Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

  So while all the other poets of the day were knocking themselves out trying to nail their poetic diction and get their heroic couplets down pat, Wordsworth was working just as hard to remove every trace of eighteenth-century classicism from his work. That’s why he spent all his time sitting on a rock and not at the library. All he would learn from books is how to write like poets who came before him, and Wordsworth had decided that their language, as good as it had been in its day, was of no use to him. He was determined, as he says in ‘The Tables Turned’, to learn from nature.

  Civilisation

  WORDSWORTH’S REJECTION OF culture in favour of nature doesn’t seem that remarkable today. But in the century he was born into, it would have been considered deeply weird. In the eighteenth century, it was taken for granted that modern civilisation had improved and refined nature in every way. The spirit of the age was extraordinarily optimistic. On the 3 July 1750 Louis XVI’s minister Jacques Turgot had told his audience at the Sorbonne that the world was getting better, and that if things seemed less than perfect now, it was simply because human civilisation had some growing up to do:

  …the whole human species, looked at from its origins, appears to the philosopher as an immense whole, which, like an individual, has its infancy and its progress… The totality of humanity, fluctuating between calm and agitation, between good times and bad, moves steadily though slowly towards a greater perfection.1

  Turgot’s theme was a popular one during the eighteenth century, a period of time referred to by historians as The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment. The era was dominated by an enthusiasm for the discoveries of science and a belief that the power of rational thought would transform every area of human life. The thinkers of the Enlightenment didn’t claim to know everything. But they maintained, by and large, that everything could be known. Whatever problems mankind faced now, they reasoned, would be solved in the future by fearless rational investigation. At least, that was the idea.

  In 1749, philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a native of the city of Geneva, read a notice in the Mercure de France, announcing an essay-writing competition on the topic: ‘Has the restoration of the arts and sciences had a purifying effect on morals’. Rousseau pondered this, and soon found that his head was swimming with a thousand ideas. He felt faint. When he’d collected himself, he sat down and wrote twelve thousand words to the effect that, No, the restoration of the arts and sciences had not had a purifying effect on morals. Progress, Rousseau argued, was not improving society — it was making things worse.

  Rousseau began his essay by pointing out that if the arts and sciences were improving morals, then France, which was supposed to have the best art and the cleverest scientists in the world at that point, ought to be the most moral place on the face of the earth. This, Rousseau insisted, despite appearances, was not the case:

  There prevails in modern manners a servile and deceptive conformity…politeness requires this thing; decorum that; ceremony has its forms, and fashion its laws, and these we must always follow, never the promptings of our own nature.2

  In the pages that followed, Rousseau offered a scathing critique of his supposedly ‘improving’ century. Where others saw the peak of civilisation and refinement, Rousseau saw only phoney manners held up to disguise a disturbing lack of real human feeling. But Rousseau also hinted, as in the passage above, at a ‘true’ human nature which had somehow been left behind or forgotten. He took up this theme in his next crack at the Dijon Academy’s essay-writing prize; this time the given topic was ‘What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by natural law?’. In this, his Second Discourse, Rousseau sized up the eighteenth-century man and tried to figure out what, in all his behaviour, is most ‘natural’. This, he admitted, was tricky. Human beings had by this point been so altered by the societies they had evolved, that they barely resembled their ancestors. But Rousseau believed that he had discovered, lurking beneath the surface of these modern people, two ‘natural’ inclinations. These were not arrived at by reason, like our tacked-on modern philosophies, but came as standard with the human soul, part of our original design. One is an interest in our own welfare, the other is the feeling of repugnance at the sight of another’s suffering.

  But on top of this original design, Rousseau says, we have acquired a caked-on crust of false standards, all of which have their basis in our need to acquire privilege and distinction. This is in turn a result of the fact that human beings have, over the centuries, been coming together in greater numbers and living in closer proximity to one another. Now, instead of living naturally, the social man lives ‘for others’. This is the case, not only for those on the lower rungs of society — who have to make their way in the world under systems designed for the benefit of the rich and powerful — but also for the privileged few, who judge their worth purely in terms of the power they command over others. From this artificial way of life has come all our law, and the hierarchies of our society. None of it, Rousseau concludes, has any basis in natural law.

  Here was a resounding ‘no’ to the essay question posed — and something more. The Second Discourse contains Rousseau’s most convincing, and most dangerous idea: that the furniture of eighteenth-century life — royalty, serfdom and myriad class distinctions in between — were not fixed, but moveable. Rousseau died in 1778. Eleven years later, the furniture of France would be thrown out the window.

