Posted on 04/18/2002 8:01:57 PM PDT by PsyOp
LOL! I didn't think most people had attention spans that long.
I think it is a great idea. Perhaps, we can even introduce it to our public schools.
So do I, but we better not tell the NEA or they'll get Hillary to pass a law against it.
de Tocqueville's marvelous summary of America is entirely relevant today, no matter how tied his observations were to his purpose, to learn what went wrong in France. I think it ended up being, for him, a study of what went right in America.
His primary thesis and interest is the nature and workings of equality. In this he was as prescient as in any of his angles on America and Americans. He understood that the American experience was a test of the meaning and workings of equality, an insight conservatives must relearn and relearn. de Tocqueville teaches us that our very concept of society is based upon equality, which to modern conservatives is almost a dirty word. Certainly de Tocqueville warns of its dangers; more, he teaches us its tremendous graces.
To calm the jittery, I'll reprint one you drew from:
Men cannot become absolutely equal unless they are entirely free; and consequently equality, pushed to its furthest extent, may be confounded with freedom, yet there is good reason for distinguishing the one from the other. The taste which men have for liberty, and that which they feel for equality, are, in fact, two different things; and I am not afraid to add, that, amongst democratic nations, they are two unequal things.Less noted is how de Tocqueville predicted Readers Digest, the "how to" genre, and MTV...
They prefer books which may be easily procured, quickly read, and which require no learned researches to be understood. They ask for beauties self-proferred, ans easily enjoyed; above all, they must have waht is unexpected and new. Accustomed to the struggle, the crosses, and the monotony of practical life, they require strong and rapid emtoions, startling passages -- truths or errors, brilliant enough to rouse them up, and to plunge them at once, as if by violence, into the midst of the subject."and Star Wars...
We have also seen, that, amongst democratic nations, the sources of poetry are grand, but not abundant. They are soon exhausted: and poets, not finding the elements of the ideal in what is real and true, abandon them entirely and create monsters. I do not fear that the poetry of democratic nations will prove insipid, or that it will fly too near the ground; I rather apprehend that it will be forever losing itself in the clouds, and that it will range at last to purely imaginary regions. I fear that the productions of democratic poets may often be surcharged with immense nad incoherent imagery, with exaggerated descriptions and strange creations; and that the fantastic beins of their brain may sometimes make us regret the world of reality.All this from the simple insight into how men will behave and organize themselves when they consider themselves their fellows' equal.
I'll try to dig up an additional fave or two for ya over the Summer. Well, there's so much here! Many thanks.
Hello to you cc: bumpees!
PS to Huck: my kids and I started reading Tom Sawyer on our way over the River of Mud. We'll do Huck when we hit it on our way back.
I also show the predilection for strong and easily understandable concepts of right vs. wrong and good vs. evil).Ya!
If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to equality, but to the inequality of condition.Damn. He got not just 1860, but 1960.
Tocqueville's chapter "Why Great Revolutions Will Become More Rare" is worth consideration regarding the Civil War, as Tocqueville posits that democracies in which property is more evenly divided are less disposed for radical change:
They love change, but they dread revolution."See also:
"Thus, nations are less disposed to make revolutions in proportion as personal property is augmented and distributd amongst them, and as the number of those possessing it is increased."
From time to time, indeed, enterprising and ambitious men will arise in democratic communities, whose unbounded aspirations cannot be contented by following the beaten track. Such men like revolutions, and hail their approach; but they have great difficulty in bringing them about, unless extraordinary events come to their assitance. No man can struggle with advantage against the spirit of his age and country; and, however powerful he may be supposed to be, he will find it difficult to make his contemporaries share in feelings and opinions which are repugnant to all their feelings and desires.I wish I wrote that. (I told the story, anyway, from 1912).It is a mistake to believe that, when once the equality of condition has become the old and uncontested state of society, and has imparted its characteristics to the manners of a nation, men will easily allow themselves to be thrust into perilous risks by an imprudent leader or a bold innovator. Not indeed that they will resist him openly, by well-contrived schemes, or even by a premeditated plan of resistance. They will not struggle energetically against him, -- sometimes they will even applaud him; but they do not follow him. To his vehemence they secretly oppose their inertia, to his revolutionary tendencies their conservative interests, their homely tastes to his adventurous passions, their good sense to the flights of his genius, to his poetry their prose. With immense exertion he raises them for an instant, but they speedily escape from him, and fall back, as it were, by their own weight. He strains himself to rouse the indifferent and distracted multitude, and finds at last that he is reduced to impotence, not because he is conquered, but because he is alone.
