In an earlier post about the search for our "National Character," this blogger mentioned a college prof from his undergraduate years (when men drew on the walls of caves) and the consideration of slippery abstractions like national character. It all began in fall quarter 1961 in a course entitled "Individualism in America." The course was team-taught by Professor (of History) Michael McGiffert and Professor (of English) Robert Richards. Those two teachers stabbed a knife into this blogger's brain: individualism, national character, and the intersection of literature and history. As this blogger's undistinguished graduation approached in the late spring of 1963, Time published an essay on Abraham Lincoln as the model for individualism. Shazam! Flash forward to 2009 as the Lincoln Memorial evoked memories of that Time essay. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, the Time archives have been digitized and this blog is pleased to present Honest Abe the Individualist (in the best sense of the word). If this is (fair & balanced) nostalgia, so be it.
[x Time]
Essay: Lincoln And Modern America — The Heritage Of A Free Choice In An Organized Society
He never saw American suburbanites driving home wearily, bumper to bumper, or the same Americans taking off for a weekend clear across the continent. He never saw a junior executive in a glass-caged office, agreeing, or the same junior executive at a school board meeting, disagreeing. He never saw people living and dying under the care of one big organization, their epitaph a punch card. And he did not hear people insisting urgently on the need to be themselves in the midst of impersonal bigness.
He did not speak in terms of individuals and individualism; the words he used were men and freedom. But he knew about Organization Man. In a sense he was one himself, and a good one. He knew that the central problem of democracy is to reconcile the claims of the individual with the claims of society. He has become a figure half out of folklore, half out of schoolbooks, as worn and familiar as the coin that bears his likeness. A century ago he carried out the most dramatic act of liberation in man's memory. However cogently historians may insist that the Civil War was not "about" slavery, the world will always see in it one overriding issue: whether any man is fit to hold permanent power over the life and liberty of another. He was certain that both Emancipation and the Union served universal causes. He said: "In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free."
Tolstoy called him "a universal individualist." In a doctrinaire sense, which reduces man to the subject of an ideology, Abraham Lincoln was not an individualist at all. But he is the greatest, the classic, the archetypical individual in the American imagination.
In Lincoln's mind, the American cause was "to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all." The human condition today is more elevated and yet more perilous, the weights on American shoulders are lighter as well as heavier, the people's pursuits are more confusing but also more stimulating than was dreamed of in yesterday's utopias.
The situation is symbolized by the astronauts. In orbit, they are living the greatest adventure in history, and much of the outcome depends on the soundness of their minds and the stoutness of their hearts, whose beat is heard over loudspeakers around the world. Yet even more depends on thousands of people on the ground who control the spacemen's ascent, their course, their return or their death.
As man asks more of himself, he must also ask more of others. To carry out his dreams, he needs organization, vast and complex. He is at a point of greater freedom as well as greater dependence. He seeks a new balance between the one and the many.
"The lonely crowd" is part of the language, and the new burdens on the individual are discussed and decried on all sides. Not only by angry, narrow sociologists (the late C. Wright Mills) or sociology's cheap popularizer (Vance Packard), or a Marxist culture quack (Erich Fromm). Speaking for more serious observers, Protestant Theologian Paul Tillich fears that the pressures on the individual to conform and adjust may mean a drift toward collectivism and "authoritarian democracy," that man may become "an object, a piece of machinery." This applies not only to ordinary individuals but to the great, of whom there may be a shortage. In the seats of the mighty, there seem to be more personalities than individuals, more preoccupation with image than with individuality.
While optimistic about man's future, Philosopher William Ernest Hocking nevertheless sees the problem. "Corporate officialdoms," he says, "are helpless and barren—the parties, bureaus, departments, cabinets, commissions—barren because of the inner cancellation of each other's certitudes. The composite program, prudentially polished, has every virtue in it but life. Where there is no personal vision, the people perish." And the late Whitney Griswold put it thus: "Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam."
