Dare to Be You
The Romantic World-View
The Importance of Romanticism in Our Lives
Hello and welcome back to Every Dawn. You know we have these series here where we are talking about books in longer videos, and I thought it would be nice if we could connect the two pieces of content. You know, instead of having the short videos talk about Epicurus or the Stoics and the long ones talk about Hesse, we can just stay inside the mood of one period or of one book we are talking about. And so I would like also to make these short videos a little more about the romantics, the Romantic Period, the Romantic feeling, romantic books.
The Magic of Romanticism
And I think that the romantics are really also important, not only as a period in literature but also something that in our everyday lives we can profit from. This romantic attitude gives a particular magic to life and makes it more interesting, more emotional. But the first thing is to understand you know what exactly this means because romantic has been more recently in our culture changed to mean something related to love. So if you look up romantic sentiment or something like this in Google, you will find all sorts of romance-related things. And this is something that comes from the Middle Ages where you had the knights making songs and poems for their ladies, and these were said to be in the romance mode. You know, like the poems or the songs that were written out of Rome, out of Italy, and so these were the romantic poems because they reenacted what the Romans were doing. So this is how this connection, this word Rome, came into that, and now romance then continued to be a part of literature that was particularly about feelings, erotic feelings towards love, you know, erotic feelings, erotic plots towards another person. And this is not the same as the Romanticism as a part of literature.
Romanticism vs. Romance
And I think that of course in our culture we have quite enough of love and sex, which is used in all sorts of contexts, especially you know to sell products. But what is much less appreciated is this original romantic feeling of the poets and writers of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The idea is that these poets were alienated by the development of technology and the loss of the natural world. Where 100 years earlier, the world was mostly rural and little villages and horses, and you know, in their imagination, more like we today would think of Hobbiton—right, of the world of the hobbits—healthy, sane, slow, wholesome community world living with nature. Which of course it never was; the Middle Ages were not that beautiful and that harmless, and they also had lots of violence and lots of poverty and lots of death in them. But the Romantic Poets tended to not see that, and they romanticized, as we say, the Middle Ages and the past. And they wanted to live in this past.
Closeness to Nature
And as an extension of that, the idea was that in the old times, people were closer to nature, and this closeness to nature made them better, made them more originally human. While society tended to take away this and replace it with the more artificial behaviors that we are supposed to have in society, and the extreme of that were, of course, the courts of that time—the Kings or Nobles World—in which this courtly behavior was particularly crazy. We would say today the way the people dressed and the way they displayed their wealth. Today we don't have this so much because even, you know, the richest people like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk dress just like us. They don't look that much different; they put particular effort into looking normal, looking everyday. But in the older times, of course, then the kings were trying to make it a particular show of their wealth because wealth was much more rare.
Lessons from the Romantics
So this is the basic idea of it, and I think what we can take from it for our lives today is very valuable. Because it is this idea that when we lose nature, we lose something that is essentially human. And today we are in a similar situation like the people where when these Romantic Poets were writing in the 18th, end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution. Today we have the same; we have the AI Revolution. We have the computer information revolution. We have rockets. We have all these wonders of technology that on the other hand tend to alienate us from our human nature. AI is replacing more and more of our human discourse, even right, our human books, our human websites, our human poetry. Human emails are being replaced by AI-written, AI-created content.
The Alienation of Technology
And so people have this very similar situation like back then, that we feel alienated. We feel not in control of our world, and we feel that the world before was better. It was more human; it was more authentic. While today everything tends to be fake, especially online, and much much of our life is lived online. And so I think that we can learn from these Romantic Poets on the one hand to appreciate nature and also to trust more in our nature, to see it not as something that must be done away with because it's in the way of AI progress. And this is often what the big companies want to suggest to us, right, because they make money from the AI, while they don't make any money from our human feelings.
Embracing Our Humanity
But to emphasize these feelings as a reaction to the AI, to say we don't want to be dominated by AI because what is human in us is fundamentally different from what AI is doing. These AI systems are not really simulating humanity; they are not, they're not being human. When ChatGPT writes an article, you can see it's ChatGPT, and even if it gets better, you can still feel that there is some absence of humanity in there. There is no spark of anything that is revolutionary, that is contrary, that is individualist, and against society. All these AI systems—and I'm not speaking of grammatical differences—but these AI systems are tame because they are products of this capitalist system that tries to keep us all tame and working together in this big machinery of capitalism. And therefore, these AI systems are meant to support this. They are not offending; they are not doing anything to step out of the expected.
The Triumph of Humanity
While Romanticism is doing exactly that. Romanticism is supposed to offend. You put your feelings above everything else, and your feelings are then stronger than even social conventions. And in this way, the humanity in you triumphs. The individual humanity triumphs over the social convention and in our time we would say triumphs over this AI-generated content that is all the same and that is all tame and that is all bland and without message. And the message is that we should dare to be human. We should dare to have our feelings, to express our feelings, and to express them even if they go against the AI and if they go against what is considered politically correct behavior.
Thank you, and see you next time.