....Read Tocqueville — and James Poulos
Detail of portrait
of Alexis de Tocqueville by Théodore Chassériau, 1901 (Library of
Congress)
We are not merely
individuals. We’re also relational beings, in need of love and
friendship.
We’re uploading
more and more of our lives in the digital clouds and, as we do so,
many of us are learning, at various speeds and with various degrees
of horror, the extent to which we are interchangeable and
individually insignificant. We seek friendship and recognition
online, only to be told in effect that we’re reducible to numbers,
useful primarily for making other people’s “content” popular or
viral or trending. And we see without fail how opulent wealth or
orgiastic pleasure dominates digital visions of paradise. We
ourselves can never have that — but it’s always there,
tantalizing, especially as other people who otherwise are the same as
we are do have it and pretend to enjoy it tremendously.
Celebrity is there
to be had. Every day some new thing goes viral. Celebrity is being
newly created and celebrated all around us in the digital world.
Pre-teen kids who flaunt their shameless parents’ wealth to arouse
hatred and envy from the poorer majority are in on the game. Why not
you and me? We’re all the same, yet only a fickle few get most of
the attention, and the Internet is primed not only to create them but
to count just how popular any popular thing is — unlike you and me,
who are somehow condemned to unpopularity.
This is the
psychodrama of our times, and of course it hits the youngest the
worst. It’s worth considering that they, the new generation of
Americans, do not even have an experience of pre-digital life, which
most of us can still remember, at least if we try really hard. And it
is hard, because not to be on social media is to be left behind,
behind the times, out of whatever it is most of our peers are in.
So we should be
thinking hard about how to deal with this. Happily, we have a guide:
James Poulos, author of The Art of Being Free. He is as steeped in
Tocqueville, whose wisdom he wants to offer to a large American
audience, as in popular culture, which he often turns to in order to
find the experiences that we all share and that reveal that we are,
as a people, crazy — and for pretty good reasons.
We’re involved in
a unique historical change, which we all feel. The old order of
different social classes had the legitimacy of centuries of practice
and repetition and inheritance. That’s long dead. The new order,
where you have to make your own place, defend it, and not
infrequently change it — well, it’s just not clear how solid it
is or where it’s headed. We all know we’re not at the end of our
journey. Most of us therefore are committed to social and
technological change, but we’re deeply insecure about whether we’ll
ever get to the future we dimly imagine — and whether it will be
any good for us personally.
We’re pretty much
wired to want — to need new things. We certainly cannot bother to
waste time on old things, unless they come into fashion again and
become new! And at the same time we have no idea what new things, if
any, will prove lasting and worthwhile. We’re leaping into the
future because we feel we have no alternative. The world is changing
around us too fast for us to feel secure or reasonably well oriented,
and it’s filling up with opportunities for — fun, wealth, and
celebrity — that we cannot afford to miss, but that we also have no
idea how to gain.
Despite what our
progressives say, progress is uncertain and often scary. And despite
their hatred of inequality, equality scares us even more. Partly,
because we believe so deeply in it, we can hardly think of any
concept of justice different from equality, so we’re not prepared
for it to fail to make us happy and comfortable. Partly, however,
it’s because equality and change are together teaching us that
we’re all replaceable — that our communities, our jobs, and our
personal experience can all disappear or at least be weakened rather
suddenly.
Any number of things
that might prove catastrophic to any one of us personally would be
experienced as minor, if at all, by everyone else. That’s hard to
live with at any time, but especially when the experience is
vicarious, online, juxtaposed to massive wealth and opulent
pleasures.
This has been true
of America at least since Tocqueville toured the country almost 200
years ago, and the fear of equality and change has only increased
since then. With Millennials, we finally have the strange opportunity
to see a generation both experience and spectate their personal
insignificance and interchangeability in a high-tech environment,
beginning from childhood. Needless to say, they aren’t taking it
well. They’re wedded to tech, which now seems to mean strictly
Internet-based technology, because they want a future, but their
experience of the Internet-based future has not made them happy.
Millennials exhibit
our national problem in obvious but neglected terms. It’s not
poverty, nuclear war, illegal immigration, or foreign enemies
sabotaging our elections. It’s insecurity. Not poverty — but
insecurity, the mundane, everyday, unpredictable but inevitable
experience that our standard of living, our status, even our
expectations are not firmly grounded, nor are our imaginations
reliable. They can, instead, be shaken by any kind of natural or
social accident. What’s worse, any number of things that might
prove catastrophic to any one of us personally would be experienced
as minor, if at all, by everyone else. That’s hard to live with at
any time, but especially when the experience is vicarious, online,
and juxtaposed to the massive wealth and opulent pleasures the
visions of which are never more than a few clicks away.
Social rejection,
humiliation, and the fear, for most of us, that individualism really
means anonymity, that nobody cares about us personally as they do
about celebrities— this takes new forms for Millennials. It takes
the form of sending a Facebook message (for those old and uncool
enough to still use Facebook) or a WhatsApp text and seeing that it
was received, even read, but not getting an answer. Kids have anxiety
attacks over such trivial things every day across the fruited plains.
That’s the ground
level of the crisis we’re facing. This is what we have to deal with
to learn again that we are not merely individuals but are also
relational beings, in need of the love and friendship of others.
We’re not social in an abstract sense. We’re not about
“relationships” but about relationships you can put a name to, as
with family, friends, love, marriage, etc. Real people are the only
real opposition to our twin temptations, to chase after change and
success almost worshipfully — or to withdraw from society, in fear
of humiliation or just exhausted by the uncertainty and the hustle
and the hypocrisy.
Poulos deals with
these subjects in his book — not just change, but also the role of
money in our lives, sex, play, love and faith, and even death, the
perpetually unconfessed object of our fear. He works hard to bridge
the gap between the esoteric level of political philosophy, where
Tocqueville is at home, and the level of pop culture, where we have
stories about what troubles us, but never reflections that are honest
and thoughtful. He shares our agonies and has also thought through
them — and his book is a rare example of the benefits of a
liberal-arts education. Humanistic study actually in service of our
humanity!
He doesn’t merely
tell us that our craziness is constitutive, that it’s baked into
the American cake. He tells us how and why and what we can do to
rethink our situation and our attitudes. Our problems aren’t
something we can fix by policy or an act of faith, although both are
in certain ways required. Our urgent problem is to learn the bitter
wisdom of “deal with it.” Not making a bargain, not that sort of
dealing, but accepting and coping with the hard facts of life — and
doing so without becoming bitter or disillusioned or cynical.The Art
of Being Free offers a lot of help both for rethinking our situation
and for coming to grips with it instead of wishing it away. It’s a
book for all Americans, though especially useful for Millennials who
live the ghost-lives of the digital era. At the same time, it is
useful for anyone who wants to reach Millenials, first of all by
understanding something of their experience and how it fits the
American pattern of leaping into the future and occasionally
recoiling from it.
Poulos makes
available to us a wealth of insight spanning the range from pop
culture to political philosophy, and, what’s rarer, he does it in a
specifically Tocquevillian manner. He doesn’t bring theories to
apply to our lives. He follows Tocqueville’s advice to seek within
our experience the implicit principles we often grasp, dimly — in
works of art or, these days, in pop culture — but find it difficult
to articulate or defend in argument. This book is an act of
fellowship and an offer of friendship, which is what Poulos
advertises. It is also a public service. If any of my observations
and arguments touch you, this book should be atop your summer reading
list.