Romanticism is not an exclusive political spectrum. It can be found in societies that are democratic or totalitarian, in nationalism or existentialism, permeated within impersonal institutions, e.g., bureaucracies, or in liberal and anti-liberal political philosophies. Before this, I wrote about what made conservatism romantic. Here, we’ll discuss what makes it anti-romantic or, with the previous piece, a hodgepodge of the two.

We are imperfect, but we can only be so if there is something that is. American conservatism, or a Western conservative in some broad sense, must retain a deistic weltanschauung if we are to assert the basic fundamentals of rights.

Where do rights come from? There are either rights that are given to man by man and, in effect, those that can be taken away; and then there are rights that are inalienable and are not given to man by man, but that were bestowed upon man by God, that is to say, embedded into us from birth, as part of rights found within nature and, if we are smart enough to retain them ourselves, they cannot be taken away.

(READ MORE: Romantics of Conservatism: Politics of the Present)

But nature to the romantics is not compatible with man and for him to be under its influence he would be considered a slave. Schiller believed in breaking from nature and transforming her to create our own. Kant echoes this when he says that nature is either an enemy or it is neutral; and inasmuch as we can control and impose our personalities on it, we are the freest; but we can only do this if we are free and when it is done it’s because we are committed to certain ideals. Fichte also says that we are freest when we are unobstructed so that we may exercise our creative drive to the fullest.

This particular romantic view of nature is a liberal one—elevating the individual above all else. It led to what John Gray calls a cult of authenticity “which finds virtue in fanaticism as long as it is practised sincerely.” It is Kant’s anti-authoritarian principle: paternalism is despotism because man does not judge for himself what principles should be obeyed. Kant praised the French Revolution because it liberated man from nature by asserting his own will upon it; however, his silence on its terrors shows his anti-authoritarian passion even when it ran contrary to it.

It’s only through devout, unwavering commitment can one truly be free, self-determinate and self-creating. “The free untrammelled will and the denial of the fact that there is a nature of things, the attempt to blow up and explode the very notion of a stable structure of anything—are the deepest and in a sense the most insane elements in this extremely valuable and important movement [romanticism],” Isaiah Berlin wrote of Kant.

But conservatism is not against nature in this way. It believes that man is innately imperfect—or perhaps perfect as in the image of God or some higher being but imperfect in his execution, as he struggles to identify and reify the realm of forms.

Conservatives do not hold the individual to be separate from nature. While the romantics might bear the liberal belief that our freedom is dependent upon our sovereignty over nature, this is not the concept of liberty: liberty is not licentiousness, it does not mean one is virtuous to equal proportion of his fanaticism, a moral relativism where the individual is morally judged according to his own self-determination. To believe such would be to justify atrocity wherever one saw it: the Holocaust would be virtuous as it attempted to mold nature and impose its personality on her.

Romantics would call man a slave to nature if he allows her to mold and dominate him; but then I suppose it is best that we are all slaves, for when we attempt to be masters we commit atrocities of horrendous magnitude. This attempt to impose upon her was what led to the French Revolution and continued in other nations well into the twentieth century.

Isaiah Berlin says that this romantic idea of freedom led to nationalism, a collective movement “creatively lunging forward for the purpose of not being frozen,” and yet I find it remarkable that a philosophy so enamored with the individual could still seek collective validation to universalize (imperialize) what Herder might call the internalized ideal of a nation. It’s as Chomsky says: even the most extreme moral relativists presuppose universal values.

Now, conservatism can also be nationalistic, but only insofar as we don’t claim individual sovereignty over tradition and history: man is a social artifact and moves with the spirit of his men. But of course this wouldn’t mean that he is justified in imperializing to others what he claims as universal. Even this claim should be met with skepticism because it derives from the individual’s impetuous and immature assertion over what is, not from prudence.

And this is the next divergence: responsibility.

Kant believed that we were responsible when we did not depend on what was outside of ourselves for our actions. But to the conservative, responsibility is rooted in a prudent realization that one cannot possibly tame nature or bend it to his will. We may manipulate what she makes available to us, as in harnessing natural resources, but we are not able to manipulate that universal that predominates, that bestows man his rights and progression of morality (how far we have come).

We are responsible for how we act and react to things that are out of our control, but do not delude ourselves that only that which is within us is sufficient to know better than that which is outside of us. Of course man is a social artifact and that spirit is present within him as it is outside of him: the memory of history is not only running through his blood but his conditions.

Yet ultimately, when the romantic asserts manipulating nature what he is really talking about is the manipulation of himself, of the human condition—i.e., that condition that is imperfect and a slave to what is higher than himself. When we attempt to alter, to manipulate, to control nature, we effectively control ourselves to such a degree and in such a manner that we become the paternalist state that Kant loathed; we tyrannize over ourselves by contradicting the individual that was a romantic sovereign; we assert a collective movement to validate a universalism, an internalized ideal that even Herder recognized as culturally temporary. And when man does this, we induce the French Revolution. Why revolutionaries fail is because their delusions were not compatible with reality.

Though, it would not be so far off to say that even the tendency of tyranny is innate to the condition of man; but again, that is his imperfection to identify and reify ideals, not simply call whatever he whims ideals. The atrocities committed in the name of a common good are today largely accepted as such: evils like slavery and the persecution of homosexuals were almost wholly argued morally, and we think back to why better conditions weren’t realized sooner. It would be hard to argue at this time that morality has not been progressively realized, as moral parameters were delineated by what was so wrong that we realized conditions were not what should be; in effect, they were immoral.

This already presupposes a morality, a bedrock of nature that is not to be neutered for a falsified sovereignty.