[This one's a little rough, needs more polishing, I think.]
It was one of those moments when the Tetris pieces fell into place. Honestly, I didn't realize it until just recently, when I was looking at my beliefs and trying to figure out when they started.
I had been a member of the College Republicans for the first couple of years. It was a natural fit, for various and asundering reasons, and I needed that group at the time.
I looked at the Democratic side, to the Progressives and the liberals, and I saw that their beliefs were totally contradictory to mine. To them, men are evil, and only government can regulate sanity and legality (Locke, not Hume). To the Democrats, there is no reason to assume that people can live responsibly according to what is right in the universe, because Greed and other vices will always corrupt. So the government steps in and provides the boundaries for them. This was clearly not what I wanted to believe at all.
At the time I was in college, it seemed that the Republicans could think ideally, that optimism and faith in human nature makes it unnecessary to regulate much beyond the essentials of government (defense, safety, some finances...etc..) . If the individual is good, and society bad, (Hume) then the individual, knowing what is right and wrong, should be able to live out his or her life without interference from society.
Assuredly, the conservative ideals that govern the Republican party are much more pro-individual than those of the Democrats. So therefore, shouldn't Thoreau, whose book Walden preached more on simple living, on individual freedoms, on speaking your mind no matter what (and Thoreau spent a night in jail for not paying his taxes in protest of the Mexican-American war) be a conservative philosopher? Isn't Romanticism a conservative movement?
***
But let me go back a few years. There are Eureka moments, as I said, when you leap out of the bath water and go running down the street, elated, that some revelatory thought had turned a light bulb on. Much like Jessica Fletcher did at 52 past the hour, or House does most episodes that saves a life.
I remember back in my college days, sitting in the classrooms, listening to professors and soaking up knowledge like a sponge. I felt sometimes like...like that river of knowledge was high above me. I could only hope to reach up and find a nugget to grasp onto, hold it next to me, and not let it go. Unfortunately, time and memory has a terrible effect on this, and most of what I learned in Art History has slipped away from me. Doesn't help in Jeopardy!, I'm afraid.
There was a core of professors that I would sit anamored with the knowledge that they contained, and the skill in which they could weave the words and music and pictures into something amazing. To me, there is no trio of teachers in this world better or more suited to take those willing minds and throw them up into the air, if only to catch those few nuggets and bring them back into ourselves. I'm talking about Geogia College & State Univ.'s liberal arts programs. Dr. Viau, English, Dr. Yarborough, Art, and Dr. Pepetone, Music.
***
Now, back to the questions above. I had started to think of the individual as a being who, knowing right from wrong, and desiring good, could live out a virtuous life without the need of a government to back it up. At the end of "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau talks about an ideal society, where the best government is one who governs least (and then goes on to talk about governments who govern not at all). Isn't one of the core planks of the Republican party a government that governs as little as possible? Therefore, Thoreau's beliefs would be essentially conservative.
So I went to Dr. Pepetone and asked him this question. Isn't Romanticism essentially a conservative movement? He suggested that we go to Brewers (which is not there anymore, alas) and talk about it over coffee (I think I had tea.) I honestly don't remember what we talked about there. It's now a blur. But I remember thinking that, I'm right, and there's something important about this thought, but I didn't understand it at the time.
One of the parallels Dr. Pepetone made in his lectures was that the Romantic movement of the 1860's was almost identical to the "Hippie" movement of the 1960's. Both were a time of exploration, an expansion of music, art, both abstract and extreme, usage of drugs, sex, open and uninhibited. And it's obvious that both time periods are very much alike. It's easy to see why both periods were both liberal in thought. So obviously, there's a disconnect here. And it makes sense.
The philosopher Hegel believed that all ideas begin with coming together of two polar opposites: the Thesis and the Antithesis. Merging together, there comes a new thought: the Synthesis. The idea that Romanticism is a Conservative one is correct, but not if you think of it in terms of the current two-party system, Republicans and Democrats. Because the individual must be able to govern himself, without the moral code placed upon him by Republican control*, and he must be able to exist without all of the other Government regulations brought on by the Democrats. Thus the true Romantic is a Libertarian, the Synthesis of the two parties that have fought in this country for so long.
