Why Capitalism is Ending

One way of understanding romanticism: 

I had a conversation with friends - one of my friends, a sort of "New Atheist" type, was expressing frustration about art, and some of my other friends are in the art world.

The New Atheist type said, "I wish there were a group of objective standards by which one could judge whether art is good or bad."

All my other friends got very angry about this, and utterly rejected it.

To my mind, this shows that all my other friends are still, in some sense, romantics.

To me, this shows that modernism is just an extension of romanticism, and postmodernism is an extension of modernism.  

We are still romantics.  Even classicism is a kind of romanticism.

I'm not sure that there is any way out of romanticism.

If there were a way out of romanticism, it would be the establishment of some kind of standard that people would agree upon.  But we can imagine what would happen if such a standard were imposed - immediately, there would be people who would angrily refuse and rebel against that standard.  It seems there will always be people who will be - or at least who will see themselves as, or aspire to be - anti-establishment.  And so no standard can become universal.  Is that really true?

It is in that sense that romanticism is anti-managerialism. 

This is not just - or even primarily - true for art.  Romanticism really began in religion. 

Sometimes I think that the first romantic was Pascal, on his famous "night of fire," rejecting what he called "the god of the philosophers" in favor of the true God, the personal God.  Pascal insisted, again and again, on a religion of the heart - le coeur.  As he said, "the heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know."  That's a very romantic statement.

But in its earliest moment, romanticism meant a relationship with Jesus in person, but not necessarily Jesus's relationship with an individual.  More often, it meant the relationship of Jesus with a nation.  That's why I say that nationalism is the ur-romanticism.  (This leads me to say that the first romantic was Joan of Arc.)

Romanticism often takes the form of a passionate identification with the people - especially the common people, the poor, the peasants, the oppressed, etc. - and at first this was understood in a national sense, and often in opposition to another nation (France against England, for instance).  For the French, the English have always seemed a bit managerial, and have seemed like they were arrogantly pretending to have some kind of standard of objective truth that they did not in fact have.