MDDM: Ch.33- "a new sort of European?"

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"Every day the room, for hours together, sways at the verge of riot.
May unchecked consumption of all these modern substances at the
same time, a habit without historical precedent, upon these shores
be creating a new sort of European? Less respectful of the forms
that have held society together, more apt to speak his mind any topic
he chooses, and to defendhis position violently if need be?" [330.3..]

And, what about those Europeans? What was the current of philosophic
discourse that was supposedly being left behind by this unprecedented
liberation of speach, by such substances modern, if ill-obtained? As a
point of reference, it might be interesting to revisit the brewing debate
between Voltaire and Rousseau, at about that time, the seeds of which 
were planted with Rousseau's second "Discourse."

Here is some of Voltaire's famous response to Rousseau after having
read that work:

"I have received, sir, your new book against the human species, and I thank 
you for it. You will please people by your manner of telling them the truth 
about themselves, but you will not alter them. The horrors of that human 
society--from which in our feebleness and ignorance we expect so many 
consolations--have never been painted in more striking
colours: no one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into 
brutes: to read your book makes one long to go on all fours. Since, however, 
it is now some sixty years since I gave up the practice, I feel that it is 
unfortunately impossible for me to resume it: I leave this naturel habit to 
those more fit for it than are you and I. Nor can I set sail to discover the 
aborigines of Canada, in the first place because my ill-health ties me to the 
side of the greatest doctor in Europe, and I should not find the same 
professional assistance among the Missouris: and secondly because war is 
going on in that country, and the exemple of the civilised nations has made 
the barbarians almost as wicked as we are ourselves. I must confine myself to 
being a peaceful savage in the retreat I have chosen--close to your country, 
where you yourself should be."

Delicious! And:

"I agree with you that science and literature have sometimes done a great 
deal of harm. Tasso's enemies made his life a long series of misfortunes: 
Galileo's enemies kept him
languishing in prison, at seventy years of age, for the crime of 
understanding the
revolution of the earth: and, what is still more shameful, obliged him to 
forswear his
discovery. Since your friends began the Encyclopaedia, their rivals attack 
them as deists, atheists--even Jansenists."

And again:

"Literary men make a great fuss of their petty quarrels: the rest of the 
world ignores
them, or laughs at them. 

"They are, perhaps, the least serious of all the ills attendant on human 
life. The thorns
inseparable from literature and a modest degree of fame are flowers in 
comparison with the other evils which from all time have flooded the world. 
Neither Cicero, Varron,
Lucretius, Virgil, or Horace had any part in the proscriptions of Marius, 
Scylla, that
profligate Antony, or that fool Lepidus; while as for that cowardly tyrans, 
Octavius
Caesar--servilely entitled Augustus--he only became an assassin when he was 
deprived of the society of men of letters. 

"Confess that Italy owed none of her troubles to Petrarch or to Boccaccio: 
that Marot's jests were not responsible for the massacre of St.Bartholomew: 
or the tragedy of the Cid for the wars of the Fronde. Great crimes are always 
committed by great ignoramuses. What makes, and will always make, this world 
a vale of tears is the insatiable greediness and the indomitable pride of 
men, from Thomas Koulikan, who did not know how to read, to a customhouse 
officer who can just count. Letters support, refine, and comfort the soul: 
they are serving you, sir, at the very moment you decry them: you are like 
Achilles declaiming against fame..."

Voltaire, even smoother than Franklin, eminently reasonable, and ready to 
admit
the sins of modernity, but also, admit that "some days it helps to have a 
lick of
molasses to look forward to, at the end of it."

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/homes/VSA/letters/8.30.1755.html

But of course, it would be Rousseau- the father of the romantic critique of
modernity- that would carry off the hearts and minds of the people, the down-
trodden, the common man. And contrary to what has been proffered here of
late, Pynchon, in all his works, champions that aspect of Romanticism, which
refuses to deny the soul in the face of ever more poweful forces that would
attempt to deny it.