I think I'll print it on a postcard and send it weekly to the Theodore Roosevelt Foundation.
Equality of condition does not of itself produce regularity of morals, but it unquestionably facilitates and increases it...Certainly our moral conceptions have changed (and dramatically), but whatever the current set the morals are strong and uniform, be it from the Bible Belt or Ivy League PC. That said, my stay here in San Francisco has led to some insight into the nature of social dissent, something my reading of de Tocqueville didn't uncover.[here, PsyOp, I'll extend a quotation you gave in the "Morality" section above...] Society is endangered, not by the great profligacy of a few, but by laxity of morals amongst all. In the eyes of a legislator, prostitution is less to be dreaded than intrigue...
The tumultuous and constantly harrassed life which equality makes men lead, not only distracts them from the passions of love, by denying them time to indulge it, but it diverts them from it by another more secret but more certain road. All men who live in democratic times more or less contact the ways of thinking of the manufacturing and trading classes; their minds take a serious, deliberate, and positive turn; they are apt to relinquish the ideal, in order to pursue some visible and proximate object, which appears to be the natural and necessary aim of their desires. Thus, the principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth."
I've been terrifically dissapointed by the underground crowd. I've not exactly lived with them, but we've made our treks through Haight-Ashbury (the kids like to lower the windows and crank out the B-52's "Planet Claire" as we cruise Haight Street), the Castro, and across the Bay to Berkeleyville. It all seems so normal. Even the crack house down the way is a bore, as are the new-agers with their incense and quartz pyramids, which has made for unfulfilling spectator sport. One gets used to the bums and the smells of their public humanity.
I don't want more from these people, and I'm glad not to be witness to a shootout, or a homeless rage, or a gay bath house. I've merely learned how dull they are. Today I was excited by one of the visitors from Planet Claire: unlike most, she was a pretty girl, nice clothes, nice walk, upright, firm and confident. Her red hair was perfectly cut, and her face perfectly blank. We watched her walk up Haight Street, turn a corner, then sit on the walk against a brick wall with legs stretched out like Raggedy Anne. Whatever her buzz or angst or fears, I saw none, and I wondered only how bored she must be. Absent the hair, she could have walked straight to my mother's dinner table.
Like the nose rings, the gay thing here is dreary at best. Diversity flags are more common than stop signs. Men holding hands are a laugh, or nothing at all. Gay is so normal its absence would shock. The only thing I learned new (and I've lived in Miami Beach, so I've seen it all), is that these people are supremely obsessed with sexuality, an infatuation that, like the flags, is so practiced it is merely banal.
Sex seems to be the only thing that defines the gay culture. Without it, there is no gay. De Tocqueville couldn't have predicted birth control, but had he known it he would have seen where it would go. On the same principle, he'd have explained away with a flipped hand that one or two percent of the populace that so demands to be different.
The dissent that is supposed to define this city means nothing. My dissapointment is that of the tourist: the exhibit was closed, the Colleseum was hidden beneath scaffolding, or McDonalds has taken over the Champs Elysee.
For my culture, and my country, I think I've learned a great lesson: the bums have plenty to eat. When I see a fresh bag of bread thrown in the park in their midst to feed the birds, I see that bums have emotions to spare for the birds. Then I see it everywhere: the new-agers get to the top of Mount Shasta on the back of OPEC (and they sleep in the latest tents courtesy of some new thread by Dupont); Haight Street is a parody of the parody it's always been, especially with the Ben & Jerry's at the corner, raking in middle class dough; and the gays don't like to be called gay anymore, for the word has turned drab ("daddy" or some other thing, I read in the paper here, cuts better).
