Poetry, Power, and the Fantasy of Self-Repair
A recent conversation about global politics ended unexpectedly in anger.
The immediate cause was a speech by Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Carney spoke of “middle powers” — Britain, France, Germany and others — forming a bloc of decency in response to rising authoritarianism. The vision was familiar: cooperation over coercion, fairness over force, enlightened coordination replacing brute power.
For some listeners, this kind of rhetoric offers genuine hope — a reminder that history might yet bend toward moral order.
Others hear something else entirely.
They hear the old promise that systems which generated inequality, alienation, and ecological damage can somehow correct themselves through better management. That feedback mechanisms, technocratic governance, and international coordination will heal wounds produced by the very structures now tasked with repairing them.
It is a form of cybernetic faith: the belief that a civilisation can self-regulate its way out of crisis without confronting its foundations.
It resembles taking more poison in the hope that the pain will subside.
The response to skepticism was visceral. The objection was not to facts but to tone: why destroy beautiful ideas? The implication was clear. Certain visions serve a psychological purpose. They provide coherence, moral orientation, and emotional shelter. To question them feels less like disagreement and more like threat.
What was being challenged was not policy but meaning.
Romantic Wounds and Modern Illusions
What connects that Romantic moment to the present is not nostalgia for poetry, but continuity of structure.
Shelley and Keats were witnessing the first great transformation of human life into system: land enclosed, labour quantified, cities reorganised around production, meaning subordinated to efficiency. What disturbed them was not machinery itself, but the emerging logic that treated human beings as inputs and outputs — components within an expanding economic apparatus.
Today’s technocratic optimism is simply a more sophisticated version of the same impulse.
Where early industrial modernity promised progress through steam, factories, and political economy, contemporary governance promises repair through data, feedback loops, global coordination, and algorithmic management. The language has changed; the faith has not. Once again, the hope is that a civilisation organised around extraction and accumulation can recalibrate itself without questioning its underlying purpose.
This is the heart of cybernetic faith: the belief that systems which produce alienation can be tuned to generate belonging; that structures designed for growth can be gently redirected toward care; that optimisation can replace moral reckoning.
Shelley sensed the beginning of this logic. Keats felt its human cost.
What is new is not the mechanism, but the scale — and the confidence with which it is now assumed that self-regulation will succeed where conscience has failed.
Shelley wrote A Defence of Poetry in response to Thomas Love Peacock’s claim that poetry was becoming obsolete in an age governed by science, utility, and calculation. Peacock moved toward pragmatic modernity; Shelley toward prophetic Romanticism. Their relationship cooled not through anger, but through incompatible visions of what the future required.
Around the same period, Keats was absorbing brutal public criticism. His early work was attacked in both the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which mocked not only his poetry but his background and social standing. Keats later remarked that his own domestic criticism was harsher than anything reviewers could offer. Unlike Shelley, who fought outwardly for ideals, Keats internalised judgement, his vulnerability deepened by poverty and advancing illness.
Both poets were emotionally fragile, fiercely idealistic, and living through the early shocks of industrial modernity — enclosure, mechanisation, urbanisation, and the conversion of landscape and labour into economic units.
They sensed that something essential was being displaced.
Shelley responded with visionary idealism.
Keats with tenderness and mortality.
Both were resisting, in different ways, the flattening of human meaning by systems.
From Hope to Structural Realism
Contemporary faith in technocratic repair belongs to the same lineage as Shelley’s defence of poetry: the belief that imagination, cooperation, or enlightened coordination can redeem history.
But two centuries later, the record is clearer.
Colonial extraction, corporate globalisation, financialisation, and permanent war economies have left deep scars. Children are increasingly treated as consumers, citizens as data points, cultures as markets. The West’s development has been driven, repeatedly and predictably, by greed and exploitation. A glance at its history in Africa, Asia, and Latin America makes this difficult to deny.
Many societies might have evolved freer and richer cultural identities without Western interference.
Against this backdrop, the idea that the same civilisation will now cybernetically heal itself feels less like hope and more like magical thinking.
It assumes that a system designed for accumulation can be reprogrammed for compassion without altering its architecture.
That feedback loops can substitute for moral reckoning.
Mud and Firm Ground
Some people need sustaining narratives in order to remain oriented. Shared ideals provide warmth, belonging, and moral uplift. Others require clarity, even when it is cold.
Neither disposition is trivial. Each serves a different psychological function.
One seeks redemption through collective decency.
The other recognises continuity through history.
One believes repair will emerge from within the machine.
The other sees that the machine itself is the problem.
This is why such exchanges so often collapse into anger. When structural critique meets moral idealism, disagreement is experienced not merely as intellectual challenge but as existential destabilisation. To question the narrative is to unsettle identity.
Shelley wrote defences.
Keats wrote elegies.
Later generations write reckoning.
This is not pessimism. It is tragic consciousness: an acceptance that awareness does not always bring comfort, and that clarity often carries a social cost.
Some prefer warm symbolic mud — collective hope, beautiful futures, moral enthusiasm.
Others stand on firmer ground, exposed to history’s winds.
The distance between these positions is not political.
It is existential.
