In his opus Democracy in America, French political theorist and aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville writes that the citizens of a democratic regime, because they have a degree of equality unknown in an aristocratic age, will tend to be isolated from one another and weak, though society at large will be strengthened. He writes, "As conditions become more equal among people, individuals seem of less and society of greater importance; or rather, every citizen, having grown like the rest, is lost in the crowd, and nothing stands out conspicuously but the great and imposing image of the people itself."1 This is a very important insight. It is well known that Americans have certain traits that are peculiar only to us, such as evangelical religion, religious pluralism, an innate love of our constitutional freedoms (even ones that no longer make sense, like the right to bear arms). Tocqueville is skillful at pointing out that just about all of them are rooted in the fact that 1) we have a deep-rooted love of equality that has existed since the beginning of European colonization in North America and more importantly, 2) in fact, are all equal under the law. One important question Tocqueville's above passage raises is simply in what ways do our equality and isolation tend to make people more like each other and in what ways do they tend to make people different from one another? But a similar and more important question goes beyond just superficial similarity and different: how does equality change the character of the people living with it? I will try to answer these two questions in turn, while factoring in the role of advancing technology on individualism.
Similarities and Differences under Equality
Tocqueville argues that as people grow more equal they grow to be more alike. "[In old societies] unity and uniformity were nowhere to be found. In our day [the democratic age] everything threatens to become so much alike that the particular features of each individual may soon be entirely lost in the common physiognomy."2 This is a chilling prospect, particularly in America where we spend so much time and energy praising individualism and "diversity," and many individuals devote so much of their scarce resources making themselves somehow different from the crowd of men and women. Normalcy is an attribute that is universally derided in American culture. We categorically despise and fear the world proposed by George Orwell in 1984. This is one reason why most Americans despise communism, or at least think they do. It is a fundamental American desire to be unlike one's neighbors (and therefore, somehow superior to them). It may be a feeling that is beyond just Americans, though, as Tocqueville himself writes, "I have never heard anyone suggest that they should all be brought together to entertain themselves in the same way and take their pleasures jumbled together in the same places."3 Therefore, upon first reading, it strikes the American as odd and unfortunate that Tocqueville would say that in democratic times people tend to be more alike. But we must keep in mind that Tocqueville was comparing our state of equality with a past age of aristocracy and that those conditions found under aristocracy are so far beyond the pale of our experience that we cannot imagine how very different people were back then. Right?
In an aristocracy the great mass of laborers, the serfs, are clearly very unlike the nobles who rule them, that is beyond debate. On the other hand, however, it seems that the serfs, who have few opportunities to distinguish themselves from one another, are all alike. It is helpful to take a look at daily life in aristocratic times: Serf "A" spends all day performing back-breaking manual labor and gets drunk at the local tavern by 10:30 that evening. Serf "B" spends all day performing back-breaking manual labor and gets drunk at the local tavern by 10 o'clock. There is not much to set these two men apart from each other or the rest of the serfs, who spend all day performing back-breaking manual labor and all evening getting drunk.
Now, never having lived in aristocratic times, it is hard to say whether the nobles were generally like one another or generally different. Perhaps their duties and station in life led them to act similarly with respect to their serfs and to their king, or perhaps because they had so much time for leisure they could become as individualistic as humans have ever been. Tocqueville would not hesitate to say aristocrats could be characterized by the latter scenario, but I cannot help thinking it is more likely an intermediate point between these two extremes, nobles being in some ways very similar to one another and in some ways very different.
So it seems in aristocratic times that only the nobles, if anybody, enjoyed the pleasure of being individualistic (and even that is debatable). But this is a moot point for us democrats. Differences among the nobility strike us as being completely unimportant to the study of individualism because our democratic brains, giving equal weight to all people, invariably decide that the tiny fraction of the population that makes up the aristocrats is too small to even matter in the final analysis. They can be as different from one another and the serfs as they want, but it will not effect the final analysis because that depends on numbers and percentages.