You see, life is way normal here in San Francisco.
Thank God there haven't been any earthquakes the last two weeks.
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'Nuff of that diverson. Back, then, to Mr. d T.
One truly lovel section regards the family. De Tocqueville saw that equality would extend to children and influence the family in a magnificent way:
"I think that, in proportion as manners and laws become more democratic, the relation of father and son becomes more intimate and more affectionate; rules and authority are less talked of, confidence and tenderness are oftentimes increased, and it would seem that the natural bond is drawn closer in proportion as the social bond is loosened."or this:In a democratic family, the father exercises no other power than that which is granted to the affection and the experience of age; his orders would perhaps be disobeyed, but his advice is for the most part authoritative. Though he be not hedged in with ceremonial respect, his sons at least accost him with confidence; they have no settled form of addressing him, but they speak to him constantly, and are ready to consult him every day; the master and the constituted ruler have vanished; the father remains."
"Democracy loosens social ties, but tightens natural ones; it brings kindred more closely together, whilst it throws citizens more apart.As for our daughters, he noted,
I have been frequently surprised, and almost frightened at the singular address and happy boldness with which young women in America contrive to manage their thoughts and their language, amidst all the difficulties of free conversation..."[I shall make my daughter read this on her 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st... birthday]The Americans... have found out that, in a democracy, the independence of individuals cannot fail to be very great, youth premature, tastes ill-restrained, customs fleeting, public opinion often unsettled and powerless, paternal authority weak, and marital authority contested. Under these circumstances, believing that they had little chance of repressing in women the most vehement passions of the human heart, they held that the surer way [of raising their daughters] was to teach her the art of combatting those passions for herself. As they could not prevent her virtue from being exposed to frequent danger, they determined that she should know how best to defend it; and more reliance was placed on the free vigor of her will than on safeguards which have been shaken or overthrown. Instead then of inculcating mistrust of herself, they constantly seek to enhance her confidence in her own strength of character. As it is neither possible nor desirable to keep a young woman in perpetual and complete ignorance, they hasten to give her a precocious knowledge on all subjects. Far from hiding the corruptions of the world from her, they prefer that she should see them at once, and train herself to shun them; and they hold it of more importance to protect her conduct, than to be over-scrupulous of the innocence of her thoughts."
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Best to all, and a wonderful rest of the summer. We're heading back East now, via the northern route, glorious Maine the destination.
-Nicollo
"Democracy loosens social ties, but tightens natural ones; it brings kindred more closely together, whilst it throws citizens more apart.
This was probably true of 18th and early 19th century rural America, though I suspect it wasn't so much political democracy as the middle class way of life that brought families closer together. With the rise of cities, automobiles, electric lighting, movies, television and social security things have changed radically, pulling families further apart.
The tumultuous and constantly harrassed life which equality makes men lead, not only distracts them from the passions of love, by denying them time to indulge it, but it diverts them from it by another more secret but more certain road.
D.H. Lawrence said as much almost a century later. He'd have argued that our present affluence and leisure haven't made things any better.
Adolescent rebellion of the sort you describe probably wasn't present so much in the early days of the Republic. Young people started work early and that's what their energy went into. But if we view a democratic society as one where inherited status doesn't prevail, and everyone has to create his own identity, you can see these adolescent rebellions as part of that process. The funny thing is, that youth rebellion is a mass phenomenon above all else -- also a consumerist phenomenon -- but it's something people go through on the way to an identity that they call their own, individual and unique. And there's even a certain crazy logic in that. There's a democratic mixture of longings for belonging and distinction behind the generational differences that people relish. Woodstock Nation or Lolapalooza Country is a way to banish disconnectedness and older class distinctions by creating new mass generational groups.
Here's a subtoquevillian article by Roger Ebert's sidekick Snobbery Flourishes at All Levels of Society on a familiar theme.
