Human nature is artificiality.

To reject the artificiality of culture is a rarefied artificiality. Don’t attempts at naturalness always look forced, ludicrous, embarassing — and artificial? Such artificiality refuses to learn — that’s the point of it — so it lacks teachers and competence.

A well-practiced artificiality is more natural. The individually perfected parts flow together organically as a unity, like a dance or a piano piece or a philosophy. Until that point, you get steps or phrases or theories.

Or you get improvised flailing, or John Cage, or spastic paraphrasings of osmotically-absorbed notions mistaken for originality. Romanticism is the groping of shut-eyes aspiring to invent a vision other than the one they still see by in their darkened imaginations.

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A member of the biological species homo sapiens, behaving “naturally”, that is, purely by the raw instincts that constitute it biologically is not yet a human being, but an animal. When a member of this species is born into a cultural tradition, and its instincts grow together within this traditional mold — that is, socialized — trained to behave in a particular way, taught to perceive in a particular way, initiated into feeling a particular way — what forms is a human being. And each generation of human beings maintains and modifies the molds for the next generation. This mold is called “education”. What a human being is changes in an invariable way.

This process of transfiguring homo sapiens animals into human beings can be quite violent. Some have powerful instincts that cannot be molded in any existing mold. Some have too little instinctive material that result is an unformed lump, or in the best cases, a hollow human-shaped form, but inwardly lacks spiritual substance. Or they have too much material, which oozes out of the edges, and must be trimmed off through all sorts of “disciplinary action”. In our hyper-gentle time which celebrates “feminine virtues” — sensitivity, consideration, cooperativeness, quietness, sitting still in small cube-shaped spaces — education has become girl-shaped, and for all practical purposes has become a universal iron maiden, within which all extraneous protuberances are mashed in, trimmed off or sanded down in the name of “classroom management”.

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It is only when humanity evolves beyond its old cultural molds that we begin to pine for nature. But what we really want is a more accommodating artificiality. But the old molds have to be broken, melted down and reformed, and for this the violence and heat of romanticism is useful.