  The French Revolution

  IN HIS INTOXICATING account of the French Revolution, historian Thomas Carlyle conjures a vivid picture of the forging of France’s new constitution, ‘amid glitter of illuminated streets and Champs-Elysees, and crackle of fireworks and glad deray’. Carlyle describes:

  Twelve Hundred human individuals, with the Gospel of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in their pocket, congregating in the name of Twenty-five Millions, with full assurance of faith, to ‘make the Constitution’: such sight, the acme and main product of the Eighteenth Century, our World can witness once only. For Time is rich in wonders, in monstrosities most rich; and is observed never to repeat himself, or any of his Gospels: — surely least of all, this Gospel according to Jean-Jacques.1

  All sorts of factors were at work in the years leading up to 1789, and in any accurate account of the Revolution’s causes, Rousseau’s books would have to get in line behind such heavyweights as France’s escalating financial crisis, the simmering resentment of the peasantry, the War of Independence in America, and a series of mini-revolutions in other parts of Europe. But there can be no doubt that Rousseau’s name was associated with the Revolution from the moment it took place. Whether the actions of the revolutionaries themselves were inspired by his (very popular) books is almost beside the point. The Revolution seemed to put his ideas into practice — right from the start, hereditary privilege and serfdom were abolished, freedom and equality were the slogans. The new constitution’s first clause, ‘Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights’, echoed Rousseau’s famous statement in The Social Contract, ‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains’.2

  The Revolution, as Victorian critic Matthew Arnold has observed, ‘seemed to ask of a thing, “is it rational?”’.3 In other words it was heralded as the culmination of all the hopes of the Enlightenment. For over a hundred years, philosophers and other thinkers had been talking about a society built on rational principles — now, it seemed, this society was being born. It’s impossible to overestimate the optimism with which this was greeted among freedom-loving artists and intellectuals.

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

  But to be young was very heaven…

  wrote Wordsworth, thinking back on the Revolution’s early days, when anything seemed possible. The poet was in Paris for the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. He saw, at first hand, the ‘fireworks and glad deray’ Carlyle described. Then, two years later, in the winter of 1791, he was back. This time, he fell in love — twice — once with
a girl named Annette Vallon, and once with the Republican cause. His political enthusiasm, as his biographer, Roger Sharrock, points out, was mingled in his mind with the natural beauty of the landscape he’d seen on his first visit. For Wordsworth the grandeur of nature seemed to point toward the dignity of man in his natural state. The essential rightness of democracy was indicated by the very ground he was standing on and the sky above his head.4

  All of this was brought to a premature halt when Wordsworth’s money ran out in 1792, and he was forced to return to England. There, he soon found that his deeply felt republican sympathies had made him a traitor to his own country, as the Pitt government declared war on France in February of the following year. Wordsworth cheered when he heard that English troops had been massacred by the French — and hated himself for it.

  There were further shocks in store for the lover of freedom and democracy. By this time, France’s monarchy had been abolished, and the king himself had been executed. Democracy it seemed was within sight. But the newly reborn nation was in a state of chaos, at war with almost every country in Europe while simultaneously being torn apart by civil strife, hunger and confusion. ‘There was no room’, as Rupert Christiansen puts it in his book Romantic Affinities, ‘for the democracy that allows dissent.’5 France’s future was effectively placed in the hands of Maximilien de Robespierre, the most influential member of The Committee of Public Safety, and a staunch follower of the gospel according to Jean-Jacques. Robespierre had learned from Rousseau’s The Social Contract that power came not from kings or governments, but from the will of the people. This, as philosopher and historian Bertrand Russell points out, is a much-misunderstood idea in Rousseau. In practice, it tends to mean that power-hungry individuals, or those with an axe to grind, can claim — by some mystic association — to ‘represent’ this will of the people, without having to go through all the fuss and bother of ballots and elections.

  Robespierre was certainly one of these. The people, he maintained, were virtuous, but their virtuous new republic was under threat from aristocrats and royalists — leftovers from the bad old days. Robespierre prescribed a Reign of Terror — a necessary stage in which these counter-revolutionaries, and anyone else who stood in the way of freedom, would be rounded up and disposed of so that France could get on with the business of creating a new society. Robespierre’s courts and police were kept very busy. The guillotines worked overtime, and seventeen thousand enemies of freedom were executed in the space of fourteen months.6

  Persecution and mass-killings were nothing new in Europe — but this was something else. Crusades, witch-hunts, pogroms and inquisitions had always been carried out in the name of religion, or authorised by despotic kings; here was slaughter carried out in the name of natural virtue, the will of the people made manifest. Rousseau had always seemed to say (though this is not exactly what he meant) that if you made people free, they would be good and just. But this, it now seemed, was untrue. For many, the brightest hopes of the Enlightenment, the dream of freedom, equality and brotherhood, died sometime in 1793.