Someday, I'll read Tocqueville. With all that's changed in the world, so many of his opinions still hold water.
Our trip was marred by a schedule, so the U-turn, the impulsive and sudden right, and the slow road were denied us. That said, those diversions we entertained were rewarded with surprise and satisfaction at something new or unexpected.
America is a mightily twisted place, we found -- and entirely sane.
Do you remember the early 1980s French film, Voici l'Amerique, a KGB sponsored display of the American decline? Naked sky-diving weddings, worm-eaters, an electric chair, and what else I can't remember, which was to counter Big Macs and Levis. The effect was laughter not fear, the great American circus. (Speaking thereof, on our trip we traced family routes, including the hometown of my great-grandfather, a Denver attorney, who ran off with the circus whenever it came through town; he'd be found in Dallas or someplace working as barker for the bearded lady).
We saw similar shows, from Moby Dick's, a bar in San Francisco, to the Wilburton, Oklahoma, road shack, that advertised, "DVD, Cell Phones, Satelite Dishes, Bait," to airplanes, tractors, cars or other contraptions raised on a twenty-foot poles by the highways. It all makes sense, it follows logical and goal-oriented behavior.
We're a land of people each his brother's equal -- and looking to prove it. Only so can the deviant enjoy the opportunities and shadows of the pursuit of happiness. And only so can a society manage its deviants.
De Tocqueville predicted it:
The reproach I address to the principle of equality is not that it leads men away in the pursuit of forbidden enjoyments, but that it absorbs them wholly in the quest of those which are allowed. By these means, a kind of virtuous materialism may ultimately be established in the world, which would not corrupt, but enervate, the soul, and noiselessly unbend its springs of action.America is a horrible place for the discontented. The times dissent has arisen, when its hysteria has taken general proportions, those times are rare. America is otherwise a graveyard for radicals. At a 1907 Gridiron dinner, President Theodore Roosevelt shook his fist at J.P. Morgan and screamed his high-pitched wail that if his latest railroad reform wasn't enacted the mob would enforce it for him. One can imagine what went through Morgan's head: contempt, and, probably, regret for so many dollars spent keeping the very sane, very conservative (and Democratic) Judge Parker out of the White House. Or, Morgan might just have chuckled, knowing that Roosevelt was high on protest, and that saner voices would prevail.
The splintered democracies of Europe are suckers for the political wave. America, with its imperturbable middle, gently sways, giving here, taking there, letting the "springs of action" work their work. De Tocqueville meant something else, but we readily apply his principle to the fags, or the Latter Day Saints. Each is given enough rope but never too much, only enough to play, and always firmly bound to the dock. A society of equals respects displays of difference, for each wants so desperately to be unique, all the while pursuing the same.
And so I have learned this Summer from the Marquis and from our travels that we are all miserably the same.
On the tail-end of this trip, I sat happily, one arm leading to wine, the other spread across a fine cloth, before a Cezanne and a Franz Marc, both museum quality and gorgeous, and I listened to their owner explain how little the psychic value of international bond trading. Nigeria finally defaulted, and he is poised to jump, looking at rewards I cannot comprehend. More important to him was that he made my daughter happy with a trip to Scotland a year ago. And if only he could write a book, he told me, he might feel like he created something of a tangible value.
I didn't bother to explain that his 24-hour work day, his gambles and skill at the silly and dangerous games of money are but another path to happiness, and if spent on making little girls happy and statues, Cezanne is just as dead.
My life seems simple and free to him, and enviable. It is, and I don't envy him, his house, or art collection; I pray that my countrymen always will, for this is what keeps America America, from San Francisco to Wilburton to New York: Alexis de T:
In olden society, everything was different; unity and uniformity were nowhere to be met with. In modern society, everything threatens to become so much alike, that the peculiar characteristics of each individual will soon be entirely lost in the general aspect of the world...And he concludes:The sentiment of ambition is universal, but the scope of ambition is seldom vast. Each individual stands apart in solitary weakness; but society at large is active, provident and powerful...