This aristocratic model should be compared with a modern democratic one. The descendant of Serf "A" is now an information technology consultant while the descendant of Serf "B" is a body- builder. The activities that make up these two people's days are quite different, and undoubtedly their tastes are as widely divergent as their jobs or even more so. Today people can chat on the Internet to others with similar tastes and desires, they can watch TV, they can play tennis, swim, play chess, pray, stuff envelopes for a fund-raising drive, attend lectures, write in a diary, make home movies, listen to a nearly infinite variety of music, choose from any number of brand names for just about every product that is offered (in fact, the government demands that they be able to do so) or participate in a prodigious number of other activities I have failed to mention. In short, when people are not working they can do whatever they want. Also, they can pretty much pick what kind of job they want to have, provided that it is within the limits of their education and/or talent. The Smithian capitalist economy in which we live dictates that people will, indeed they must, have different roles in a society predicated on division of labor. Beyond the production side of the economics equation, though it is very important that people have such differing individual tastes. It is this variety among all the people that allows for a wide array of firms to operate. If people were similar in their desires, there would be less diversity of providers as well. Thus we see diversity among people in their roles as producers and in their roles as consumers, and it is precisely our democratic penchant for individualism that fuels capitalism. Therefore, there are many more distinctions between people today than there were during the centuries of aristocracy and Tocqueville must simply be wrong in stating that equality makes people more alike -- just look at all our differences! Right?
The preceding paragraphs exemplify what would likely be a modern American's initial reaction to Tocqueville's statement, and possibly sentiments the casual American reader may never get over. But it would be incorrect to stop at such a superficial level. One must delve deeper into the text to accurately understand Tocqueville's meaning.
The preceding paragraphs would be rendered useless if it could be proved that the way an American defines "individualism" is not the true definition, but a placebo meant to lull him4 into thinking he is not part of the crowd when in fact that is exactly where he is. While Chinese culture, for example, generally puts a high value on strict conformity, American culture is exactly the opposite. We glorify the "rugged individualist," the person who does not care one iota what her peers think, but does only what she wants to do. Free-spiritedness is a very positive quality for Americans. It is for this reason that we pretend to be individualists and strive to make ourselves different from that ephemeral and amorphous concept called "the norm." It is precisely our obsession with being individualistic that should be the tip-off that underlying this outward diversity we are all, in fact, very similar. Just as Tocqueville notes that sentiments toward blacks in the north were much more harsh than they were in the south, where laws were more harsh, Americans are obsessed with being different from each other precisely because they are not different enough for it to be obvious! When a boundary exists people have the liberty to pretend it is not there, but when it is taken away, people suddenly need to prove that it still really exists. The same is true for other aspects of life as well. If it were obvious that we were all different, there would be no need to promote one's own differences at all.
There is a positive side to our constant drive toward artificial differences as well. "[If] there is [ever] a chance of their all getting merged in a common mass, a multitude of artificial and arbitrary classifications are established to protect each man from the danger of being swept along in spite of himself with the crowd."5 The fewer differences there are, the smaller are the differences that are noticed. The fewer real differences exist, the more perceived differences come into being, and we are always happy.
Tocqueville writes that equality is responsible for making all individuals more alike one another, that equality is the great leveler. "I think there is no other country in the world where, proportionately to population, there are so few ignorant and so few learned individuals as in America."6 Under aristocracies there was both the high intelligence of the few and the low dullness of the masses. In democracy, we're all mediocre. But educational levels are not the only things that differentiate between people. There are countless other ways in which the American people are alike. Tocqueville writes that we all love money, we all love to be taken care of by a strong federal government, we all love individualism and that too makes us the same in a way. In our severe isolation we Americans need a way to distinguish ourselves from others and so are constantly striving for some way by which we can differentiate ourselves from the rest. Of course, as this trend continues, people will continue to become ever more flamboyant, because as mentioned above, as these superficial differences are exacerbated the sense we have for what is different is dulled down, as Tocqueville would readily note.7
Attributes Peculiar to Our Time
I must note here that one cannot make the foregoing argument without getting into the quagmire that clouds the picture of individualism over time: the fantastic increase in technology over the period we study. People now have a wide variety of outlets for individual expression because of advances in technology. But in order to use the technology we have, we need a degree of freedom. So both freedom and technology are needed to attain the high degree of superficial individualism we now have. Serfs of ages past could not go see a movie, they could not surf the Internet, go bowling or become ham radio operators. People without freedom today cannot always do those activities either. We Americans can do all those things, and additionally, we still have the leisure activities of our aristocratic ancestors, like horseback riding and sailing, thus allowing us the greatest array of activities yet seen on earth and supposedly making us more different from one another and demonstrating our freedom. Thus, technology gives us the outlets, freedom allows us to use them, and equality gives us the drive to want to use them and thereby distinguish ourselves from the crowd.
