Other scions of the bourgeoisie sought to transcend their fathers not just by abolishing rules in an orange quest for adventure that veered close to a red pursuit of power, but in the extinction of the adventurous ego itself.  They sought a green world of universal community not in the cramped culture of village and clan but in the whole brotherhood of mankind.  They experienced the ultimate futility of all ego.  And they also began to see, as science began to lead them away from a naïve anthropocentrism, that man was not called to dominate the world as a god, but to live within its fragile envelope as but one participant in a great communal organic biosphere.

So it came to be, by the end of the nineteenth century, that the human quest had expanded to many levels.  There were purple tribes, living purely within a world of blood kin and extended family.  There were red peasants, living in villages, bent to the power of landlords, princes, and sons of heaven.  There were red proletarians, trying to make sense of life in the city under the tutelage of the blue bourgeoisie and the orange industrial adventurers.  There was the respectable blue middle class, making a modest competence in the city, earnestly living by rule and role, sober and purposeful.   There were the orange entrepreneurs, exploiting the new inventions both material and cultural to create a wealth of material abundance and cultural innovation that still barely trickled below the middle class.  And there were the orange/green creative communitarians, sons and daughters of the middle class, born to a competence, exploring the world of the self-conscious ego and dreaming of peace and justice, a nonviolent world without conflict and division.

There were those among the orange artistic creatives who did not shout: Down with rules!  They called for a transcending of the bourgeois rules, including them but searching through creative process for better ones and using the bourgeois rules as a jumping off point for more enlightenment and more universality.  But they were little heard.  There were those among the green communitarians who recognized the explosion of wealth creation in the nineteenth century as a boon, and that the swashbuckling capitalists did not represent a malevolent force bent on world domination but a benevolent force striving to shower the people of the world with mass products for mass consumption.  But they were little heard.  What overflowed Europe in the nineteenth century was a first a great Romantic movement that celebrated creativity, hated rules, living to differentiate itself from the fat and somnolent bourgeoisie, and then a great socialist movement that celebrated community, hated enterprise, and reviled the bourgeois edifice of law and property as a false front, a mask for naked power.  The two movements did not celebrate their new insights as transcendent truths that stood on the shoulders of earlier times.  They demanded that their new truths should replace the old truths and make the world anew.

The Romantic Movement, an orange consciousness of the creative ego, vowed to replace the blue consciousness of rules with pure creative genius.  The restraining bands of law would be burst by the creative genius beyond good and evil.  The socialist movement vowed to return the world community, savaged by the explosive waste and energy of laissez faire businessmen and the higgling of the market, to a society where once more, as of old before the rules and the property of bourgeois society had pitted friend against friend and neighbor against neighbor, the people would hold the power in gentle, local communities.  By the turn of the twentieth century, Leon Trotsky could know that in the new world the average human type would rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.  And above that ridge, new peaks would rise.

Thus was forged the modern temper in which three styles stand out: Compassion, Irreverence, and Creativity. (Barzun 2000 p787)  All of them represent green and orange consciousness freed from the anchoring influence of blue.

When the modern temper was tried out in the twentieth century it immediately led to a bloodbath.  For the explosive force of the twentieth century was not to be the much-feared capitalists that Marx had warned about in 1850, and the trusts that American Progressives had heroically busted in 1900-10.  When the trusts were busted there was no rioting in the streets; there were no bullyboys sent by the Rockefellers and Morgans to intimidate the judges; there was no truculent defiance of due process.  When the law declared their combinations illegal, they submitted to the law—and took their winnings to the bank.  The great threat of the early twentieth century turned out to be the anti-bourgeois power, Germany, “the very embodiment of vitalism and technical brilliance” breaking the mold of bourgeois legality in a war of liberation from “the hypocrisy of bourgeois form and convenience.” (Ecksteins 1989 p.xv)  War in avant-garde circles in 1914 was not considered a life-destroying cycle of violence but “a liberation from bourgeois narrowness and pettiness” epitomized, of course, by the nation of shopkeepers, Britain.  Germany was drenched in the spirit of orange creativity, but rejected the dead hand of bourgeois culture, where enterprise and progress were restrained by law and property.  After the war, of course, the avant-garde declared the Great War to be the fault of arms merchants and stiff-necked Prussian generals.

After World War I the orange consciousness of creativity ranged stronger than ever as the pre-war antinomian movement of creativity moved into the mainstream, and the green consciousness of universal community triumphed in the former empire of Russia.  Both these movements advertised that the sickness that had brought on the war was the sickness of capitalism: rigid laws inspired by bourgeois capitalists that oppressed the poor, and rigid social conformity inspired by superstitious religion.  The legal and contractual framework of the nineteenth century was scorned as inhuman and oppressive.  Down with the blue bourgeois rules; that was the cry.  The rigid contract between government and people institutionalized as the gold standard was scorned and abandoned; the rights of property were everywhere curtailed; the global trading system was hobbled by punitive reparations, by new tariffs, and by interventionist economic policy.  In due course the trading system collapsed in a Great Depression, and that was blamed on capitalism too.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill