilections of the Enlightenment which prescribed what she refers to as “a so-called objective perspective” rooted in Man’s capacity for Reason which clearly separates him from the rest of the natural world. Her suggestion that this was a 17th C. invention is disingenuous given that many of the Ancient Greek philosophers had taken it for granted that Man was a uniquely Intelligent Being obligated to behave as such. At the same time her celebration of the fact that the Romantics “wanted to feel rather than observe” fails to take into account the real world results of this apparently noble aspiration.
In 2019 I completed a book entitled: “Mindless by Design: The Progressive Assault on Western Civilization.” It remains but a document in my computer. Tracing the history of the Principles and Values informing Western Civilization from its roots in Ancient Greece, it focuses specifically on the Romantic Rebellion against the Enlightenment and its dire effects on our contemporary world..
Just as Wulf belittles the very idea that Man might be capable of Objectivity, so the Romantic poet William Blake defined the Objective World as a self-imposed burden which was clearly impeding Man in his quest for fulfillment. Innocence, for Blake, meant abandoning the arrogant assumption that we are uniquely Intelligent Beings and accepting our “oneness” with Nature. And what was the result of this radical act of liberation? Why it was a Century rife with cultural icons who were little more than self-indulgent children, many of them drug or alcohol addicts, many of them libertines afflicted with syphilis by the age of twenty, many of them quite literally destroying the lives of everyone around them. Lord Byron actually brayed that he had had sex with more than 200 prostitutes, both male and female, on his sojourns in Greece. Ironic, is it not, that this demonstrably self-centered degenerate continues to seen as a heroic, anti-establishment, Cultural Icon.
But of course it all makes sense! You see, what Andrea Wulf deceptively celebrates as a “Philosophy of Oneness” is simply the belief that Man is just another Animal entitled to behave as such. It is an Ontological assumption that makes the notion of Objective Truth an absurd anachronism; that makes every opinion as valid as every other; that makes self-restraint merely some bizarre, Western eccentricity; indeed that makes the very concept of Morality something only religious fanatics endorse. Of course “progressives” would never admit they are definitively Amoral and impervious to the Truth, but their celebration of Inclusiveness is precisely that.
If it is not already self-evident, “wokeness,” the notion that one’s feelings, however unjustified, are always worthy of respect, was born approximately 200 years ago, that host of 19th Century writers, artists, etc. who felt justified in satiating all their natural urges without restraint being precursors of the cultural and moral degeneracy so evident all around us today. As I point out in my book, the poisonous bequest of the Romantics took until the 1960s to manifest itself only because of the two World Wars and Great Depression that dominated the first two thirds of the Twentieth Century.