Only a generation ago, the great plea of social conscience was that unfettered individualism must be curbed for the sake of the community as a whole. Freedom of conscience from religious persecution, political freedom from arbitrary rule, even economic freedom from "capitalist exploitation"—all these greatly troubled past ages, but by and large they are no longer at issue in the U.S. Today's champions of the individual do not worry about religious persecution but about religious blandness, not about outright tyranny but about creeping collectivism, not about economic exploitation but blind and well-paid loyalty to one's job.
In short, the freedom that is supposedly threatened is the freedom of the individual to be fully himself. An ad in a fashion magazine no longer warns of body odor but of a more dreadful threat: "If you're not you, you're nobody."
The belief that the individual is Somebody, that, in Emerson's words, "the private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy than any kingdom," is extraordinary when seen in historical perspective. It is held neither natural nor right in most civilizations.
All the great Far Eastern religions consider created matter, including man, so barbaric that the only hope lies in nirvana, in which the soul—unnamed, unnumbered, unidentified—achieves a blessed reunion with the cosmic spirit. The Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer expressed this Eastern anti-individualism perfectly in his novel The Demons. Looking Eastward, he mused that there "individual life does not rebel; there is too little of it for rebellion. One soul mingles with another like smoke." But in the West, "every life has its own special, if invisible, garden plot. . . . A man stands alone between the tended flower beds and the little porticoes of a house from which no one, by law and equity, is entitled to expel him. He stands alone, by himself; the soft blue air is around him; he is unencumbered on all sides, like a statue. This is the only way he knows how to be; only in this way can he be big or little, crooked or straight, good or bad."
Even where the air is no longer soft or blue, where people are far from unencumbered, this remains essentially the faith of the West and of the U.S. It owes much to ancient Greece, a civilization of first-rate men and second-rate gods, which prized human excellence, beauty and strength above all things. But it owes most to the revolutionary Biblical idea of a direct encounter between man and a single, personal God. Abraham had the temerity to bargain with Jehovah over the fate of Sodom, and Job is noted for having goaded Him into talking back.
Christianity dismissed the state and temporal power as transitory, turning all existence around the salvation of the individual soul. Christ asserted the infinite worth of every human being: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." And St. Paul added the equally radical injunction: "Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." The central paradox of Christian free will is that the individual must surrender wholly, yet forever remain free, to say yes or no to God.
As the scattered early Christian churches turned into The Church, the direct relationship between the individual human being and the Creator had to be broadened to include society. Ever since, the intellectual and spiritual history of Western man has been a great, ever-varying triangle of God, the individual and the community.
In the Middle Ages, the triangle was firmly fixed, and each person, no matter how lowly, had his place and his worth. Unity, not individuality, was the ideal. The soul was cupped in the great single hand of the Church—until, in the Renaissance, the soul bloomed into flesh bursting with beauty, strength and pride.
Some of the greatest individuals the world has known dedicated their works ad majorem Dei gloriam. But it was really for the greater glory of man that they recreated the heavens and the earth in their paintings, molded the fiercest and the softest forms as if marble had become wax, and folded the world into their ledgers. For, as Will Durant said of the Renaissance, "first of all it took money, smelly bourgeois money."
The human side of the triangle very nearly overwhelmed both the divine and the social. But the great parallel movement of the Renaissance and the Reformation powerfully reasserted the direct relation between man and God, conferring on the individual the freedom, but also the burden, of "the priesthood of all believers." And in the 17th century, society reached a new balance with man and God in the thought of John Locke, who believed in God as the ultimate guarantor of human rights, in natural law as the foundation of liberty and property, and in government as an arrangement for the convenience and protection of the citizens.
