The Rise of Sentiment and the Fall of Civilization
13th July 2016
Already in the 1950s, Jacques Barzun pointed out in his House of Intellect, people were beginning to say “I feel that…” instead of “I think that…” in common discourse. This terminological ferment marked a change in how people were engaging the world as the Modern Ages passed away. Reason, which had been enjoying a free pass and a table close to the orchestra ever since the Middle Ages (when it was virtually the only kind of thing taught in the universities), and which even later modestly named a time period after itself, butted heads with sentiment… and lost. This “triumph of the will” gave us Romanticism, Nietzsche’s philosophy, impressionist paintings, and self-esteem classes like “Me Studies.” The heart wants what it wants.
The Sixties then were less a youth revolution than the aftermath of an adult abdication. Commenting on Barzun, R.R. Reno wrote that “the adult world of achieved self-discipline” gave way to “an adolescent world of spontaneity and desire” as the epigones of the old Bourgeois threw in with the Bohemian project, a “royal road to self-discovery through the alchemy of self-expression.” Barzun predicted that the then-emerging Bohemian Era would be anti-intellectual: characterized by an “externalized and collective sense of purpose” (Everything is political! Everything is a Movement!) and an “undifferentiated, amorphous inner life” (The triumph of the will! If it feels good, do it!). After all, the Bourgeois Era was repressive, patriarchal, and logocentric, wunnit?