1. Discover one’s nature• Listen to the still small voice• Ignore conventional wisdom

Part 4: Politics

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’ssocial 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 togetherFrom its diffuse float, and the soils on the Surface, and water runs, and vegetation sproutsFor 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”

Anti-authoritarianism in religion, in politics, in education, across the boardAnti-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

Freedom

Social Change: The personal is political

• “Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; 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 selfexpression of that selfintegrity in maintaining that selfpolitical 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 companionableand 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

Mid 1800’s: Whitman, Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau et al

Pre-WWI: The Lyric Left1920’s: The Harlem Renaissance1920’s: The “Lost Generation”

1950’s: Beats & Bebop, 1960’s: Counterculture, “hippies”1970’s: Patti Smith, Punk

Important Hip/shadow/countercultural

eras

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 onthe ground-- There ought to bea law against you comin' around

You should be made to wearearphones because somethingis happening here but you don'tknow 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’sbecause she wanted to be cool and was acting the way coolkids act. She had to reject being cool to be herself.

A phenomenon we’ll look at more closely when we get to the Fifties