Voltaire, Diderot and others extracted from Locke what they chose, and the rational individual was enthroned as monarch of the universe. Never was the triumph of individualism more swiftly followed by disaster. In the French Revolution the Goddess of Reason danced in the streets—until she found herself at the foot of the guillotine. It remained for Napoleon to create from the Revolution the modern state (including the draft and the secret police) in which individual men are submerged in the abstract glory of the nation.
But in the hands of Jefferson, Locke's thought became something quite different. The New World brought about a new dispensation. Puritanism, despite the memories of stocks and stonings it left behind, sanctified self-reliance and self-discipline. In the colonies Christianity and the Enlightenment came together without strife. As Father John Courtney Murray has put it, the framers of the American Bill of Rights, unlike the men of the French Enlightenment, acted with due regard for Christian history. They "were individualists, but not to the point of ignoring the social nature of man."
It was Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting the U.S. in the 1830s, who first reported the "novel expression," individualism. This must not be confused with mere selfishness, he explained, but was "a mature and calm feeling" of withdrawal from the community. He thought it was a dangerous tendency but also believed that America's political institutions would keep it in check. Amid this early American balance of man and society developed a new breed of individual.
To call someone an individual involves many personal and historic judgments as well as an endless play of paradoxes. In the litany of the saints of individuality, men have placed all the holy rebels and unholy dissenters, the blessed visionaries and diabolic prophets, the leaders and pioneers, the artists and discoverers, and all the mere eccentrics who enlarged (and sometimes narrowed) the human spirit. There are the true dissenters, in whom a sense of injustice, like Karl Marx's boils, is almost a physical affliction: Spartacus and Tom Paine, Abelard and John Brown, Saint-Just and Sam Houston, Cromwell and Bernard Shaw. There are also those who are pushed to their rebellion almost against their will, like Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who recanted several times but then, cursing his right hand for signing the recantations, deliberately put the hand into the flames; or Luther, gradually moving from reform to open spiritual insurrection. There are those who flee into rebellion as if it were a second country, like Lenin or Garibaldi or T. E. Lawrence, or find in it a devout clique of followers, like Freud or Sartre. And there are those who carry rebellion to insanity, like Sade and Hitler.
There are those who neither rebel nor assert egos but are consumed by a vision, like Buddha, Pascal, St. Joan, Mary Baker Eddy. There are the converts who see a sudden or a slow light for which they surrender their past, like St. Paul or Mary Magdalene or Cardinal Newman. There are those who are willing to defy the class or service to which they belong, like Savonarola or Franklin D. Roosevelt or Billy Mitchell, and those who fulfill their individuality in the sometimes more difficult discipline of submission.
There are the numberless artists who lived to express their visions, or merely to earn applause, or both: Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Raphael and Mozart, who aimed to please; El Greco, Goya, Picasso, Beethoven, Proust and Yeats, who mostly aimed to please themselves. And there are those who found in art a refuge from reality, either through true talent, like the runaway Gauguin, or through some talent mixed with posing, like Byron, Hemingway and Dali, or no talent at all, like the hundreds of pseudo artists who succeed on borrowed ideas and hand-me-down rebellion. There are the great artistic eccentrics who flourished particularly in the 19th century: Coleridge, who took dope; Blake, who thundered against "old Nobodaddy aloft"; Rossetti, who buried his sonnets with his dead wife and exhumed both later when he needed material to fill a book.
There are those, like Moliere, Cervantes, Twain and Thurber, who assert their position against the world humorously—for everyone can laugh, but only individuals have humor. There are the explorers, discoverers and obsessive questioners; their individuality is not necessarily greater because they chose to die, like Socrates, or smaller because they saved their necks, like Galileo. There are the obscure men who, by an accident of history, are forced to develop individuality or at least strength, like Emperor Claudius and Harry Truman. There are, above all, the unremembered and unknown individuals who take their stand and suffer their small martyrdoms in all places and all ages. With them in mind, Kierkegaard said: "The truly extraordinary man is the truly ordinary man."
