In an unpublished book I have written which charts the evolution of Western Civilization from its roots in Ancient Greece, I spend a lengthy chapter citing the real-life results of the so-called Romantic Rebellion against the “restrictive” Rationalism of the Enlightenment. This may seem to have little relevance to our contemporary world but please bear with me.
Just as today, many of the social criticisms that emerged from the Nineteenth Century intelligentsia had some merit, their attacks on the emerging problem of industrial pollution, working conditions in factories and the very real scourge of religious intolerance being among them. But as Blake stated quite frankly, he and the Romantics were in rebellion against Objective Reality itself. While the Ancient Stoics and Twentieth Century Existentialists would have deemed their orientation childish if not pathological, critics such as Northrop Frye actually deemed them to have been heroic in their refusal to be bound by the inexorable demands of empirical reality. Following in their footsteps, “intellectuals” and artists throughout the Nineteenth Century in effect enshrined a brazen double standard entitling them to pursue the vagaries of what Saul calls “sensibility” in pursuit of that “higher” level of wisdom unavailable to those unenlightened masses governed by mere “common sense.” Yet from Rousseau to Byron to Baudelaire to the Decadents of the late Century, one is confronted by a never ending parade of alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual promiscuity, venereal disease and various forms of psychological dysfunction which blasted the lives of almost everyone who entered their sphere. Byron, the archetypal Romantic rebel, claimed to have had sex with hundreds of male and female prostitutes on his sojourns in Greece and Italy, the inevitable result of his antics, of course, being gonorrhea. Sadly America’s post-war Beats, those whose sensibility would come to inform the Woodstock generation, shared the same disregard for Reason and Personal Responsibility which the lives of the cultural icons of the previous Century had proven to be so utterly futile.
Jack Kerouac, whose status as both a writer and person baffles me, declared he was interested only in those “mad” souls who lived beyond the perimeters of straight society. In the free-flowing opening section of “Howl,” Alan Ginsberg alludes to the “lamb-like youths” of his early acquaintance savagely demonized by mainstream America: poets, Leftist radicals, jazz musicians, drug addicts, homosexuals and psychiatric patients whom he deemed to be among “the best minds” of his generation. And what had rendered them sacrificial victims but “the monster of mental consciousness that preys upon the lamb,” that state of consciousness reviled by the Romantics which Ginsberg refers to as Moloch, the ancient Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice. Significantly, one of the defining moments of his life would seem to have been his 1948 vision of William Blake reading from his poetry in his Harlem apartment, Ginsberg’s Buddhist notion of the Oneness of all things being but a latter-day variation of Romanticism’s enshrinement of “Inclusiveness” as the ultimate “religious” value. A user of drugs to enhance his “visionary” powers, Ginsberg nevertheless lived his life modestly, unpretentiously. But while one can find little fault with the sincerity of his quest for spiritual enlightenment, the same can hardly be said for many of his Beat contemporaries.
William S. Burroughs was a heroine addict who “accidentally” killed his wife Joan at a party in 1951, attempting to shoot a shot glass from off her head. Their marriage on the rocks, he was evidently high and she decidedly drunk. Lovely! Neal Cassady’s death in his early forties was clearly drug related. Jackson Pollack was an alcoholic who also died in his forties in a single car traffic accident while driving under the influence. And Kerouac would die at more or less the same age of internal bleeding also caused by alcohol. Were these iconic Beat “revolutionaries” cursed with failings to which all of us are more or less prone or were those failings an intrinsic aspect of their juvenile orientation? Were they the “lamb-like innocents” of Ginsberg’s narrative or a collection of self-indulgent delinquents incapable of confronting the world with anything like the courage and clarity of vision which their contemporaries, Sartre’s Existentialists, deemed essential to the “authentic” life?
At a time when the Vietnam War was raging, Beat poetry was juxtaposing images of mutilated bodies against those writhing in sexual delight. Fucking rather than confronting Reality was, as it was for most of the Romantics [they called it Eros] the central sacramental act of Beat culture. Charles Bukowski’s 1972 book of short stories entitled “Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness” fairly graphically illustrates the Beats’ approach to the human condition. Such was their response to the geopolitical issues of the day. Such was their response to the threat of Communism. I fully understand that literature operates on a different level than rational, discursive prose, but the overwhelming implication of the works of the Beats was that if everyone would simply chill, smoke a little dope and get laid every once in a while, world peace would somehow be secured. It is a level of disconnect from Reality that continues to inform contemporary Leftist discourse, a state of dysfunction that puts feeling before thought thereby making rational dialogue with those so afflicted virtually impossible.
A television program entitled “Drunk History” recently devoted an episode to the birth of “rock ‘n roll” and more specifically to the person of Allan Freed, a late 50s D.J. largely responsible for its popularization. The show’s narrator, in an effort to define the revolutionary essence of the music in question, declares as follows: “It’s not enough to say I don’t give a shit, you have to fucking show it.” How much of our culture since the Sixties has been imbued with this spirit? How much “intellectual” and “artistic” excrement has been celebrated by critics who subscribe to the specious notion that showing one doesn’t “give a shit” about the values and lifestyles of the “silent majority” is somehow cool?
Clearly it is not conformity or non-conformity that defines one’s moral status. Clearly those who live within the confines of suburbia’s white picket fences may be more evolved, more compassionate, indeed more fully human than those who get their kicks flinging excrement at everything they hold sacred. This is not to say there are not still elements of racism, homophobia and sexism in mainstream Western societies utterly worthy of political dissent, though they would seem to be radically less common than they were sixty years ago, indeed would hardly seem to merit the term “systemic.” That they are generally deemed so, I would argue, is an indication of just how pervasively disingenuous and childishly indiscriminate the quality of political discourse emanating from the Left has become.
Blake’s renunciation of Objective Reality was childish, egotistical and, to some of his contemporaries, insane. Marcuse found Capitalism Fascistic because it asked him to defer his quest for sexual satiation and actually work for a living. The Beats’ celebration of those “lamb-like” innocents reviled by mainstream America, while no doubt having some merit, was poisoned by their own aversion to discipline, sobriety and hard work, in none of which they had any real interest. Carrying on in that tradition, Ralston Saul comes to the ludicrous conclusion that it is not a failure of “efficiency” but the harsh demands of an efficient world that is the main cause of the material squalor that continues to beleaguer so many of our Indigenous. Really!!!
In the superficial regime bequeathed us by the Post Moderns, human behavior has been severed from its inevitable impact in the Real World and failure is always the result of Victimization by forces beyond the Self. Hence the political Left’s insistence on seeing all those presently ranting against the “oppressive” demands of the status quo as innocent if not heroic, no matter the speciousness of their complaints or the ugliness of their antics. Check out CNN any night of the week and behold its brilliant social commentators rationalizing behavior in the streets of America that is hateful, destructive and oftentimes downright barbaric, such being the inevitable result of a Civilization given to “feeling” and “sensibility”rather than Thought and Morality.