But it is not only democrats that love diversity of activities. Marx and Engels wrote,
In communist society, however, where nobody has an exclusive area of activity and each can train himself in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production, making it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I like, without ever becoming a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critic.8
Without going into a lengthy critique of how communism ended up actually working, I would say that the above statement applies more appropriately to capitalism, where people are free to engage themselves in a wide range of hobbies and activities when they are not at work, and increasingly people can move about between careers as they please. In "communist" countries such as the old Soviet Union, people were tied to their factory or office for life and certainly not free to engage in whatever they wanted to when they were not at their state-sponsored job. Being able to do whatever one wants is as much a product of modern technology as of freedom and equality.
Making the technology issue even more complex is question of whether the advanced technology we now have could even have arisen in an aristocratic society. While it would be interesting to address this question, brevity dictates that I cannot.
If technology helps bring about perceived difference between people it also hurts our ability to do so. American author Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, worries that the ubiquitous presence of television, besides sucking the associational life out of America, is creating a "lonely crowd," a mass society composed of people who do not interact with each other, but choose instead to sit in the confines of their individual boxes and stare at one end of a cathode-ray tube. To grossly oversimplify Postman's argument, TV and the rest of the modern media makes people think less, and America is the pioneer of this trend. He worries about the consequences of this on our culture.
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is defined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.9
This points to a dangerous fusion of technology and equality. It is not simply television that makes people all alike, it is also equality. Thus, while it is technology that takes away some of the sameness about people by giving them a large number ways to spend their time, it is also technology that drives people to do the same things, and we are back where we started, if not below where we started.
Not only is this an American trend, but as democracy spreads throughout the globe, the entire world will be experiencing both equality's virtues and its vices. "Variety is disappearing from the human race; the same ways of behaving, thinking, and feeling are found in every corner of the world,"10 Tocqueville wrote. This is, of course, a brief synopsis of what Benjamin R. Barber argues in Jihad vs. McWorld. "The world is more united than ever,"11 he writes, and it is united under the cultural hegemony of the United States, the country studied so closely by Tocqueville when it was still young. "McWorld is a product of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce. Its template is American, its form style. Its goods are as much images as matériel, an aesthetic as well as a product line. It is about culture as commodity, apparel as ideology."12 Barber is as critical of a cookie-cutter mold for the world as Postman is of a Huxleyan United States, where people love that which enslaves them. Both men, more so than Tocqueville, see withdrawal as the fundamental problem facing us today. Both Barber and Postman, Tocqueville would note, are Americans, and thus would naturally feel that way. To analyze the previous quotation as Tocqueville might, it is obvious that expansionist commerce would arise in the United States, after all, there is no country in which daily hustle and bustle is greater than the United States. Men are competing with one another, in part to make a name for themselves and expanding commerce to the four corners of the globe is one avenue upon which this can be done, just like inventing new technological advances, which I mentioned before.
Individualism as Isolation
We see from the above authors that in an overall sense, the equality of democracy makes people more similar to one another, both in equality's early stages and its most recent times. Technology though it greatly enhances people's ability to be different from one another if used properly, can also be a tool to make us all mindless automatons. A related question of great importance is what effect equality has on the very nature of the human character.
