Week Two – 2A

“The Historical Conversation”

Reading: Chapter 2 of Habits,

Self vs. SocietyDid the Puritans emphasise self-reliance?

American character / ideals

‘self-reliance’, independence, and the freedom to determine and direct one’s own

resources

These are central to ‘American’ values

They descend from the Puritans.

Is this what the Puritans were really saying?

Left England b/c unhappy with the ‘Roman’ influences in the Church of England and the corruption in government

The Puritan experiment in America would stand as an example that would help reform the English Church (and the world):

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” – “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630)

Their example would be what helped them to “stay connected” to their society back in England. It wasn’t meant as an ESCAPE!

John Winthrop (1587-1649)Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company

“[We must] “entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities … we must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labour and suffer together, always having before our eyes … our Community as members of the same Body.”

“A Model of Christian Charity”(1630)

Self-reliance?

The “social contract” In exchange for certain

protections from the government,

individuals surrender some of their freedom.

America: founded on a promise The architects of the

Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were influenced by the Enlightenment thought that a republic is best founded on the idea of social contract between the government and the people.

In America, this “social contract” often slips back into the minds of the people as a promise, a hope.

Puritans covenant w/ God, not Man

We have to look after each other

“every man [is to] afford his help to another in every want or distress.”

“… he that gives to the poor, lends to the Lord …”

“we must love one another with a pure heart fervently, we must bear one another’s burdens.”

[Winthrop warns against the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest] Invoking the Gospel, Matthew: 6:19:

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth.”

From Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity”

Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop.

We have to caricature the Puritans in order to feel comfortable in their presence. They found answers to some human problems that we would rather forget. Their very existence is therefore an affront, a challenge to our moral complacency; and the easiest way to meet the challenge is to distort it into absurdity, turn the challengers into fanatics.

(p. 13)

Winthrop’s sermon has been invoked by John Adams, JFK, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin,

Barack Obama.

Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)

“The Republican Party “must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than insuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society.

… Then with God’s help we shall indeed be as a city upon a hill with the eyes of all people upon us.”

“Liberty can be measured by how much freedom Americans have to make their own decisions – even their mistakes.”

America: founded on documents

“Take away the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and perhaps various public speeches that lie behind those documents or pass them on, and as a nation you have little more than a collection of buildings and people who have no special reason to speak to each other, and nothing to say.”

(Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice 10)

Do you need a B R E A K?

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

author of the Declaration of Independence

A republic is based on active citizenship.

He designed a system of local government in which “wards” of 100 citizens would be self-ruling “small republics.”

“Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself.”

(Qtd in Bellah et al, 31)

“our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless.” [If people forgot themselves] “in the sole faculty of making money, the future of the republic was bleak and tyranny would not be far away.”

Benjamin Franklin (1760-1790)

His Autobiography of 1791 and the maxims contained in his Poor Richard’s Almanack establish the model of the “self-made” man.

“… the most important thing about America: the chance for the individual to get ahead on his own initiative” (Bellah et al, 33)

“God helps those who help themselves.” - From “The Way to Wealth”, 517)

"All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition.  He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among the Savages.  He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club to the Support of it.“

Ben Franklin, “Private Property Is a Creature of Society, November 1789” Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, Norton Critical Edition (1986),

221

Franklin believed prosperous men had an obligation to give back to society:

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813)

The notion of the self-interested individual was celebrated in Letters from an American Farmer (1782)“Here the rewards of his

industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his

labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest” (Qtd in

Bellah, 35)

“We are all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained, because each person works for

himself.” (Qtd in Bellah, 36)

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

Democracy in America (1835 & 1840) examined the unique influence democracy had on people.

Individualism thrived particularly in America and he wondered if that was due to the character of the people or the system of government – democracy.

He saw unbridled individualism as a threat to society.

Yet the worst effects of too much individualism were mitigated by certain “habits of the heart” and through participation in social and public associations. He called this “self-interest rightly understood.”