  William Wordsworth, for one, was deeply confused. For him, as for all those who ‘had fed their childhood upon dreams’, the Revolution had promised nothing less than heaven on earth:

  … O times,

  in which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways

  of custom, law and statute took at once

  the attraction of a country in Romance;

  when reason seemed the most to assert her rights…7

  Now his faith in this vision was being sorely tested. For a while he clung to the idea that the Terror was simply a necessary means to an end, that true freedom and democracy could only be achieved after a difficult, but necessary, clampdown on freedom and democracy. When he realised how untenable this position was, he turned to the political philosophy of William Godwin, who advocated Universal Reason as mankind’s brightest hope. In his much-read and discussed ‘Enquiry Concerning Political Justice’, Godwin argued that reason should be given priority over all other considerations in life, including law, social convention and family ties. What this meant in practice was, as Godwin illustrated in a famous example, that if you could save only your mother or the world’s greatest philosopher from a burning building, you really ought to save the philosopher — reason says he will be of more use to the human race in the long run. Despite his initial enthusiasm, Wordsworth soon found he was incapable of being a good Godwinian. He just couldn’t quite let go of his emotions — though it wasn’t for lack of trying:

  Thus strangely did I war against myself;

  A bigot to a new idolatry

  Did like a monk who hath forsworn the world

  Zealously labour to cut off my heart

  From all the sources of her former strength;8

  In his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, Wordsworth explains that the story of his life up to this point had been — like that of the century he was born into — a story about things getting better:

  This history, my friend, hath chiefly told

  Of intellectual power, from stage to stage

  Advancing, hand in hand with love and joy,

  And of imagination teaching truth.9

  But the Revolution and the Terror had knocked him badly off course. He’d found his youthful idealism diverted toward a cause that made him an apologist for murder. Then, searching for an alternative, he’d embraced a philosophy that required of him that he cut out his heart. This he knew he could not do. Irrational though it might be, the young poet had a feeling his heart would come in useful later on — and he was right.

  Conor Oberst: ‘A special moment governed more by intuition than intellect’.

  The Story is in the Soil

  Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground is plainly too long for the name of an album — but Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst will always happily sacrifice tidy form to the expression of powerful feelings. In the album’s first song, ‘The Big Picture’, we find the singer riding in the back of the tour van while the driver and the guy in the passenger seat argue jokingly about where this place they’re looking for is supposed to be. Something about this conversation gives the singer an idea. He pulls out his guitar and starts picking out some chords, letting the words come as the music builds up a head of steam. It doesn’t rhyme properly in places, and some of the words are crammed a little awkwardly into the metre — but the feeling is real, and it’s the feeling, not some pre-conceived idea of ‘good songwriting’ that Oberst follows in bringing this tune to completion. ‘The Big Picture’ goes on for another six and a half minutes — bringing the whole to a total of eight minutes and forty-seven seconds. Too long, you might say, for a melancholy dirge banged out in the back of the tour bus. But to Oberst in 2004 criticism of this kind meant nothing. ‘There’s a point where they feel complete, and that’s where I stop’, he said of his songs. ‘Maybe for some listeners they felt complete four minutes ago — they can fade it out.’1

  Oberst is a student of nature, so he’s not interested in rules or traditions. He might sound philosophical in 2005’s ‘I Believe in Symmetry’, but really he’s expressing a wish to be rid once and for all of philosophy — and all the other stuff they teach you at school. Has any of it, Oberst asks himself, made me happier?

  An argument for consciousness

  The instinct of the blind insect

  Who makes love to a flower bed

  And dies in the first freeze

  ‘I want to know such simple things,’ says the singer, ‘no politics, no history.’2 But ridding yourself of five centuries of tradition is not as easy as all that — politics is everywhere, and history keeps screaming in his ear. In ‘Road to Joy’, recorded the same year, Oberst decides to scream back. The song is a portrait of a young man with a sensitive heart and a head full of noise trying to get his thoughts down before it’s too late:

  So now I’m drinking, breathing, writing, singing.

  Every day I’m on the
clock.

  My mind races with all my longings.

  But I can’t keep up with what I got.3

  What he’s got is a feeling, not just for himself, but for the whole country, the whole human race. Now, politics has become personal for the singer, and he’s turned into a sort of emotional news anchor, reporting on the state of his world as it relates to President Bush’s War on Terror. Everything is involved — his parents, his girlfriend, the flowers in the driveway, the dead bodies in the cemetery, everything hums to the tune of his anxious ballad. Oberst has what Wordsworth would call ‘a heart that watches and receives’, and hearts like this can’t help but pick up the world’s static. He gives his feeling words, and fits the words to a tune — not one of his own, this time, but one that was written to give voice to a similar mood of turmoil and hope almost two centuries before Conor Oberst was born.

  In 1785 Friedrich Schiller had just gotten over his last girlfriend, and spring was coming to his village near Leipzig. He was overcome with an incredible surge of happiness and goodwill for the human race, and sat down to write an ‘Ode to Joy’:

  Joy, brilliant spark of the gods,

  daughter of Elysium, heavenly being,

  we enter, drunk with fire,

  your holy sanctuary.

  Your magic reunites

  what was split by convention,

  and all men become brothers

  where your gentle wings are spread.

  Be embraced, you millions!

  This kiss for all the world!

  Brothers, above the starry canopy