"Individualism" has more than one meaning. The petty, superficial meaning I have been using up until now, and the deeper, truer meaning. Tocqueville posits that equality turns people into individuals in this second sense of the word. Children are no longer accountable to their fathers, they are accountable directly to the government. For example, if the state has reason to believe that the father is doing a poor job of raising his children, they can be taken away and placed in foster care. Thus, we all have a direct link to the state, which represents all, and at the same time, we have a link to nobody, since we are all autonomous and independent. "In democratic ages ... the duties of each to all are much clearer but devoted service to any individual much rarer. The bonds of human affection are wider but more relaxed."13 One person, one vote; it is just that mechanically simple. We are left with a mathematical equation and fewer feelings. Paradoxically, it seems at once more humane and more inhumane. There is less child abuse, but we're all alone and responsible for nobody but ourselves. In democracy, "Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart."14 Our bonds to others broken, in democracy we're all atomized individuals, temporarily coming in contact with others and reacting to them, using them for our own gain, but not forming lasting bonds with them, not coming to know them.
As we become more equal there becomes more of a Hobbesian "war of every one against every one."15 From an historical perspective, man started out equal in the state of nature, grew disparate through the processes eloquently and accurately16 described by Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and are finally coming to be equal once again under democracy (though not nearly as equal as humans were in the hypothetical state of nature). Tocqueville notes that a notable side effect of the equality we enjoy is that we have the capacity for greatness but the reality of mediocrity, and that is hard for us Americans to swallow. "The taste for huge fortunes persists, though such fortunes in fact become rare, and on all sides there are those who eat out their hearts in secret, consumed by inordinate and frustrated ambition."17 In the long run, this is no good. Because we all want to be great, and have it technically within our power to do so, we are constantly trampling over each other in order to be so. How much of an improvement can this be over a Hobbesian state of nature? "No sooner do you set foot on American soil than you find yourself in a sort of tumult; a confused clamor rises on every side, and a thousand voices are heard at once. ... All around you everything is on the move ... ."18 The fight for power and glory never ceases, and that is what drives the hustle and bustle that Tocqueville accurately says characterize the United States. We live in a place where "the innumerable crowd [is] striving to escape from their original social condition."19 It is our egoism that fuels the great achievements of this country.
Look around and everything we see in the United States exists because someone either wanted to rise up in society, or just wanted to subsist. Our sameness drives us to do great things, but is the drive too much for us to handle? If we spend so much time producing, we forget about the good, intangible things life has to offer. The CEO who dies at 55 of a heart attack spent a lifetime reaching for greatness, but the process of reaching is what caused her downfall. So we have great things but wretched lives.
Under aristocracy were everybody is born into a fixed position, there is no need to strive for anything beyond subsistence, but under democracy, self-interest, however it is to be understood, forces people to be active and hard workers. "[I]n democracies ambition is both eager and constant, but in general it does not look very high. For the most part life is spend in eagerly coveting small prizes within reach."20
Unfortunately, as yet it seems egoism or self-interest is the only force that can motivate people to do anything. I would argue that it was nothing more than lack of this self-interest motivation that caused the attempts at communism to fail. We can see it today on a smaller scale within our own country. Members of groups (such as inner-city gang members or perhaps uneducated West Virginian coal miners) who for a variety of reasons feel they have nothing to gain in life no matter what they do, choose not to walk down those hard routes to grandeur, but rather wallow in self-perpetuating misery, without ambition of any kind. This is one of the greatest problems facing our country today, inclusion of all Americans in the struggle for achievement that is driven by self-interest. Yes, this struggle most Americans engage in is ruthless and cutthroat, but is still the best mode of living humans have yet devised; it is probably the only one that works toward true productivity.
I-it and I-thou
Jewish theologian Martin Buber's formulation of I-it and I-thou relationships can be useful for understanding how the democratic state of equality that is found in the United States tends to make people tend to behave. Buber wrote that, "If I face a human being as my Thou ... he is not a thing among things, and does not consist of things."21 Buber writes that it is possible for a person to view a Thou through an I-it lens. This happens when a person is simply using another person as a means to some end that is more important than the person being used. There are plenty of examples of this occurrence in a democratic age. For example, when a person goes in to buy some items at a convenience store, to the customer the clerk is a It. If the clerk were somehow transformed into a machine, there would be no loss to the customer. She would still get her frosty beverage or tofu or whatever it was she wanted. I-it relationships occur more frequently in democracies for two reasons: 1) the tendency toward isolation means that people only think of themselves and their needs, and 2) people tend to be more withdrawn in an age of equality, Tocqueville notes, and they lose the very ability to form I-thou relations.