But there are also, inevitably, those who must move and drive these ordinary men, the Caesars, Catherines, Napoleons, Gandhis, De Gaulles. The leader may impose his will by force, but more often he must do it by cunning and patience. As Jacob Burckhardt, the great historian of the Renaissance, put it:"Without him the world would seem to us incomplete . . . He appears complete in every situation, but every situation at once seems to cramp him. He does not merely fill it. He may shatter it . . . He beholds the true situation and the means at his command . . . He knows what can be the foundations of his future power. Confronted with parliaments, senates, assemblies, press, public opinion, he knows at any moment how far they are real or only imaginary, and makes frank use of them . . . He will curb his impatience and know no flinching . . . There is no study too toilsome for him."
This description fits no American better than Lincoln.
He was neither a rebel nor a conservative, but a conserver. He was no artist, except in using public language and in using men. His life was an infinitely varied mixture of leading and following, conforming and defying. He could temporize, compromise, and maneuver. But he always held to his own vision and met the exacting definition of an individual set down by French Philosopher Georges Bernanos: "A man who gives himself or refuses himself, but never lends himself."
Above all, Lincoln was an individual in the special double sense that Americans attribute to the word—the common man who is yet uncommon.
The common stamp was indelible on him, whether he was campaigning in Sangamon County, wearing a calico shirt and old straw hat, with six inches of blue socks showing from beneath his pants, or whether he stood at a White House reception, his hands enormous in white gloves that as often as not burst under some diplomat's hand clasp. And yet Lincoln always had a sense of being different and apart. John Hay, his longtime presidential secretary, wrote that it was "absurd to call him a modest man."
Innumerable times he could have settled for what he had. He could have stayed a ferryman on the Ohio, where as a boy he was overwhelmed by earning a dollar in one day. He could have taken up the indolent hunting, fishing and Shakespeare-quoting life of his mentor Jack Kelso in New Salem. He could have remained postmaster or storekeeper or a circuit-riding lawyer with Blackstone in his saddlebag, instead of running for office. But for all his unassuming qualities, he had a sense of destiny. Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, when he was 28, he made a speech in which he ostensibly warned against usurpers but actually sounded a note of personal longing: "Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored . . . It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief."
He had the individuality of the self-disciplined and the self-taught. His was a natural taste (no less an authority than the French ambassador praised his esthetic judgment of women and literature) and a natural nobility of style, which more rigid education could only have tarnished. He had, of course, the individuality of the frontier—but the picture of the frontier as totally individualistic is false. To survive, people sorely needed one another. Again and again, in sickness or in debt, Lincoln leaned on others for help. In his first campaign for the state legislature, his platform contained the remarkably other-directed statement: "I have no [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men." After he was elected, in his second try, he discovered that self-reliance was not necessarily the ideal of frontier politics either. Lincoln fought for state funds to build roads, bridges and other "internal improvements," until the state of Illinois was saddled with a then staggering debt of $17 million.
The statehouse at Vandalia1 boasted a Greek-columned portico, and this was not inappropriate. For the grass-roots democracy of the period constituted a kind of prairie Athens in which legislators were not remote and impersonal but known to all the voters and directly involved in their concerns. In that school he learned to be a politician first and last—and to respect organization. Later in the House of Representatives, he almost never missed a roll call. Whether or not he really grew his beard because some Republican politicians, plus an eleven-year-old girl, advised him to do so, Lincoln was conscious of his "image."
During the 1860 convention at the Chicago Wigwam, his supporters put through his nomination by crass maneuvering and packing the galleries with Lincoln men, including one stalwart, cued by the floor manager's waving handkerchief, who was reportedly able to shout across Lake Michigan. Deals were offered right and left, and Lincoln honored them later. But he always knew when to draw the line. During his second presidential campaign, at the height of the Civil War, he and his Administration again used every trick. But when politicians urged him to cut the draft to win popularity, he refused. He said: "What is the presidency to me if I have no country?"
