Survivor!

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Tue Oct 24 01:13:26 PDT 2000


On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:


> >>>My impression is that individualism was a relatively marginal ideology
> >>>until the government-sponsored explosion of the suburban sprawl in 1950s.
> >>
> >>Depends on what you mean by individualism? Ever read any of the 19th
>
> I mean widely spread. No doubt, individualistic ideologies could be found
> among intellectual elites. But most immigrants to this country were
> anything but intellectual elites. In all likelihood, they were European or
> Asian peasants or workers whose "native" cultures strongly emphasized
> social solidarity ties. They never heard of Emerson or the Whigs - let
> alone consciously following their counsel. So if that ideology becames
> widely spread - we need to look for the vectors of that dissemination.
> Immaculate intellectual conception does not sound very convincing.

A distinctive American individualism has been here since the begining of the republic, bound up, as Jacob pinpointed, with the vocabulary of rights. And it was popular and widespread -- but to see the evidence of it, you need to go through the archives and read a lot of handbills and pamphlets. Daniel T. Rodgers did an excellent job of doing the necessary research to make this case in his 1987 book _Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence_. The first, and far and away the best, essay is the first one, on rights. Here's an except from a contemporary review that sums up his argument.

<quote>

The chapter entitled "Natural Rights" is a clear contribution to the debate about "civic republicanism." And on a broader view, it contributes an historical explanation for where the unique "rights culture" in America comes from. Rodgers traces a sutle inflection that the phrase "natural rights" underwent in the period 1765-1776. In the beginning, "natural" was just an adjective that could be stuck onto almost any assertion to give it added emphasis; it was added to "rights" as well during the pre-revolutionary agitation. There was also a second meaning of the phrase available which stemmed from the way the word was taught in the colonial colleges. There, "natural rights" referred to the rules God had etched in Nature. The pamphleteers and declaration writers availed themselves of this usage as well, insisting that the colonialists could claim rights that had not been written down. But while this "natural law" line of reasoning allowed a little more maneuvering space, it still would not justify revolution. Natural Law was more often used to justify kings. This sort of Natural Rights reasoning might be stretched to justify claims of lapsed custom. But for claims of custom to provide a precedent justifying revolution, what was necessary was at least a mythical time when there were no kings. Insurgents in Britain drew time and time again upon their "Ancient Constitution." In America, when the agitators reached back for precendents, in the place where the Ancient Constitution should have been but was not, they began to find a mythical "state of nature."

As Rodgers puts it, "Thomas Paine, long after the fact, set down the underlying dynamic of the argument. 'The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the intermediate stages of a hundred or a thousand years, and produce what was then done as a rule for the present day.' But each precedent had its forerunner to contradict it. 'It is authority against authority all the way till we come to the divine origin of the rights of man at the creation. Here our inquiries find a resting-place, and our reason finds a home.'" (p. 56-67)

But that was in 1791. Rodgers' accomplishment is to show almost the exact moment in time when this peculiar, pre-political and powerful notion of rights came into being in the penumbra of arguments made in speeches and handbills and declarations. It took shape in half-light, because in many ways it was a wacky notion even in the beginning. Certainly Rousseau and Locke did not think one could actually return to a state of nature. And neither did these men, at least up front. Yet during this crucial period there were, with increasing frequency, statements like the following, pushed through at a Boston Town meeting in 1772 by Samuel Adams, to the effect that "All Men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they please." (p.55) It was not a thesis sentence, and it was not even so much a proposition as it was a marriage in rhetoric of a famous phrase and a background picture. In the heat of debate, the vast wilderness of America seemed to be close enough to a State of Nature that, if Union with Britina were dissovled, the settlers would be in a "state of nature" until they formed a new nation. The idea of the fictitious contract was later married in their minds to an historical act, when "we the people, in order to form a more perfect union" actually got together and formed a government and society where once there was none.

Today, when people avail themselves of the language of rights to put forth demands that have previously had no place in American law, they do not use the adjective "natural." And yet, when one considers how much the 18th century use of "nature" implied God as creator and ultimate judge, one can still hear echoes of that usage today. When my father raged about some infamous act of government, he would often go on about how his "god-given rights" were being trampled upon, usually the most sacrosanct ones, the right to be left alone and keep his money. But my father is, if not fully an atheist, still deeply suspicious of institutional religion. It just never occurred to him, or me, that "god-given rights" had anything to do with God. They were simply his due inheritance as a naturalized American.

Rodgers argues convincingly against the common notion that Americans simply imported our ideas of rights, like our ideas of everything else, from overseas. He highlights the deviances between the American way of thinking and that of Locke and Rousseau, and documents how state of nature reasoning had been falling into suspicion an ddiscuse in Britian for soem time before it was reborn in America. So what we have in the end is a carefully documented account of the birth of a national myth in real time.

<end quote>

As to how this vocabulary persisted to be picked up by new generations of immigrants, the reviewer goes on to say:

<quote>

The hypothesis that emerges from this book is that the most enduring words, the keywords, were originally slogans that were thrown into the poltical mix at crucial moments of the nation's history, and which proved successful in mobilizing people. . . The mechanics of handing down keywords is not that mysterious. If we focus only on the big breakthroughs, when the meanings of key political terms are changed, then it might seem mysterious how the words could endure for decades or centuries thereafter. But such terms are handed down like most social reproduction, encoded and re-encoded in the mundane and the ritual. The key ritual for political keywords is the campaign. There's a campaign every year, and there's a presidential campaign every four years. People don't have to reach into the murky collective unconscious to remember the words that rang true last campaign; they are ready to hand, year after year, and the majority are always hardy perennials. And each campaign some words go up in stock, and some words go down. So when we see them being put to radically new ends 100 years later, it is not a mystery that they were available. They are handed down by visible processes linking the spoken to the heard, like a centuries-long game of telephone.

<endquote>

Michael __________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com



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