Modernity and the Death of the Romantic

in which I discuss how modernity has brutally murdered our sense of romance and what this has done to our art

Am I a romantic? It might surprise you, but yes—at least, I think I was, once.

Growing up somewhat isolated from technology made it easier. I made it to sixteen before I ever encountered the dopamine casino known as social media, and I was closer to eighteen before I really started to play there. (This was a feat I wasn’t nearly proud enough of, considering I was a teen during the early teens.)

Instead, I amused myself by reading and writing. Mostly fiction, but occasionally some creative non-fiction and poetry. Living in the hinterlands of the rural Midwest where we could barely see the next house two hills over and you always noticed the sound of tires on gravel because nobody came up that way, I had little barrier to developing a sense of the romantic, or, as Anne Shirley would call it, a “scope for the imagination.” Even later, after I married and moved to the city, I still saw magic in the skyline, the twilight jazz, and the corner cafés nestled along teeming streets. (This was back in the shockingly-recent past when places like this still had a shred of desirable culture, and that was ours.)

It would be easy to say that this romanticism was yet another casualty of the COVID Regime—which, I suppose is true. But it’s not the whole truth. Lockdowns killed it in the way that a bullet to the skull kills an animal bleeding out on the ground. I’m not sure how much blood was lost before that, but at any rate, it wasn’t long for this world.

Once, on Twitter, somebody posed the question, “When did what we call ‘modernity’ really start?” It was a fascinating subject, and people gave a variety of interesting answers, many of which I think could be considered right, which is to say that it would seem “Modernity”—and the simultaneous death of the romantic—was something that happened gradually, then all at once.

But now that it’s over, it’s impossible to deny that it has happened, and we now find ourselves living through the loneliest and most unromantic of eras.

What is the evidence for this? Well, for one thing, we have stroads. Not roads, not streets: stroads. These abominations have ruined the romanticism of a peaceful stroll through a quaint, idyllic town by subverting it into a noisy, hazardous trek through a maze of asphalt and car exhaust designed to maximize efficiency of consumption. (Play outside, they said, it’ll be fun, they said.)

We also have Funko-Pops, and if those don’t symbolize our status as perpetual, mindless consumers, devoid of any original thought, I don’t know what does.

Speaking of being reduced to senseless consumers of product and media, we can’t neglect to mention the inch-deep oceans of Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and the like, all eating away at our attention spans until our capacity for romanticism—for creativity and imagination—is nothing but a devoured, sun-scorched husk.

While we know (we can all feel) that Modernity is responsible for the murder of the romantic, we now come to the weapon: subversion.

Nearly everything within Modernity is a deliberate subversion of the romantic—by which I mean the earthy and the real. The physical, actual, tangible world, which, prior to this miserable, perverted era, had been taken for granted. I mean, for the love of God, we’re actually asking the question, What is a woman? as if there’s some non-obvious answer that is to be seriously entertained. A sense of the romantic simply cannot coexist alongside such ridiculous claptrap. To make matters worse, our hyper-connected digital universe has even managed to subvert the very nature of what we understood to be “community,” offering us instead a glittering hall of mirrors in which everyone wears the same face.

This is, fundamentally, why I think we’ve seen an explosion of really, really bad art.

Because you used to be able to take things about our world and reality—like men and women and their relationships—for granted, you used to be able to devote your intellectual energy to daydreaming about them. Not in the way of “reimagining” or subverting them as the post-romantic Wokes would have you do, but in the way of examining and interrogating them for their functionality, their essence, their soul, and then stylizing those inherent truths into pieces of art. As a result, this art would have universal relatability.

Instead, we find ourselves endlessly expending our intellectual energy on merely trying to survive Wonderland without going mad. (I’m writing this in a public library and just now, a young man(?) and devout Current-Thing-Supporter walked past wearing a shirt sporting all the various dogmatic subversions of reality that we’re accustomed to being assaulted with on a daily basis.)

It’s all so tiresome—and yet there’s no escape. How can we reclaim our sense of the romantic when every aspect of our society is hell-bent on stamping it out?

I’ll be honest: I don’t know. I’m writing this out of frustration and my own sense of loss, and, I suppose, as a bulwark for my own sanity against the delirious ravings of a world gone off the rails. Not because I have anything so nice and convenient as answers. Alas.

What I do know is this: If we want to have a future apart from the pods and the bugs, we must find a way to resurrect romance. If we can’t manage to do that, the enemy’s demoralization campaign will be complete.