(a part of Robert Goldman's online syllabus for his course Reinventing America III)
Whether it's myth or reality -- and it is certainly a bit of both -- individualism has long been considered a defining criterion of American culture. After all, this is a country where the most popular kind of music, at least among the suburban middle class, bears the name "Alternative." Of course, if everybody listens to "Alternative," it ceases to be so (maybe it's Garth Brooks) -- and this irony provides at least a suggestion that much of the "individualism" in which contemporary Americans take such pride is not so much a deep "habit of the heart" as a superficial construction of image. If you buy a Stetson, you can be a cowboy too.
Still, there is surely something real behind the myth. To Alexis de Tocqueville, American individualism represented an essential -- perhaps the essential -- difference between the Old and New Worlds, and he was far from the only observer to acknowledge the individualistic strain in the American character. Writing a century and a half after de Tocqueville, Robert Bellah and his colleagues (1985) argue that individualism, of one type or another, still provides the key to understanding what is essentially American.
The question, of course, is what type? Independence of action and thought is one thing, isolation and egoism something else again. Yet American individualism has always contained elements of both. Nowhere, perhaps, are the two edges of the sword expressed more clearly than in Emerson's Self-Reliance. What most of us remember from Emerson are his aphoristic exaltations of the virtues of uncensored honesty and free thought -- "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds;" "To be great is to be misunderstood;" "Insist on yourself, never imitate." Indeed, only Shakespeare occupies more space in Bartlett's Quotations.
What we forget is the down side of all this celebration of self, Emerson's callous rejection of the notion of any connection to the Other: "(D)o not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor?" Thus, even as American individualism and its cousin traits -- practicality, ingenuity, self-confidence -- have brought us prosperity (including the technology we're using right now), so too has it created, tolerated, and perpetuated poverty, racism, sexism, and, perhaps more than anything, self-indulgence. The same individualism -- the same dams, actually -- brought electricity to our homes but at the same time brought about the utter domestication by concrete of the Columbia -- the wild, spectacular, and to American Indians, sacred, Great River of the West (Dietrich, 1995).
To say, however, that American individualism is paradoxical, or that it is as much myth as reality, or that it has a mean side, does not erase its importance. The Marlboro Man exists, even if we can't imagine him sending flowers to his mother or entering a voting booth. As Stegner put it: "When youths run away from home, they don't run away to become farmers."
References:
Dietrich, W. (1995). Northwest Passage: The Great Columbia River. NY: Simon and Schuster.
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