*(Republicans are very willing to let individuals speak their minds, own guns, practice religion, etc... But, when it comes to matters of ethics, in matters society believes are wrong, Republicans step in and use the power of the government to regulate and control. Why couldn't the government just stay out of people's private lives? Let us travel down the paths we believe are morally right, according to our own beliefs.)
That coffee "lunch" with Dr. Pepetone was the first time I realized that the Republicans didn't necessarily have everything right, and now, seeing how they have acted recently, throwing free enterprise out the window, I certainly see the benefits of having a Libertarian government over the other two. The problem is, however, that such idealism is almost impossible to continue, especially with the uneducated, the unstable, and with people who don't necessarily see right from wrong. This is where the government must step in. We will never have a pure Libertarian government, because no matter how ideal it is, that government, as Thoreau pointed out, is far beyond our current understanding.
But that is our goal. It's what keeps me coming back to faith in human beings, even after the Ponsi schemes, the deception, the greed. Because if we don't believe in the goodness of humans, there's nothing to work for. There's no sense in bettering our lives. We should not let the politicians or the preachers sail our ships for us. We should sail ourselves, ever striving, and never yielding.
Showing posts with label Romanticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romanticism. Show all posts
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
Romantic thoughts from an Ice Cream Truck
There are Eureka moments in your life, the one's where something pops, synapses fire, neurons open up a whole new highway to someplace new. We're all far removed from the days when we were 8, and we spent each day wanting to get toys and what crack not to step on outside. And it's not those moments after you've painted your mailbox gray, or cut the leaves off of your mother's favorite plant, and your dad comes home furious. It's those times when the knowledge of something far more than what you knew suddenly opens up.
***
Summers in Georgia are filled with hot, sweaty, humid days, and there is nothing like hearing the tones of a ringing bell driving down the street in either a rhythm, or in short, staccato notes that toll of a break from July and a moment of December (in your mouth, at least) as the Ice Cream truck meanders down the road. And on the side of the road, are children, crumbling up the dollar bills placed in their hands by parents who want either a moments peace, or know that if one dollar can give their children a little happiness, then it's much more important than the dollar that goes to pay the light bills. Maybe there's a tinge of nostalgia in those dollars, as if the parents would be out there as well, shouting out "esta esta" while pointing at the colorful images of fudge bars and banana popscicles.
The ice cream truck business is, for the driver, not a very pleasurable experience. The trucks here in Georgia are ones bought from the brink of extinction, with no hint of an Air Conditioner ever having been installed. The motors may run...may not. And the coolers inside the trucks are the same way...bought from some dying grandmother's estate sale and coached back to life by some duct tape and some freon. So it is expected that successful, eager businessmen are not going to choose "ice cream truck driver" as their first profession. Instead*, this falls to the people who are down on their luck, swept aside by society, forced into such a job because there's nothing much more they can do, with drugs or mental conditions slowing their thinking capacities down so that it may be hard to make change for the tykes with the dollar bills. But that is not to say that ice cream truck drivers are reprobates and criminals. The ones I met are usually very normal, kind people, with the conditions that have brought them to that state being their only vices.
And so it was that my stepdad, now retired and looking for a way to contribute to the family budget, got in contact with the local ice cream truck service and became one of their best drivers. And while I never understood why he would rather put the dry ice into the coolers (which never did quite keep the ice cream cool enough) with his bare hands, I understood (or think I do, now) why he took the job.
The ice cream, you see, was not just high caloried milk and sugar, but rather bars of short-term happiness. We were bringing treats into neighborhoods that normally would never have gotten such things. For in the time that he drove the ice cream trucks, the best neighborhoods to sell from were the poorest socio-economically. But the parents were always willing to give a dollar, or 50 cents, to the kids to get something from the truck each day.
I went with my stepdad a couple of times, and marveled at the joy we could bring kids just by traveling down the street and selling ice cream. Didn't they know they could get more for a fraction of the cost just by going to the grocery store? But that would be ruining the experience.
So I remember sitting in the passenger seat of the ice cream truck on some hot Spring day, reading a book that my 12th grade English teacher (Mr. Nunes, a professor at Dekalb College, now Ga Perimeter), had assigned to us. And there, in that ice cream truck, I had what I call a Eureka moment (my second to that point, but that's another story.)
[*These statements are opinions based on experience only and are not endorsed by the Ice Cream Truck Drivers of America.]
