Ideologies can be “collective diseases of the ideal”, says François Duparc in his article “Vie et ebrdes idéologies” (The life and death of ideologies) (Le journal des psychologues, 2009/02, 265.). For this psychiatrist, ideologies can be beneficial in a society or in a family to create cohesion and solidarity, to structure individual psychism and, ultimately, to live or survive. However, they can be detrimental to oneself and society as a whole by denying the variability and necessity of time and being applied in a totalitarian way, condemning diversity. Among contemporary ideologies, François Duparc designates, among others, a fluid and attractive communication, consumerism, individualism (supposed autonomy or independence that can lead the individual to social solitude), great capitalism.

I believe that we should not aspire to a rigorous ideology, but to a florid ideal, in which ideologies should only be considered as instruments of support to navigate that ideal, simply as stimulating frameworks of reflection. I therefore believe that the same ideal can be the objective of different ideologies and serves to promote debates that support different ideologies but an ideal.

This was done by Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy in their French essay Romantisme anticapitaliste et nature (Romanticism anticapitalist and nature) (Payot, Paris, 2022). The American Sayre is an emeritus university professor in Paris and a Marxist sociologist and philosopher and a Franco-Brazilian eco-socialist Löwy. They propose a renewed vision of Anglo-Saxon romanticism. For them, romanticism is not a 19th-century movement: it is a true conception of the world. For the authors, romanticism is the cultural protest against capitalist civilization and its terrible effects on the planet, which begins and continues in the 18th century. The book analyzes the works of six different common figures: W. Bartram, Botanist Traveler (1739-1823), T. de Cole (1801-1848), W. Morris (1834-1896), W. Benjamin (1892-1940), R. Williams (1921-1988), N. Klein (1970-).

The reflection that emerges from this work is that romanticism is inspired, in time, in the persecution against excessive “progress” and in the threat against the nature generated by great capitalism, regardless of artists’ political-moral ideologies. What everyone has in common is an ideal, a utopia that positively drives each of us, that is, respect for Earth and life, turning our backs on the diseased and sad passions and environmental repressive that the system is growing.

It is known that romanticism exalts the past and nostalgia. For Sayre and Löwy, choose the six romantic figures that teach us that losing must become hope to survive, in harmony with the world. That is the conclusion reached by literary critic Evelyne Pieiller at Le Monde Diplomatique this month, and that is what I too would like to retain in memory. Let us not mourn what happened, let us not be turning on modernities in desperate ears, but, like the romantic, out of ideologies, we come to the ideal that will care for life and nature!