Caught between extreme abolitionists and extreme Southerners, Lincoln had the individuality of a man who will not be pushed to extremes. That he personally detested slavery is beyond question. He recalled how in 1841 he had seen a cargo of shackled slaves on the Ohio River: "That sight was a continual torment to me." But "I bite my lips and keep quiet." Again and again he defined his lonely position between the extremes. When John Brown was executed, he told Northerners that since Brown had acted lawlessly, they had no right to object to his punishment. But he told Southerners that if they should try to destroy the Union, "it will be our duty to deal with you as old John Brown has been dealt with."
Above all, his was the individuality and the solitude of leadership. His task was defined by the late Benjamin P. Thomas, author of the best one-volume biography of Lincoln: "To hold together in wartime a party made up of abolitionists and Negro-haters, high-and low-tariff men, hard-and soft-money men, former Whigs and erstwhile Democrats, Maine law prohibitionists and German beer-drinkers, Know-Nothings and immigrants." He had no administrative experience, and surrounded himself in his Cabinet with former political rivals, strong and able men widely considered his betters, and it seemed as if they would crush him. But he knew how to play them off against one another.
His military experience consisted of a captaincy in the Black Hawk War, in which he admitted never having seen any "live, fighting Indians." And yet he proved himself a sound strategist, against the enemy as well as against his own generals. He suffered through the hesitations of dilatory George McClellan, complaining bitterly that sending him reinforcements was like shoving fleas across a barnyard—so few of them seemed to get there. Later, he tried Joe Hooker. There had been rumors that a clique, including Hooker, wanted to set up a military dictatorship. Lincoln flung him a magnificent challenge: "Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship." He made mistakes. He was vilified both for being too soft and for being too hard. He was called a tyrant for suspending habeas corpus and imprisoning dissidents. He had one answer. "I expect to maintain this contest until successful," he said, "or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsake me."
Beyond the triumphs of his leadership, he retained a special genius—not of strategy, not even of politics—the genius of being a person. The legendary, the charismatic Lincoln grew out of a cluttered office where he sat with only two secretaries, writing most of his own letters in longhand and receiving an endless stream of callers and favor seek ers; out of the hundreds of scrawled pardons for deserters ("Let this woman have her son out of Old Capital Prison"). The effect of it all was in no way diminished by the fact that there was also a method to his mercy—too many executions would cut down enlistments.
He was the gaunt figure walking alone at night to the War Department telegraph office to read late dispatches or wandering about the White House in his short nightshirt ("setting out behind," said Hay, "like the tailfeathers of an enormous ostrich") to read a funny story to his secretaries. He was the man who, after Lee's surrender, could scribble a note to Secretary of War Stanton: "Tad wants some flags. Can he be accommodated?" And he was the man who had recurring gloomy dreams in which he saw his own body laid out in the East Room, but who refused bodyguards.
And so, out of large and small facts of his life grew a man whom it is difficult to call a genius, and even more difficult to call anything less; a man so unheroic in appearance that he looks uneasy in stone, and yet beyond question a hero; a man so much himself, even when bending to others, that it is almost redundant to describe him as an individual.
Abraham Lincoln's life connects colonial America with modern America; Jefferson died when Lincoln was 17, Woodrow Wilson was eight when Lincoln died. While America was fighting its war, the greater battle of the modern world was already joined.
John Stuart Mill had finished his essay "On Liberty," in which he expressed the horror with which 19th century liberalism regarded the state, and enunciated the magnificent principle that "if all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion," mankind would still not be justified in silencing him. Yet at that very time, Karl Marx was writing Das Kapital, striking back at liberal individualism in the name of mankind. For the industrial worker, argued Marx, had been "reduced to a mere fragment of a man, mentally and physically dehumanized," and only collective action, state action, could redress his wrongs.