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Walt Whitman, embodied “expressive individualism.”

“For Whitman success had little to do with material acquisition. A life rich in experience, open to all kinds of people, luxuriating in the sensual as well as the intellectual, above all a life of strong

feeling, was what he perceived as a successful life … Freedom to Whitman was above all the freedom to express oneself …”

(Bellah et al, 34)

Song of Myself (1855)“I celebrate myself, and sing

myself, ...”

the great poet of democracy

Shifts to

“... Working life became more specialized and its organization tighter …Domesticity, love and intimacy increasingly became ‘havens’ against the competitive culture of work … [A]ll this [was]in strong contrast to ... the often-sentimentalized family farm [in which] these functions had only indistinct boundaries”

(Bellah et al, 43, 44)

Herbert Hoover (1874-1964), 31st US President (1929-1933)

the Progressive Era

Herbert Hoover’s American Individualism (1922) provided a critique of traditionally understood individualism and argued for the need for

“certain restrictions on the strong and the dominant.”

Charles Beard (1874-1964) historian

was known for studies such as

An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913)Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915)The Economic Basis of Politics (1922)The Rise of American Civilization (1927)

“Myth of Rugged American Individualism” (1931) revised traditional narratives that Americans’ success was due to self-reliance and argued instead that the State had always been involved in supporting industrial and commercial ventures.

John Dewey (1859-1952)

A philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer in the Progressive era.

Individualism Old and New (1930)

People who drew upon older notions of individualism to justify the concentration wealth of at the top of society were not fit for the present age.

Equally, the ‘losers’ in the way wealth had been distributed in the modern age were inappropriately nostalgic – he calls them vain – when they long for an earlier age that had not been so mechanized by science.

A NEW form of individualism was required: individuality could only be come into being where connections among and within the broader collective were recognized.

John Dewey (1859-1952)

[In his essay “Individuality Today,” Dewey quotes Emerson:

“The same Emerson who said that ‘society is everywhere in conspiracy against its members,’ also said, and in the same essay, ‘accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.’”

Dewey emphasised that “disconnection” from events and society “conspire[s] against individuality.”

… But the ‘connection of events,’ and ‘the society of your contemporaries’ as formed of multiple and moving associations, are the only means by which the possibilities of individuality can be realized.”

“Individuality Today,” in The Political Writings of John Dewey. Ed Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro. p. 87]

The Progressive Era & the New Deal’s Optimism toward Mass Man

Thomas Hart Benton. City Activities with Subway. (1931) The New School for Social Research, NY.

John Stewart Curry’s Baptism in Kansas, 1928.

William Gropper, Automobile Industry, 1940-1, Mural in the Northwest Post Station, Detroit.

“Intellectuals were being acknowledged as a working part of the nation, not individually but collectively. This was new and it communicated something of the American tradition that had never been congenial to artists before

– the get-together, corn-husking democracy

of mutual help.”

Jacques Barzun, “Our Country and Our Culture,” Partisan Review 14.4 (July-August 1952): 424-431,

426.

But after WWII, people grew skeptical of movements that involved ‘Mass Man’ and a shift took place back towards the Individual

No. 5 (1948 byJackson Pollack)

Jackson Pollack, the artist working in his studio, on his own.

Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

Author of The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957).

Man should not be forced into charity by some misplaced sense of collective guilt.

Laissez-faire capitalism is the best way to assure individual freedom.

“Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights.”

- The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), p. 69

Baby Boomers

• Anyone born in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s.

• Raised to put “duty” ahead of personal gratification.

However, the1950’s in particular were experienced by many as an oppressive “age of conformity.”

Late 1960s & 1970s

During and post Vietnam, the cultural revolution and the self-actualization movements caused people to focus on themselves again and drop-out of civic engagement.

1980s The 1980s was an era dominated by Wall St, Young Urban Professionals (YUPPIES) and withdrawal of State supports for service – aka, ‘Privitization.’

Some say that self-preoccupation has bred a cruel narcissism.

Where are we today?