American Individualism – Yes, Really

We're not the big individualists – Really?

While doing my due diligence in preparation for last week's post, Enemies Of The American Revolution, I came across an article from the Boston Globe that in turn drew from a piece written by Claude S. Fischer, author of the book Made In America and a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He in turn drew heavily from a study done by the International Social Survey Programme. The gist of both Fischer's piece and its legacy piece in the Boston Globe is that Americans aren't more individualistic than any other culture in the western world.

My studies in Political Geography beg to differ with this conclusion, but it's not the conclusion that inspired my response here. It's how the conclusion was drawn. The conclusion depended heavily on two things, an impractical definition of individualism and questions in a survey based largely on that impracticality.

[If the collective of the moment is the group that happens to occupy a sinking ship's life boat, you join them, but apparently not Fischer's understanding of Ralph Waldo Emerson.]

I'll share the questions later, but for now it's important to explain what I mean by an impractical definition of individualism. Fischer defines individualism by quoting Emerson's Self-Reliance (1841) where he wrote, “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.” “I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. . . . I will do strongly . . . whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints.” He then concludes, “Emerson rejected any suggestion that the individual submit him- or herself to the control or even the influence of any group or its traditions.” This definition however has huge problems if we are to take individualism seriously.

Mark Elliot, one of the nation's leading scholars in the area of Soviet Studies, while Professor of History at Asbury University, once explained a similar problem he saw with Nazism. It can't be a true ism if it's defined primarily by what it's against, communism and influences of foreign and extra-cultural origins. For if an ism is defined by what it's against and not by what it's for, it is then essentially controlled by its enemies. This Emersonian definition leaves individualism in just such a state. It makes it reactionary and hardly an ism at all.

Besides making it reactionary, it also makes it impractical, more like a prejudice than an actual functional approach to life and social policy. No rational person would responsibly be an individualist if that's its definition. If the collective of the moment is the group that happens to occupy a sinking ship's life boat, you join them, but apparently not Fischer's understanding of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Fischer's Ralph would go down with the ship as a matter of his individualistic principal, or maybe he would never have gotten on the ship in the first place, for the same irrational principal.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting Fischer has Emerson wrong. It really doesn't matter if he does or not. What matters is he's using a definition of individualism that is irrelevant unless one assumes individualism to be less than rational.

Allow me to provide a definition that respects the intellect and reasoning of those who are individualists.

Individualism*

• a belief that the individual (third person) is more important than any collective, individual (first or second person), ideal, cause, or human (inevitably flawed) understanding of the divine.
• a belief that manifests itself in a high respect for individual liberty and dignity.

Now let's look at some of the questions from the International Social Survey Programme.

Question – “In general, would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law?”

Result – Americans were the most likely to believe they should obey the law even if the law was wrong, something Fischer believed was antithetical to individualism.

A sound conclusion using the Emersonian definition but not when allowing individualism to be be a true rational ism. Having "a nation of laws, not of men", as is attributed to John Adams, protects the individual from its two greatest threats, unlimited political power in the hands of collectives and other individuals. For laws, once established, are impartial and their restrictive effects can almost always be avoided**, but empowered collectives and individuals can respond to every effort to evade their tyranny. Thus a well thought individualist appreciates the value of laws and how even bad ones can often be better tolerated than people acting solely on their own consciences. In the United States we change or eliminate bad laws, and defying them is an act of absolute last resort. This is precisely for the sake of the individual.

Question – “ Right or wrong should be a matter of personal conscience,”

Result – Only Norwegians were more likely to say this statement is wrong than were Americans. Once again this fit Fischer's conclusion if going by, what I consider to be an impractical and irrelevant definition of individualism. The question of how we determine what is right and what is wrong is an intellectual can of worms, but you can't revere the individual above all human things unless you believe there are in fact things bigger than us all. It is logically consistent with individualism to believe there is a sense of oughtness, yes even perhaps a source, that transcends all of us. What is it otherwise that tells us the individual is important to any degree? Individualism, whether it be Emersonian or Fontaignian depends on a universal sense of oughtness for its very existence. It should be a matter of course that individualists would believe right and wrong is definitely not a matter of personal conscience. We should be free to live by our own understanding of right and wrong, but if that understanding is wrong, we are still wrong.