For myself, who now look back from this extreme limit of my task, and discover from afar, but at once, the various objects which have attracted my more attentive investigation upon my way, I am full of apprehensions and of hopes. I perceive mighty dangers which it is possible to ward off -- mighty evils which may be avoided or alleviated; and I cling with a firmer hold to the belief, that, for democratic nations to be virtuous and prosperous, they require but to will it.I am aware that many of my contemporaries maintain that nations are never their own masters here below, and that they necessarily obey some insurmountable and unintelligent power, arising from anterior events, from their race, or from the soil and climate of their country. Such principles are false and cowardly; such principles can never produce aught but feeble men and pusillanimous nations. Providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free. It is true, that around every man a fatal circle is traced, beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free; as it is with man, so with communities. The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.
"plus ça change..."Indeed, as Osama learned (his final thought) and Saddam shall re-learn once and for all,
"Reports of America's demise are greatly exaggerated".God bless America!
You correctly pointed to the dissasociations of modern life, how "With the rise of cities, automobiles, electric lighting, movies, television and social security things have changed radically, pulling families further apart."
I think this is exactly de T's point: "natural ties" are strengthened in a democracy, be it the nuclear family, similar-thinking fools on the internet, or idiots at the Lolapalooza, as you say. Perhaps "natural ties" leads us astray; sperm associations aside, instant communication allows idiots of similar stripes to pose in instant, similar idiocy.
Always love your commentary, so please say.
Whatever you may think of the politics of the Weekly Standard, they do an interesting job of the kind of cultural investigation that Tocqueville might smile at. David Brooks on Patio Man. And Christopher Caldwell (scroll down), picking up where Brooks leaves off.
The GI generation of the Forties and Fifties spent their time constructing an egalitarian, commercial suburban order, paving over things that stood in the way. Their children seem to have spent their time fleeing from that asphalt egalitarianism, but because we're already a mass society, it's hard to get away from the masses. We always brings them with us, in the form of -- ourselves. What the grandchildren will do is another thing and an interesting question.
Brooks and Caldwell say that gentrification has become a real plague. Once directed at poor urban neighborhoods, it now divides the country. A mob of rich nomads pick up all areas that haven't been paved over and "save" them from middle class sprawl by bringing a different, upscale form of uniformity, destroying the uniqueness that they claimed to value and preserve. How true the picture is, I don't know, but it's another fascinating example of how things work out differently in reality from people's intentions.
In reference to your comments: during the Cold War, American society was likened to a ballbearing rolling around in a wide groove, unstable, but also unlikely to jump the groove. Communist societies were compared to the same ballbearing sitting in a single, narrow hole or notch, rigidly stable for long periods, but likely to be knocked out when a real shock happens. That turned out to be prophetic.
It's also been said that "space" has been the great American solution. While Europeans work out comprehensive "plans" for society as a whole, Americans allow different societies to grow up in different cities or parts of the country and hope that they'll be able to live together. Indeed, space is freedom. Europeans would object that civilities can provide this sort of "space" in a small area, and incivility reduce freedom in even the greatest realm. The premise behind the Culture Wars -- and of course the Civil War -- was that different groups wouldn't be able to get along. But it looks like we are doing just that, perhaps because we do accept some common framework of ideas in spite of all our differences.
The idea of "natural ties" is a stimulating one. In our own day it sometimes looks like the affinities uniting this or that clique or generation are stronger or more natural than the ties which bind families together. What you say about generational ties versus family ties is echoed in the history of our constitutional system. The same proximity, commonality of interest, and affections, which made the family paramount, were presumed to make our cities, towns and states natural communities. Information technologies bring together people with the same interests from different parts of the country together to the point where we may have more in common with someone 3000 miles away than with other members of our "natural community."
If you have time, you might check out our generation's answer to Tocqueville.
