Inhalationism

A famous and successful American optimist, Ronal Reagan, put his finger closer to the problem when he suggested there was little limit to what people could accomplish if government would get out of the way.

    [From Daniel Henninger’s column in today’s Wall Street Journal]

The doctor must have hit Mr. Henninger just below the knee with a little hammer because those words, above, are a kind of reflex. The reflex might be called the American Reflex; it produces contradictory statements by members of government. That famous and successful optimist, after all, was a President of the United States, a Governor of California, a labor union leader, and a secret informer employed by the FBI to pinpoint communist sympathizers. Three of these activities of his could be described as “government”; he certainly didn’t “get out of the way.” People who suffer from the American Reflex hunger and thirst for political power when they are out of office, and when in the office pretend to do away with the jobs that they are holding.

Days ago we were once more throwing up our hands over some other, earlier instance of the American Reflex. “Odd, when you think of it,” I said. “America is the only country where this virulent hatred of any kind of collective activity, especially government, is taken for granted.” “Individualism,” Brigitte said.

Got to thinking about that. Individuality is a defining characteristic of humans. Humans only? No. It’s a feature of all living entities. Are the Japanese, Indians, Germans, Tibetans any less individual that we are? Isn’t it peculiar to single out this universal trait, common to all people all over the world as a distinguishing trait, a marker of American Exceptionalism? We all breathe. Then came the title of this post. Wouldn’t it be amusing if we worshipped breathing, instead of individuality? Then inhalationism would not have the ridiculous sound that it has.

Averagism

Herewith an addendum to my earlier “Elitism, Individualism” (two days ago). I did not manage to capture the feeling that served as the inspiration for that post. The feeling was something like this: “Odd that in a country where individualism is supposed to reign, elitism is roundly condemned. Shouldn’t elite achievement be prized instead? Isn’t that an implication of individualism.” I didn’t quite manage to say that. Much depends on precise definitions, and words like elitism and individualism thrive precisely because they’re handy labels. We read into them whatever we wish. Individualism is stretched to justify radical libertarianism at one end, free marketeering in the middle, and elitism as capitalist wealth at the other—but, in the last case, disguised using another word. Elitism is very suspect because it implies both gifts and unusual effort: natural endowments, social status at birth, and unusual abilities energetically developed. That flies in the face of individualism which, applied to the masses, is thought to mean that everybody is the same. The only activity that gets a pass is sports. There elites are fine and dandy. But it helps a little if the great athletic star started life in the slums and did not come from a wealthy family.

There ought to be a law. I propose it. Let all true individualists join me in getting it passed. It would outlaw the word “individualism” and all of its meaning in favor of “averagism.” As under the Nazis you had to prove that no Jewish blood tainted your line, so in our bright future, every person, before holding any job of worth, should be able to certify his or her absolutely average gifts and status. And those who don’t qualify? Well, we saw a lot of uninhabited little islands in the Florida Keys when we were down there. We should have a elite cleansing and make them live on those islands. Global Warming, as luck would have it, will cause them soon to be submerged.

Elitism, Individualism

Elitism has negative connotations in this supposedly individualistic society because the meaning of the word has changed to mean “people who exhibit privileges, wealth, and position they did not personally earn.” They started with a better hand than most—be that through family, genes, energy, smarts, whatever. The word’s origins are in selection, choice (the Latin eligere). Someone has chosen, elected, or picked out these people—presumably because of their emergent qualities. Using the original sense, all those who win elective office are members of an elite—but such is the onus of this word, candidates make utter fools of themselves trying to show that they’re just Average Joes.

Individualism, of course, derives from the concept of something that cannot be further divided; in practice it means that you can’t saw a person apart to make two. We might as well say human. But we enlarge and distort such words. We have humanism, for example, which asserts that the focus is on humans—rather than the cosmic arrangements of God. Therefore individualism means a focus on the individual rather than powerful collectives able to influence all kinds of human outcomes.

For this focus to work ideally—which it can only do in an impossible world—every baby born would have to be kept to an average achievement, intelligence, beauty, talent, etc. Kurt Vonnegut made fun of this in his wonderful story, “Harrison Bergeron”; it features a Handicapper General.

Elite or elites are the modern terms for aristocracy. That word for me has always had an un-erasable ambiguity. If by “rule” of the “best” we mean the genuinely best, it is laudable. If we means a controlling ruling class that maintains itself by privilege, force, and manipulation, it is problematical. The notion that people should be judged by what they achieve using whatever fortune dealt them is a bit too complicated for use in the Age of the Sound Byte. 

The Worship of Man

I return today to two of my early teachers, two cyclic historians, Toynbee and Sorokin. They observed astutely that when humanity abandons its transcendental focus (God, the universe, and everything) the object of human worship becomes humanity itself. Both of these men would have emphasized the word collective, as in “collective humanity.” Collective humanity needs a focus, as it were. Great secular ages sooner or later become imperial, and figures like pharaohs and emperors then emerge as handy symbols of secular worship. Hence, of course, conflicts flared up in late Roman times when Christians chose not to toss a bit of incense on the glowing coals in gestures of submission to the prevailing ideology.

What neither of these sages noted is the highly innovative character of American culture, and here, therefore, I hasten to provide a footnote to their wisdom. Our culture has discovered a wonderful new way of worshipping man. It arises from the insight that humanity may be worshipped in either of two ways: as a collective, which turns our transcendental longing into the worship of the state—or as an individual.