Thus began the long Marxist offensive that eventually led to Communism and fascism. Just as the U.S. had succeeded in tempering and transforming the forces that became the French Revolution, it tempered and transformed the Socialist Revolution. America had its age of ruggedly individualistic businessmen, when popularizers turned Darwin's theory of natural selection into a doctrine of economic predestination, according to which the damnation of the weak was a law of nature. But out of this era grew the sometimes uneasy partnership between business and government that in effect built a capitalist welfare state and an almost universal middle class society.
This is the central fact about the individual today. The life now led by Americans (and to a great extent by Europeans) was made possible only through industrial, and organized, civilization. Hence what is often denounced as regimentation of the individual is the price paid for giving virtually every individual a chance to live a wider, longer, richer life.
Americans have never really learned to speak of the "masses." Vast crowds do not give the U.S. the sense of doom that Ortega y Gasset felt when he shuddered about "mass man." Yet, sheer numbers are an overwhelming factor in the individual's existence. Demographers calculate that, given a U.S. population density of ten people per square mile in the mid-19th century, each American inside a ten-mile radius could "interact" with about 3,000 others. But the density in the U.S. today is 60 people per square mile, making possible interaction with nearly 20,000 (in cities the figure rises into the millions).
Says the University of Chicago's Philip Hauser: "In a mass society, we are more anonymous, but it also makes for far greater variety and for relationships that were never possible in a smaller society. Today, far more than in a simpler, more settled society, a man is forced to choose his wife, his education, his occupation, his friends, the place he lives. He never used to determine how many children he would have, but even this is now virtually a universal matter of choice. Mass society has transferred decisions from tradition to control by the individual."
Like all freedoms, this freedom of choice is also a burden, and that is one reason why there is much "conformity." Few individuals in any society have the emotional security to base their choices only on their inner resources. If a fixed order is not available, a man can only seek out models and examples until, in time, he develops more of his own values. To expect every individual to take in all of life through a thinking man's filter—to have his own independent, personal convictions about politics, ethics, culture —is to ask the impossible. It is, in fact, to ask for a mass elite.
Moreover, mass living is not nearly so homogenized as it is often said to be. Much individual activity is carried on privately, undemonstratively. Countless people pursue their private crusades and crotchets. The U.S. has many subcultures. Creeds and races live unto themselves, often by choice. Parents and children often live worlds apart. There are innumerable social islands of different inter ests, occupations, tastes, hobbies, snobberies and ethics. There are countless voluntary organizations that provide a vital middle ground between two extreme possibilities—a chaotic agglomeration of isolated individuals on the one hand, a totally regimented society on the other.
There is a kind of privacy even in the mass. "You find it driving to work, alongside all those other people, but alone with your thoughts," says California's Sociologist Edward McDonagh. "The car has become a secular sanctuary for the individual, his shrine to the self, his mobile Walden Pond."
Organization is the genius of modern man. He uses it in coping with life the way Medieval man used faith and the Humanists used experiment. Inevitably, he is also used by it. The most important organizing force in his world is the government. In the U.S., it has grown from the 37,000 federal bureaucrats of Lincoln's day to nearly 2,500,000, very few of them dedicated to Lincoln's (or Jefferson's) principle that the state should do for the individual only what he cannot do for himself. Many social critics deplore the prevalent complacency about this. Says Chicago economist George Stigler: "The trouble is that hardly anybody in America goes to bed angry at night."
Big Government is counterbalanced by the Big Corporation, which has developed its own smothering bureaucracy. As W. H. Whyte sees the Organization Man, in the office he is engulfed by the team spirit, and in his suburb he is "imprisoned in brotherhood." The indictment, now seven years old, still has much validity, although Whyte admits that a tighter, more competitive economy has made for many sharper, less brotherly elbows. Besides, as automation displaces many straight clerical jobs, there is growing demand for skilled, creative people—and a growing willingness to take them as they are. There is a thriving washroom and cocktail-party folklore about corporate togetherness (the oil company chemist who is instructed to buy only company gasoline, the assistant vice president being told what car he should or should not drive). At the same time, businesses are becoming sensitive and corporations are appointing committees to see what can be done about curbing the committee spirit.