Question – “People should support their country even if the country is in the wrong,”

Result – Once again Americans were most likely to answer this in a way that supports Fischer's conclusion based on his Emersonian definition of individualism. Another example of Fischer's Ralph going down with a sinking ship in order to avoid joining a collective on a lifeboat, that is individualism as a powerful ruling prejudice but not a true ism.

At the core of any practical individualism, according to our nation's founders, are the rights to life, liberty, and private property, and these rights usually do porly in the absence of civil order. Look at almost any riot and you will see that not only do protections for core individual rights such as life, liberty, and property go away but they are attacked. Property gets stolen, damaged, and destroyed. And individual liberty only exists at the mercy of the mob or at the very least their lack of notice that you have it.

Individualism is incompatible with civil disorder and thus it must make a calculated deal with governance where government is given just enough power to keep relative order and no more if at all possible. The three basic rights of life, liberty, and property are interdependent and inseparable***, and the protection of private property rights is the most common role of government as an effective support of individualism. From this it follows that a government must establish and maintain a jurisdiction over the areas where private property is owned and may come to be owned. That, on the largest scale, is a nation. If a nation loses or has its jurisdiction compromised, it's ability to protect property is also diminished.

It logically follows that even when one's country is in the wrong, it is often preferable to support it than to risk its sovereignty. This isn't just a selfish preference, as much as it may sound that way to some. If forces external to any nation are allowed as a matter of some international policy to compromise its sovereignty, that policy then logically supersedes private property rights. Thus “my country right or wrong” is more than just a nationalist slogan, but a rational individualist one as well.

Question – “Even when there are no children, a married couple should stay together even if they don’t get along”

Result – Emersonian individualism is once again defied by a greater proportion of the Americans polled than those in most other western nations. How can Americans being more loyal to marriage be in any way consistent with them being more individualistic? No need for a long discussion here. It was answered above. Marriage is a legal contract and we are a nation of laws to the benefit of the individual. Also individualism is not selfishism. There are things bigger than all of us and the individual (third person) is one of them.

Question – “a married person having sexual relations with someone other than his or her husband or wife” is “always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all.”

Result – This is the point when if this were a lecture I'd be noting the yawns from my students and feeling for them. What does the marriage contract say? How do we feel about laws and a sense of oughtness? I think we've got it now.

Conclusion

From a rational point of view individualism is not about ignoring or defying all sources of information, but about considering as many as is reasonable and practical, and then arriving at one's own reasoned conclusions without automatic deference to recognized experts. As much as many in academia may accredit what I call the Emersonian definition as valid, it functions to do little more than try to make individualism rationally and responsibly irrelevant, by circular logic. Of course if you define something in a way that makes it irrelevant it will be irrelevant. It is convenient for its critics that one recognized as a proponent of individualism, one Ralph Waldo Emerson, should offer up such a definition, but well recognized or not, if his definition destroys his own cause, what use is it to a fair discussion with those who don't accept it that definition?

Now I have used Karl Marx's own statements to demonstrate what I believe to be communism's fatal flaws, but if any communist insists as I do about Emerson, that Marx was wrong, I wont pretend his reasoning must live or die by Marx's words. No one is a prisoner to someone else's words, as much as academia tries to make it so.  We all must answer to reality, no matter what words are said or unsaid.

So are Americans typically more individualistic than Europeans? I can't answer that for sure. Perhaps we Americans take what the Bill of Rights have served to guarantee us for granted, perhaps we don't, but there is nothing in this survey to suggest anything other than that many in academic realms don't really understand what individualism is. Students beware!