Romantics.

Our previous post, Intellectuals and creation of the political order, describes the social planners and dreamers who inflate the ability of the mind to construct political entities and have no understanding of the role of custom and experience.

This post is from a piece by Robert McHenry, the former Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, wherein he discusses, in part, the politicians' fawning romanticization of The People who need only to be loosed from the chains clapped on by rich, white, European, or patriarchal evildoers in order for them to give expression to their noble natures.

Romantics, to Mr. McHenry, are

• utterly convinced of their unique ability to understand reality and
• refuse to recognize the validity of any kind of restraint upon them:

The core of romanticism is egoism, of a degree that threatens always to slide over into solipsism. It is a disease chiefly of the leisured young and first came to be identified and named when the Industrial Revolution had produced a critical mass of that class. . . . [R]omantics [are] each utterly confident of [their] unique insight into the really true nature of things.

* * * *

The fundamental error of romanticism is the failure to understand the importance of rules, of constraints, to creation. . . .

* * * *

The same inexorable law applies to all such human endeavor. Science works because of . . . strong constraints . . . . The arts, on the other hand, have declined deplorably in recent decades for no other reason than that the notion has taken hold that utter freedom leads to creativity (and, by the way, utterly trumps craft).

The Curse of Egoism." By Robert McHenry, TCSDaily, 1/26/06.