***
Most people have no problem living without thinking deep thoughts. The most serious conversations might cover the attributes of the latest American Idol contestant or the Defensive strategies of the Chicago Bears (which is usually Urlacher, all the time). And for some reason, teachers hold out the really important stuff till you get to High School. I remember in 11th grade, Mrs. Cook teaching us American Literature. In doing so, I was introduced for the first time to the ways that people thought about the world. By the time we got to Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, I was awash in being able to think about literature in ways of symbolism, in the ways that people think about life. Earlier that year, she introduced a way of thinking called Romanticism. As she explained it, it was talking about things that were of Nature, thinking emotionally about the world, and dealing with the unknown in ways that accepted the irrationality of human existence. And that was okay, I guess. I read Thoreau and really enjoyed his writings, but never really quite got past that. All those meanings and thoughts meant nothing to me, not really.
But the next year, Mr. Nunes really got into the processes in which philosophers thought about the world during each period of literature. How that the unknown was looked at either with scientific assuredness that one day mankind would know everything, or in the supernatural wonder that there were things that we could never know, and only could grasp through the heights of mental thought. He showed us how Nature could be the trim, properly cared for gardens of Wordsworth's poetry, or the wild foreboding mountaintops of Coleridge, or the cold, uncaring Nature of Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat."
And so it was, I sat in the back of my stepdad's Ice Cream truck, reading a copy of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, a tale of forbidden love and the throes of emotional outburst and melancholy. The love interest of Werther being an already married woman, and the love that he felt he could only return as friendship, as society would not let him go further. And as the emotions welled up inside him, he delved into philosophical thought about life, about nature, about the world as Goethe would have seen it (through the beliefs of Immanuel Kant.)
It came to me, as I was reading, that the ideas of Romanticism, the yearning, the emotions that are brought back in times of quiet solitude (Wordsworth), that pain and pleasure are usually the same thing, and things that are not always obtainable, be it paradise, or love, or simply a warm touch, are things we must keep striving for, even if it drives us insane. We must keep pushing further towards those heights of feelings, and not live in the microcosm that is our own boring lives. I had on my front Myspace Page (and will again) a quote from the band Engima, "Open your Heart, and Push the Limits." This is the feeling I got in that Ice cream truck. It's the Eureka moment that said, "There's more out there than just video games and ice cream. The world is filled with experiences and knowledge that are just waiting to be slurped up. If only you would climb up to the cliffs of this world and look out over to the far reaches, to experiences and emotions still unknown to us in this world." My only regret is that I have not always striven to do this, as fear of those heights are as real as those a acrophobe has. We have to live according to society's rules, for the most part, and unfortunately, the laws are there to keep us safe, ere we fall.
One day, I will return to Goethe's masterpiece, and will refresh those feelings I had that warm spring day. And perhaps living in the Phenomenal world (as Kant would call it) is for the best, as there are few times in our lives when we can climb up to the apex. In the valleys, there is happiness and contentment, even if there is paradise on the mountain.
***
Summers in Georgia are filled with hot, sweaty, humid days, and there is nothing like hearing the tones of a ringing bell driving down the street in either a rhythm, or in short, staccato notes that toll of a break from July and a moment of December (in your mouth, at least) as the Ice Cream truck meanders down the road. And on the side of the road, are children, crumbling up the dollar bills placed in their hands by parents who want either a moments peace, or know that if one dollar can give their children a little happiness, then it's much more important than the dollar that goes to pay the light bills. Maybe there's a tinge of nostalgia in those dollars, as if the parents would be out there as well, shouting out "esta esta" while pointing at the colorful images of fudge bars and banana popscicles.
The ice cream truck business is, for the driver, not a very pleasurable experience. The trucks here in Georgia are ones bought from the brink of extinction, with no hint of an Air Conditioner ever having been installed. The motors may run...may not. And the coolers inside the trucks are the same way...bought from some dying grandmother's estate sale and coached back to life by some duct tape and some freon. So it is expected that successful, eager businessmen are not going to choose "ice cream truck driver" as their first profession. Instead*, this falls to the people who are down on their luck, swept aside by society, forced into such a job because there's nothing much more they can do, with drugs or mental conditions slowing their thinking capacities down so that it may be hard to make change for the tykes with the dollar bills. But that is not to say that ice cream truck drivers are reprobates and criminals. The ones I met are usually very normal, kind people, with the conditions that have brought them to that state being their only vices.