Now it turns out that capitalism is wonderfully suited as an all-purpose institutional structure for the worship of man as an individual. Back in the God-fearing days capitalism was condemned—to be sure under another name, usury. But functionally that label was correct. Later, as we began to hear only the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith, capitalism was reluctantly accepted as a device and instrument for social benefit, as in creating jobs, railroads, pipelines, trickle-down wealth, and the like. Now, finally, as the Individual starts to be capitalized, we are beginning to raise Capitalism itself to the status of a religion—as earlier we raised Communism to the same exalted status. But Communism was a foreign god, and we now praise Us for having managed to conquer it.

What tea leaves am I reading to reach these conclusions? Well, those left over after each gathering of the Tea Party. Those marked by the elevation of figures like Rand Paul. And by news, such as today’s, about “for-profit colleges.” For-profit prisons, for-profit hospitals, for-profit politicians. “I wonder,” Brigitte asked as we were chuckling over these matters over coffee. “Are there for-profit churches yet?” — “Yes,” I said. “The great mega churches with TV channels of their own. But they are legally not-for-profit. And rightly so. It would be sinful for them to pay taxes to the great evil one, the Collective Human of the State.”

Individualism

During one of our sun-room musings the other day, pondering the wonders of American life, Brigitte and I fell to talking about that strange growth, Individualism. We tried to remember if the concept, in any form at all, had ever even surfaced during our lives in Europe, but we failed to find even a trace of “individualism” in the common heritage that we’d absorbed through experience or upbringing. Meanwhile, doing some digging, I’ve come to understand why. We both grew up in environments largely dominated by Catholicism, she in Poland and I in Hungary. Her own background heritage was Lutheran with Catholic branches; mine the exact inverse of that. Furthermore, while the seeds of individualism were European, the living plant that they produced never took root as ideology in Germany, least of all in that form of it which is linked to property.

An interesting history. In a nutshell—but, mind you, this is my synthesis of it, so grain of salt—it is in part a secularization of the traditional concept of the inviolable, immortal soul, in part a reaction to a rising tide of socialism born in the wake of the French Revolution. My way of making sense of modernity is to see it as just that: the rediscovery of discarded spiritual values in a new and shiny secular form. But let me sketch the history.

The concept arose, ironically enough, from an upsurge of utopian socialist movements that followed the French Revolution, notably Owenism, a movement begun by the Welshman, Robert Owen (1771-1858). Another such was Saint-Simonianism, named after Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint Simon (1760-1825). Owenites applied the word pejoratively to their opponents. Thus where you find socialism, you find individualism. Scholars suspect that the usage originated in France, possibly used by Saint Simon’s followers. Now the Owenites believed in communal ownership of property whereas individualists did not. Hence individualism was apparently already born with the Sign of Satan, the dollar or the pound sign, on its forehead. Owenism left its mark in the United States as well, in New Harmony, founded in Indiana around 1824. This utopian community barely endured for two years.

The word soon acquired a positive and religious aura thanks to the efforts of Millenarians and Unitarians. The first category refers to diverse movements over time that have focused on the End Times, almost always imagining these to be right around the corner. One such figure was James Elishama Smith (1801-1857), also known as Shepherd Smith (he edited a journal called The Shepherd). Smith had what you might call a colorful career. He was a Millenarian minister, prolific journalist and writer. You might sample some of his thought by looking at his 1854 book, The Divine Drama here. He eventually turned socialist, translated Saint Simon, and edited an Owenite journal. Late in his life he discovered the “universal” qualities of individualism. Universalism, by the way, was another ideological flower of the nineteenth century—“enlightened” humanity’s efforts, meseems, to reinvent the divine. Characteristically (the man had a wide range) Smith also discovered that individualism favored the accumulation of wealth: blessed from two sides, in other words.

Later on William Maccall (1812-1888), a Unitarian minister, also laid down some universalist justifications for individualism in his book Elements of Individualism (1857). You might wish to look at that book here. He starts out by laying out thirty-three articles of faith, of which the first one is: “I believe that I am an Individual Man.” Here is his brief commentary on that article:

The inference from this is, that whatever else may be the accidents of my position or the peculiarities of my lot, whether I be Christian, or Jew, or Unitarian, or minister of the Gospel, or healthy or the contrary, or rich or poor, or fortunate or unfortunate, my highest and noblest characteristic is that of being an Individual.

Maccall’s articles nowhere link individualism to property ownership, wealth creation, or any subject of the sort. His aim, rather, is to support his belief “that the Unity of the Universe necessitates Infinite Multiformity in the Universe,” which is an odd sort of assertion unless, in pondering it, the notion arises that that New Age was striving to build a concept of God from the bottom up. And in that schemed individuality finds its supporting role.

Yes, an interesting history. Remembering the past—it comes naturally to people of our age—musing back, we searched for the “universal” message we receive as children from our parents and our teachers. It had a different flavor. It had its roots in the parable of the talents, by and large, an obligation to develop them, but always in the context of helping the community. There were no Hidden Hands anywhere in our upbringing, no talk about enlightened self-interest either. There was no spot where God was not. And we never needed preachers to tell us that we were individuals. That seemed sort of obvious.