Part 4: The Woke Bohemian
By Laura Terrell
The following post is written by my friend and colleague, Laura Terrell. Laura holds a degree in Religion: Women’s Ministry with a Psychology minor (Liberty University). She is also a certified copyeditor (University of California, San Diego) and a published author. She is the editor of The Life I Now Live: Continuing Machen’s Historic Battle for the Gospel.
Disclaimer: This particular blog post deals with sensitive topics regarding the peculiar sins of the Enlightenment period and the Roaring Twenties. These cultural sins are not unlike our own postmodern milieu.
Blessings,
-Rich
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,
and a skunk-cabbage, by any other name,
wouldn’t smell any sweeter.”
–Joel Parker(1)
The Woke Bohemian
In my last blog, we talked about the origins of some—though, most assuredly not all—of the institutions we see in our own modern U.S. culture, namely abortion, transgenderism, and the public school. As promised, we’ll dive much deeper into those issues and others in Part 6 of this series. But in order to fully appreciate the direction these institutions could take us in (if allowed to continue unhindered to their natural and logical ends), we have to first discuss the importance of “environment.” Specifically, the philosophical and political environments that have allowed these ultimately dangerous institutions to flourish under the guise of freedom.
The most recognizable beginnings of what would today be called “wokeness” can be found in Germany in the 1770s. In an effort to combat the stiff and stodgy Rationalism of the French Enlightenment that had swept the nation of Germany also, the college age artists who led the Sturm und Drang movement led their generation in completely the opposite direction. Sturm und Drang is often translated as “Storm and Stress,” however, that’s not quite accurate. Drang should more correctly be translated as “sexual desire.”
The Sturm und Drang movement, which was specific to theater and literature, was a deconstruction of all the structure, logic, and rules that had been put on a pedestal during the Enlightenment; and not just a deconstruction but a disowning of the entire concept of rules and structure.
Sturm und Drang plays often had no recognizable structure at all. The traditional five act play, set to a specific meter and rhyme, was done away with in favor of a seemingly random cacophony of ideas, words, and emotion-driven acting. One particularly popular Sturm und Drang play, by Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz, called “The Tutor,” centered around an ill-fated love affair that caused an angst-ridden meltdown, ultimately resulting in the leading man’s self-induced castration, which of course didn’t stand in the way of the adoring couple living happily ever after. How could it?
The same was true of books for the Sturm und Drang writers.
Out with the old, in with the new. The rules were gone. Let chaos ensue! But only, of course, in the pretty form of angst and romanticism. Everything must be cranked up to eleven… except for common sense. The Sturm und Drang writers chose to dial that one back a bit. One of the most popular books of the time was written by the famous Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He was the George R. R. Martin of his time, and Faust was his Game of Thrones. But long before Faust, at the age of 24, he was deeply immersed in the Sturm und Drang movement.
Goethe’s first big hit was called The Sorrows of Young Werther.(3) The book is about a young man who, overcome by his angsty angst of angstishness, decides to kill himself. Because… unrequited love. And equally because reasons. The book serves as a metaphor for the conflict between the old Enlightenment thinking, juxtaposed with the Sturm und Drang worldview. In terms of the book’s plot, Werther has a debate with his friend about the rightness of his decision to commit self-harm. Werther contends that it’s fine to kill himself because he himself has no religious convictions. Therefore his only obligation is to his own reasoning. And he must follow his own reasoning to its logical conclusion. He has determined that his life is not worth living apart from his lady love; therefore, he must and shall end it. His friend (who is a personification of Enlightenment thinking) seeks to save his life by insisting that right and wrong do in fact exist. But he is ultimately outvoted, and Werther kills himself, This insinuates to the reader that Relativism has won over Rationalism.
In our over-saturated culture of entertainment and fiction, this storyline might seem harmless enough. But at a time when entertainment was much harder to come by and each new installment of fictional narrative was treasured as a beloved prize, storylines were taken much more seriously than they are now. (Although that point could be argued by anyone who’s ever had to sit in a room with a Marvel fanboy or a Twilight fangirl for more than five minutes!) Thus, sadly, much like the horrific Tide Pod Challenge of 2017, the book, The Sorrows of Young Werther, contributed to more than a few deaths. Many of Goethe’s young readers decided it would be fashionable to emulate Werther and take their own lives.
For a reasonable and rational human being, it’s not difficult to see the tragedy here. Speaking for myself, the greatest and truest tragedy is in the fact that human lives, made in the image of God, were ended. And not just ended, but ended by their own hands. All for the sake of sensationalism. All for the sake of a trend.