And so it was that my stepdad, now retired and looking for a way to contribute to the family budget, got in contact with the local ice cream truck service and became one of their best drivers. And while I never understood why he would rather put the dry ice into the coolers (which never did quite keep the ice cream cool enough) with his bare hands, I understood (or think I do, now) why he took the job.
The ice cream, you see, was not just high caloried milk and sugar, but rather bars of short-term happiness. We were bringing treats into neighborhoods that normally would never have gotten such things. For in the time that he drove the ice cream trucks, the best neighborhoods to sell from were the poorest socio-economically. But the parents were always willing to give a dollar, or 50 cents, to the kids to get something from the truck each day.
I went with my stepdad a couple of times, and marveled at the joy we could bring kids just by traveling down the street and selling ice cream. Didn't they know they could get more for a fraction of the cost just by going to the grocery store? But that would be ruining the experience.
So I remember sitting in the passenger seat of the ice cream truck on some hot Spring day, reading a book that my 12th grade English teacher (Mr. Nunes, a professor at Dekalb College, now Ga Perimeter), had assigned to us. And there, in that ice cream truck, I had what I call a Eureka moment (my second to that point, but that's another story.)
[*These statements are opinions based on experience only and are not endorsed by the Ice Cream Truck Drivers of America.]
***
Most people have no problem living without thinking deep thoughts. The most serious conversations might cover the attributes of the latest American Idol contestant or the Defensive strategies of the Chicago Bears (which is usually Urlacher, all the time). And for some reason, teachers hold out the really important stuff till you get to High School. I remember in 11th grade, Mrs. Cook teaching us American Literature. In doing so, I was introduced for the first time to the ways that people thought about the world. By the time we got to Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, I was awash in being able to think about literature in ways of symbolism, in the ways that people think about life. Earlier that year, she introduced a way of thinking called Romanticism. As she explained it, it was talking about things that were of Nature, thinking emotionally about the world, and dealing with the unknown in ways that accepted the irrationality of human existence. And that was okay, I guess. I read Thoreau and really enjoyed his writings, but never really quite got past that. All those meanings and thoughts meant nothing to me, not really.
But the next year, Mr. Nunes really got into the processes in which philosophers thought about the world during each period of literature. How that the unknown was looked at either with scientific assuredness that one day mankind would know everything, or in the supernatural wonder that there were things that we could never know, and only could grasp through the heights of mental thought. He showed us how Nature could be the trim, properly cared for gardens of Wordsworth's poetry, or the wild foreboding mountaintops of Coleridge, or the cold, uncaring Nature of Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat."
And so it was, I sat in the back of my stepdad's Ice Cream truck, reading a copy of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, a tale of forbidden love and the throes of emotional outburst and melancholy. The love interest of Werther being an already married woman, and the love that he felt he could only return as friendship, as society would not let him go further. And as the emotions welled up inside him, he delved into philosophical thought about life, about nature, about the world as Goethe would have seen it (through the beliefs of Immanuel Kant.)
It came to me, as I was reading, that the ideas of Romanticism, the yearning, the emotions that are brought back in times of quiet solitude (Wordsworth), that pain and pleasure are usually the same thing, and things that are not always obtainable, be it paradise, or love, or simply a warm touch, are things we must keep striving for, even if it drives us insane. We must keep pushing further towards those heights of feelings, and not live in the microcosm that is our own boring lives. I had on my front Myspace Page (and will again) a quote from the band Engima, "Open your Heart, and Push the Limits." This is the feeling I got in that Ice cream truck. It's the Eureka moment that said, "There's more out there than just video games and ice cream. The world is filled with experiences and knowledge that are just waiting to be slurped up. If only you would climb up to the cliffs of this world and look out over to the far reaches, to experiences and emotions still unknown to us in this world." My only regret is that I have not always striven to do this, as fear of those heights are as real as those a acrophobe has. We have to live according to society's rules, for the most part, and unfortunately, the laws are there to keep us safe, ere we fall.
One day, I will return to Goethe's masterpiece, and will refresh those feelings I had that warm spring day. And perhaps living in the Phenomenal world (as Kant would call it) is for the best, as there are few times in our lives when we can climb up to the apex. In the valleys, there is happiness and contentment, even if there is paradise on the mountain.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
