It's the Romantics Who Move the Ball (Though Their Visions May Fail)

 

Henry David Thoreau

 

I've been reading about Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, the 19-year-old, fabulously rich French aristocrat who defied his king and his own family, bought a ship, and raced to America to support and participate in the revolution. On board ship, as he approached the New World, he wrote his wife Adrienne,

"The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of mankind. She is destined to become the safe and venerable asylum of virtue, of honesty, of tolerance, of equality, and of peaceful liberty .... Night coming on obliges me to stop, for I have lately forbidden the use of lights about the ship." 

Said like a 19-year-old in love with his own heroic image -- who was also not an idiot about self-preservation. When he was preparing to sail to America, with the Atlantic crawling with British men of war determined to intercept any French commerce going west, including war materiel, Lafayette let it be known that if fired on by British cannon, he would rather die than give up the ship. He vowed to blow it up himself. That's a romantic for you. Imagining his own theatrical death for the Great Cause. The romantic is willing to act as though the best future is already here, if he can only grab it. Lafayette sails toward an America that exists first in his imagination: virtuous, tolerant, equal, peaceful. And by gawd he goes and puts his body, money, reputation, and military training at risk for that imaginary America.

Rick Aktinson in Volume 2 of his Revolution Trilogy suggests that Lafayette was meticulous about building and maintaining a vivid public image. All of France knew he was planning to sail west and join the Americans' rebellion -- he was a trained military officer at 19 -- and though the King and his government absolutely forbade any French officer joining with the Americans, Lafayette was determined (and determination backed by great wealth will get you a far distance). He was brave, perhaps dangerously brave. And an odd figure -- a French aristocrat taking up the banner of resistance to aristocracy. He fired the enthusiasm of the very French citizens who would soon be executing French aristocrats. Non-romantics probably thought Lafayette had marbles in his head. Napoleon called him "just another nitwit."

The cynic in me, reading that letter he wrote to Adrienne about the prospects for America, can see the nitwittery, assuming that we, the descendants of the revolution, are supposed to be essential for "the happiness of mankind." 'Cause look what time and decay have coughed up. Are we the happiness of mankind in 2026? Or a persistent stinging nettle? Lafayette promised his pregnant wife that America would be a "venerable asylum of virtue," which under the present regime becomes one of the funniest conjurings ever of the word asylum. 

Romantics have the gene to risk themselves for a cause. The Cause gets bigger as the risk escalates. Romantics can also make the impossible seem possible by their own doing, which is how movements get started. Change rarely happens without a movement. So what if the Lafayettes of this world tend to mistake their hope for reality?

Thomas Jefferson was a romantic and he decisively moved the ball of history. But “all men are created equal” was pure romanticism, asserted as reality before reality remotely conformed to it. It's the romantic's way to imagine a future that does not yet exist, behave as though it might exist, and thereby bull his way through the obstructions. Never mind that their animating vision turns out to be partial, naïve, contradictory, or downright dangerous.

Getting women the right to vote was a long political movement waaay before it became a reality. It became a reality through the gritty determination of women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Anthony's willingness to violate the law by voting in 1872 is very Lafayette-like. The romantic acts out the future before the future has been authorized. And is more than willing to go to jail for it.

Obviously, romantics can be remarkably grounded in present reality -- Lafayette's knowing he had to sail blacked-out at night -- while carrying the idea of freedom like a torch. Those suffragist women made historical change and could still cook cabbage and tend to the sick. I think of Henry David Thoreau, withdrawn to the woods to get his head straight. In 1846, Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax because he opposed slavery and the Mexican-American War. He was arrested and spent one night in jail in Concord. Someone—apparently his aunt Maria—paid the tax, and he was released the next day. Isn't he a quintessential romantic? He took an abstract moral conviction and turned it into a physical act that put himself at risk. He was saying in effect, “I believe in the America that ought to exist, so I'm refusing to cooperate with the America that actually exists.”

Lenin and Mao belong in the story, too. Both imagined radically transformed societies and possessed the romantic conviction that the existing order could be swept away and something fundamentally new built in its place. They moved the ball enormously. The fact that the resulting societies produced coercion, famine, terror, and enormous human suffering doesn't make them less romantic. It makes the warning in my title real.

I think civilization advances because some people are insufficiently constrained by their knowledge of what is possible.