But what if one were to approach the subject from the viewpoint of an Enlightenment Era philosopher? From that perspective it would be “necessary” to completely throw off the restraints of traditional religious interpretation and start fresh, using only the relatively newly discovered sciences. To quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article entitled, “Enlightenment”:
“D’Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes his eighteenth century, in the midst of it, as ‘the century of philosophy par excellence,’ because of the tremendous intellectual and scientific progress of the age, but also because of the expectation of the age that philosophy (in the broad sense of the time, which includes the natural and social sciences) would dramatically improve human life.”(4)
That was the whole point of the Enlightenment. To counter and “correct” what was seen as an outdated and irrelevant system of religion and morality with the new and sophisticated sciences—especially philosophy and reason. Religion, specifically Christianity, was considered a failure. It “failed” to give the people what they wanted and what they thought they needed to advance as a modern civilization. Therefore, logically, Science must step in—not to aid it, but to replace it. As a result, Germany and, indeed, much of Western Europe saw a quick and decided shift away from a Christian framework for society toward a secular one. Science was now the standard for determining good and bad for an individual and for society as a whole.
This begs the question: Are the sciences bad?
Of course not! God created science. God created our minds complete with the ability to think and observe and discover and reason. In the positive sense, science is meant to be a framework for us to understand his creation and even a tool to help us “fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28b). It was never meant to be the framework for human morality in and of itself. It was never meant to be a tool for condoning and facilitating sin. It was never meant to be its own religion.
And yet, at the height of the French Revolution, on November 10, 1793, it became just that.(5)
Once again, fed up with the old system (this time the failed monarchy of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who had obliterated the nation’s finances by catering to their own extravagant whims), the starving people of France had finally been pushed to their breaking point, and they rebelled. First, they tore down the Bastille brick by brick with their bare hands. Then they captured, imprisoned, and guillotined the escaping royal couple. Then they guillotined everyone they saw as a threat to the Republic. Then the heads of the new regime started removing each other. In fact, the guillotining only stopped when the leader of the revolt, Louis Capet, lost his own head on January 21, 1793.
When they weren’t guillotining people, the leaders of the Republic were renaming streets and such, so that all references to Catholicism were completely wiped out. They replaced the names of saints and such with the names of leaders of the Republic. It was decided that, since the monarchy had been Catholic, Catholicism must go the way of the monarchy.
But, because man was not created to be godless, it was admitted that there was some need for an official religion. However, this time it must be a completely secular one. It must be a humanist religion dedicated to man’s ability to reason for himself. They called this religion the Cult of Reason. This cult only lasted about a year and was supplanted by Maximilien Robespierre with the Cult of the Supreme Being.(6) This new cult was largely based upon the same concept; however, it allowed for the possible—but not in any way obligatory—existence of some ambiguous cosmic force. This force could perhaps be called a deity—if one were absolutely pressed for specifics—but only a deity of whatever kind one wishes, of course! The Cult of the Supreme Being also was short lived. The French Revolution and its new Republic officially ended when Napoleon seized power in 1799.(7) He officially banned all cults in 1802.
But the autocratic spirit of the age remained. The citizens of France now knew that they could change the rules when necessary, and those rules could become whatever they saw fit. Even if they saw fit to get rid of the rules entirely. They didn’t, of course, but they did eventually become rather lax on some very important ones.
And on that note, we arrive at our final destination in our theoretical archaeology tour. Paris, 1920. Specifically, in the home of author, playwright, and former Pittsburgh native Gertrude Stein, and her life partner, Alice B. Toklas. We’re at a swanky dinner party. Think Great Gatsby. The guest list includes such notable names as artists Pablo Picasso and Henri Mattisse, authors Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and poet Ezra Pound, among others. Stein is the beloved den mother of this rag-tag gang of artists that have one thing in common: they’re all members of The Lost Generation.(8) The Lost Generation was a group of Bohemian artists who, finding themselves in a state of shock and displacement at the end of the Great War, felt completely at odds with their old way of life, utterly different from everything they’d been raised to be, and entirely abandoned by the U.S. in its inability and seeming unwillingness to help them cope.
Of course, you might be wondering, what is a Bohemian?