Brooks & Caldwell get me laughing on the looks at Mesa, AZ, Henderson, NV, Bethesda, MD (Brooks), Gaithersburg, MD, and the North Shore (Caldwell). I know these places, especially Bethesda, whose now posh streets I once roamed with fellow adolescent fools looking for something to break. I was in college when Bethesda started its ascent to Caldwell's hell, "restaurants with subtitles" and a hometown you won't recognize, and I saw then, as now, that I wished I'd had Sugar Ray Leonard's money and advisers: 'twas a good time to buy.
I spent a couple days in Phoenix on this summer trip; it looks distressingly like Dade County, although I can't figure where all the water comes from (a whole 'nuther matter, eh?). Had that been my only view of Phoenix, driving around, checking out the Capitol, Mesa, & Scottsdale (speaking of: anyone seen "O.C. & Stiggs""? -- still the greatest movie of the post-Animal House period) I'd never understand it. To know Phoenix is to see it from the air (and I'm still convinced that PHX airport has worlds longest taxiing ramps). Btw, Phoenix has a most apt name.
Henderson, NV: best I can tell it's a city of fallen Mormans, I mean the border is smack downtown; the drunken need merely stumble over the line. Perhaps they trip on it. We didn't stop, and I wish we had, but we were late to arrive to Salt Lake, and the cross winds were blowing us all over the desert. Oh, and speaking of managing dissent and creating "space," Utah has done a masterful job of channelling sin into small pockets, like the "private clubs" one "joins" for a drink, and, I'm thinking, Henderson, Nevada.
I wonder when the sprawl crawls across the desert to Lovelock, NV? Hopefully not too soon, for it's a charming place, what with the solitary Exxon with one pump and three slot machines. The unusually pretty girl at the counter gave me a marvelous, toothless smile that I'll never forget. Indeed, I may not ever get over it.
As bad as is the sprawl, and although there's not much room left in the Phoenix valley, there's plenty of room for expansion around Lovelock, Nevada. I'd add most of PA, especially Chester, which could use some serious gentrification.
I get some bad nostalgia, and sad, in places like Chester, or Poughkipsie, NY. Americans just move on, leaving the helpless behind. And so it must be. Tocqueville wrote,
It seldom happens that an American farmer settles for good upon the land which he occupies: especially in the districts of the far West, he brings land into tillage in order to sell it again, and not to farm it. He builds a farm-house on the speculation, that... a good price may be obtained for it.Caldwell is wrong about the North Shore. After the Depression and the War and the Income Tax, his kind, the working class, the Boston teachers and professionals took the North Shore from previous invadors who earlier shocked Bostonians the way Caldwell is shocked today. When Henry Clay Frick (and other new-money, "western" undesirables) built his summer palace the turn-of-the-century (1900s) Brahmins shuddered. They also came running whenever he blew a whistle.
Today's Bethesda makes me laugh. (Gaithersburg makes me cry). I can hardly imagine the torture that poor fool Brooks quoted who left Bethesda because it's become too sophisticated. My, my. Bethesda, Maryland, home of the Davis farm, the man who saw the expanding metropolis and -- such a nice man -- gave the county land for a high school and a library. He put the Montgomery Mall next door. His farm is today HQ for Martin-Marrietta and Marriott, among the paying tenants.
I marvel at the nation's concrete, and, coming off this tour, I'm amazed how much more room for it there yet is. If I could predict anything, it'd be that the expansion will return inward as inner suburbia deteriorates. I'm scanning Tocqueville now for advice, and I don't find anything other than the generally good lesson that whatever it'll be, it'll be because someone's making a buck. Tocqueville saw it all, long before anyone realized the business of America is business:
I believe that ambitious men in democracies are less engrossed than any others with the interests and judgment of posterity; the present moment engages and absorbs them. They are more apt to complete a number of undertakings with rapidity, than to raise lasting monuments fo their achievements; and they care much more for success than for fame. What they most ask of men is obedience, what they most covet is empire.Oh: he also predicted the McMansion. He continues:
Their manners have, in almost all cases, remained below their station; the consequence is, that they frequently carry low tastes into their extraordinary fortunes, and that they seem to have acquired the supreme power only to minister to their coarse or paltry pleasures.
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