Part 4: Politics
1. Discover one’s nature
• Listen to the still small voice
• Ignore conventional wisdom
2. Express one’s nature:
•be nonconformist
•Develop one’s inborn abilities
3. Have the integrity to resist coercion
out of one’s authentic life and seduction back into
a conventional life.
4. The personal is political: change the
world by changing yourself
EQUALITY
1. We all have a Natural genius, we are all worthwhile.
No one exists simply to serve someone else.
2. One’s worth is inborn: it is not measured by one’s
social status or wealth or race or gender.
3. Insist that your life matters and is not to be
lightly thrown away or wasted.
Do you know so much that you call
the meanest ignorant?
Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight,
and he or she has no right to a sight?
Do you think matter has cohered together
From its diffuse float, and the soils on the
Surface, and water runs, and vegetation sprouts
For you only and not for him and her?
--Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric”
No greater men are now than ever were.
A singular Equality may be observed
between the great men of the first and of
the last ages.
Kingdom and lordship, power and estate,
are a gaudier vocabulary than private
John and Edward in a small house and
common day’s work: but the things of life
are the same to both:
-Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
Freedom
Anti-authoritarianism in religion, in politics, in
education, across the board
Anti-Puritanism: freedom to enjoy one’s self, to
enjoy free sexualiity, to enjoy drugs. . .
Freedom to explore alternative lifestyles, to be
eccentric, to be nonconformist
Social Change:
The personal is political
• “Go love thy infant; love thy woodchopper; be good-natured and modest;
have that grace; and never varnish your
hard, uncharitable ambition with this
incredible tenderness for black folk a
thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite
at home.”
• --Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
”
the revolutionary process of changing ...external
conditions is comparatively easy; what is difficult
and necessary is the inner change of thought and
desire”
emma goldman
• A greater self-reliance-a new respect for
the divine in man--must work a revolution in
all the offices and relations of men--in their
religion, in their education in their pursuits;
their modes of living; in their property; in
their speculative views.
• -Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
Summing up: Romanticism emphasized
the individual,
the subjective,
the irrational,
the imaginative,
the personal,
the spontaneous,
the emotional,
the visionary.
In three major categories:
discovery of the authentic self
expression of that self
integrity in maintaining that self
political equality, democracy, freedom
If you are true, but not in the same
truth with me,cleave to your
companions;
I will seek my own.
-Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
We’re going to explore some of these companionable
and Romantic Cleavings:
• The Beats in the 50’s,
•the 60’s counterculture,
•Punk in the 70’s.
" These writers set down the intellectual framework for hip.
Celebrating the individual and the nonconformist,
advocating civil disobedience, savoring the homoerotic,
and above all claiming the sensual power of the new,
the writers articulated a vision of hip that we now carry
everywhere like an internal compass. The hip felicities
that have come since--the uncapped solos of bebop and
hip-hop, the gnostic blur of the Lost Generation and the
Beat Generation, the indie purism of Chapel Hill or Olympia,
the altered consciousness of the drug culture-all built on the principles they threw down. . .
Leland, Hip: A History pp. 40-41
Important
Hip/shadow/countercultural eras
Mid 1800’s: Whitman, Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau et al
Pre-WWI: The Lyric Left
1920’s: The Harlem Renaissance
1920’s: The “Lost Generation”
1950’s: Beats & Bebop,
1960’s: Counterculture, “hippies”
1970’s: Patti Smith, Punk
Allen Ginsberg & Neil Cassady: Beat Icons
Four years later
Well, you walk into the room
like a camel and then you
frown;
You put your eyes in
your pocket and your nose on
the ground-- There ought to be
a law against you comin' around
You should be made to wear
earphones because something
is happening here but you don't
know what it is,
Do you, Mister Jones?
--Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man” 1965
Would Romantics be cool? Probably not.
Being cool is usually not being yourself, it’s conforming to the
Values of a chosen set of peers Cool kids reject being like their
parents (“squares” or “straights” or the “uptight” or “plastic
people” or what have you) and so its members see themselves
as rebels. But a true romantic would reject the Cool scripts for
how to act as well as the Parental scripts for how to act.
Mary Sue’s unwillingness to express her intellectuality wasn’t
because she was conforming to her parents’ values--it’s
because she wanted to be cool and was acting the way cool
kids act. She had to reject being cool to be herself.
A phenomenon we’ll look at more closely when we get to the
Fifties