Essentially, a Bohemian was a precursor to today’s woke generation. More formally, however, Andy Walker of BBC Radio 4 describes the term in this way:
"Bohemian was originally a term with pejorative undertones given to Roma[ni] gypsies who were commonly believed by the French to have originated in Bohemia, in central Europe. The Oxford English Dictionary's definition mentions someone ‘especially an artist, literary man, or actor, who leads a free, vagabond, or irregular life, not being particular as to the society he frequents, and despising conventionalities generally.’ But the connotation rapidly became a romantic one. From its birth in Paris in the 1850s, and the huge success of Murgier's play Scenes de la vie de Boheme, the ethic spread rapidly. Gypsy clothes became all the fashion, sparking a style which lives on today through lovers of boho-chic like Sienna Miller and Kate Moss. And artists and poets from Baudelaire to van Gogh characterised bohemian ideals.”(9)
And so they went to find themselves in the progressive freedom of Paris. In Paris, they could be anything and everything they wanted to be. No one cared if they were gay, if they went to orgies, spent entire weekends on absinthe and cocaine-fueled benders, wrote about sex, drugs, and partying, or painted nudes and slept with the nudes they painted. Literally no one cared.
It would only take a few short years, with the dawning of the Roaring Twenties in the United States, before no one here cared either. With WWI now in the past, the time to practice frugality was over. America experienced a huge boom in our economy with the popularization of electricity and automobiles, not to mention excessive spending and charging purchases to accounts. Mass drunkenness and partying led to the institution of Prohibition in January of 1920, which led to more partying and drunkenness—the only difference being that now it was worse and now it was illegal. Oh, and now people were making bathtub gin that often had deadly chemicals and other putrid substances in it that often led to poisoning or blindness.(10) So… that happened.
Women’s Liberation—although in and of itself a good thing, as it led to women’s right to vote and fare wages—was taken too far with things like Planned Parenthood (established in 1916, originally to sterilize people who were deemed not good enough to breed) and the increasingly popular idea that a woman didn’t need a man to make it in the world.(11) Ideas like these were seemingly true and compelling on the surface. A woman doesn’t need, and shouldn’t attempt, to define herself by being wanted or not wanted by a man. However, the idea that women and men don’t need each other at all, except for sexual pleasure for those who go looking for it, is dangerous to its very core. It can and ultimately must lead to the undermining, if not even destruction, of marriage and the family. On that note, you might find it interesting that, even with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, those states that still allow abortion all have more lenient laws than France.(12)
Oh, how the tables have turned!
-Laura
P.S. You might be wondering about that running tally of Sun cults in my first blog, which I’ve rather conspicuously not mentioned in this second one. Well, get that tally sheet out. You’re going to need it as we journey onward in Part 6!
Footnotes:
Joel Parker, Constitutional Law and Unconstitutional Divinity: Letters to Rev. Henry M. Dexter, and to Rev. Leonard Bacon, D.D. (Cambridge: H. O. Houghton, 1863), 56.
Melvyn Bragg, Tim Blanning, Susanne Kord, and Maike Oergel, “Sturm Und Drang,” In Our Time (podcast), accessed August 19, 2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b00y72x6.
Ibid.
“Enlightenment” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last modified August 29, 2017, accessed August 18, 2022, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/.
John Robson, “Today in History: French Revolution swaps churches for ‘Temples of Reason’” (1793), Rebel News, accessed August 19, 2022, https://youtu.be/c47vkgnnAYk.
The French Revolution (documentary), dir. Doug Shulz, narr. Edward Herrmann (Partisan Pictures/History Channel, 2005).
Julia Shapiro, “Storming of the Cults: A Revolutionary Remembrance,” The Humanist, accessed August 19, 2022, https://thehumanist.com/commentary/storming-of-the-cults-a-revolutionary-remembrance.
Biography: The Lost Generation (documentary), dir., Stephen Crisman, narr. Harry Smith (Crisman Films/A+Edocumentary Network, January 25, 2001).
Andy Walker, “What Is Bohemian?” BBC Radio 4, accessed August 19, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-12711181.amp.
Prohibition (documentary), dir. Ken Burns, narr. Peter Coyote (Florentine Films, WETA, Prohibition Film Project, National Endowment for the Humanities/PBS, 2011).
“Our History,” Planned Parenthood, accessed August 19, 2022, https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-history.
Lief Le Majieu, “America’s Foreign Allies—Some With Stricter Abortion Laws Than U.S.—Lament Supreme Court Abortion Decision,” June 25, 2022, accessed August 19, 2022, https://www.dailywire.com/news/americas-foreign-allies-some-with-stricter-abortion-laws-than-u-s-lament-supreme-court-abortion-decision.