I have already discussed the first reason for increased I-it relationships, how the struggle for power and prestige drives people onward to create and produce. The I-it concept applies to this drive perfectly. Now, I will address the second reason, which is related to the first. The natural course for humanity is to sink into equality in servitude, and humans must continuously struggle to attain equality in freedom. Similarly, it is the natural course for humans to sink into self-interest wrongly understood, and we must struggle to attain self-interest rightly understood. The same is true for I-it and I-thou relationships. It is easy to attain an I-it relationship. It takes no effort at all. One can form an I-it relationship with any object and with any person. In fact, it usually happens many times throughout the day. However, it is much less common to experience an I-thou relationship, especially in democracy. At least one of the parties22 involved must be fully aware of the other as a Thou. No activity is safe from being an I-it mode of being; even the most intimate of acts, sexual intercourse, can be degraded into an I-it relationship if the individuals involved are just using the other for pleasure. When we live in a dog-eat-dog world of constant competition, "a war of every one against every one," it becomes more common that we just use people for the goods and services they can provide.23 As we sink into this level of seeing people only in terms of how they can help us, we lose the ability to see them as a Thou, that part of our psyche falls into atrophy. It is easy to see how modern technology and the every-increasing speed of change that Alvin Toffler so wisely notes in Future Shock only serve to further exacerbate this tendency.
It is true that under an aristocracy people were not safe from falling into I-it relations with other people. Aristocrats did not think of the serfs the same type of people. They were fundamentally different, meaning that it was much harder, almost impossible, for them to look at them as Thou. But they did come into contact with their serfs on a constant basis. As Tocqueville notes, they formed lasting bonds with their serfs, and the bonds were mutual. But, they were bonds of need. The serfs needed the patronage of the aristocrats, and the aristocrats needed the labor of the serfs, so that particular relationship, while it was not the most benevolent, was lasting. Over time, surely, the aristocrats would grow attached to those who worked under them, and vice versa. People would get into fights over whose lord was better, signifying that there was some kind of minimal affection there. Now, in a world where even childhood friends are likely to fade away after a few short years, there is little hope for forming lasting bonds, and people use other people relentlessly in their attempt to scramble up the economic and social ladders. As Aristotle proposed in the Nicomachean Ethics there are friendships based on virtue, pleasure, and use. While democracy facilitates the latter of those, is makes even more common the type of relationship needed in commerce: that of blatant (I-it) use.
Tocqueville wrote that the south was the last surviving vestige of aristocracy. I would say that it was easier for a plantation owner to form an I-thou relationship with a house slave who has worked for him for twenty years than it is for the plantation owner's descendant to form an I-thou relationship with the slave's free descendant who flips burgers for minimum wage at McDonald's (who is supposedly equal to the plantation owner's descendant!). Not that achieving I-thou is easy in the first case, it is practically impossible in the second. For what it is worth, the house slave also probably had a higher standard of living than the free McDonald's worker. This is another example of how when formal, legal restrictions are loosened, informal, social ones become more rigid. So in this sense, "individualism" has a very negative connotation, one of isolation and use.
The ramifications of this for Buber are immense and chilling. People do not even exist before they have an I-thou relationship. "The Thou meets me through grace -- it is not found by seeking. But my speaking of the primary word to it is an act of my being, is indeed the act of my being. ... I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou."24 Therefore, the extent to which I-thou relationships are abolished is the amount by which the human experience is degraded -- which, in democracies, is a lot.
Conclusion
So we see that equality leads to individualism at several levels. There is the superficial individualism that all Americans strive for so as to make ourselves think we somehow stand apart from the crowd, and there is the kind that is characterized by isolation, loneliness and cold withdrawal. While the first is bound to continue on with no significant effects to society, the latter must be studied, so as to determine if there is a way to quell it but somehow keep people motivated. Communism in practice did not work, but there may be another, as yet hidden, way.