The problem goes far beyond business. Unions are full of Organization Men. Nobel prizes these days are awarded to entire teams, because the individual's contribution is increasingly merged with others'. There is a kind of intellectual welfare state: poets and novelists spend their lives in the sheltering arms of universities. Men with ideas may not ask, like their "commercial" brothers: "Will it sell?" But they do ask: "Will it get me a Guggenheim?" Foundations pour their fertilizing funds over the landscape, doing a great deal of good, but not necessarily for the individual: it costs too much to give small amounts to individual applicants, while it is much easier to give large sums to organizations. Scientists, although they often think of themselves as individualists, actually tend to be highly cultish.
Britain's C. P. Snow, who has paid more attention than most writers to modern organization, believes that the threat to the individual is vastly exaggerated. "It is a cliche to think that persons in organization society are much less interesting than romantic rebels," he says. "That is a superficial, early 19th century concept of Rousseau-ish man. Variety of temperament and experience within organization seem to me quite as large as anywhere else."
Artists in particular are the guardians, or victims, of the Rousseau romanticism that Snow deplores. They see themselves as the champions of the individual against the Philistines. The stance, however, is no longer true. There will always be Philistines, but right now they are hiding in the woodwork, behind the De Koonings and the Klees. If there is any limit on the surge of artistic creativity, it is imposed not by the George Babbitts but by the "Gaylord Babbitts," a name coined by Peter Viereck to denote the arbiters of taste who run in packs and judge in cliques.
The situation is familiar in other fields. Scientific innovators encounter no resistance; they are eagerly embraced. The number of condemned heresies is shrinking all the time. "When I was young," recalls Philosopher Sidney Hook, 60, "certain positions on smoking by women, birth control, easy divorce and labor unions were considered dangerously radical. Not now. What we suffer from today is not fear of ideas so much as a dearth of ideas." Disagreeing for its own sake, says Hook, is simply synthetic individualism. "A man can conform or not conform and still be an individual, as long as he uses independent judgment."
The best (and worst) of causes do not necessarily make for independent judgment; on either side of the battle for Negro equality, positions are ritualistic rather than individual. Liberals are wedded to the notion that dissent is being silenced everywhere, because it gives them that desperately needed feeling—so rarely available since McCarthy—of being oppressed. Actually, nothing could be less individual than the standard causes to which most liberals are unquestioningly loyal, as one is to a fine old club even if the service is bad.
One emphatically unsilenced, and fashionable, heretic is Author Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd), a jolly intellectual anarchist who wants to break up the government and the public schools, but is remarkably wise on the question of individualism. The man who worries about whether he is an individual, says Goodman, is a little sick. The healthy person does not think in those terms at all, because he is committed to some worthy enterprise larger than himself.
Ultimately, what affects the individual most deeply is not the physical organization of his life, but the spiritual view he has of himself. The Medieval stonemason may not really have left a far more personal mark on a cathedral than the Detroit assembly-line worker leaves on a car, but he thought of himself and of his work as more important.
When it became clear to man that Reason alone did not really give him an adequate view of himself, a number of surrogate deities emerged—"forces" that supposedly rule man's fate. One was History, and modern man still sees himself to a great extent ruled by this abstraction. A second was Science, which tremendously increased modern man's sense of power over nature. But it also humbled him, by producing new forces of destruction, by building computers incredibly faster than his own brain, and by transforming the simple physical concepts of Newton's day into an almost metaphysical dream world beyond his grasp.
In the name of science, depth psychology tells man that he is really guided not by his conscious will but by his unconscious drives. Sociology, invented by the French Philosopher Auguste Comte—who visualized a scientific religion worshipping a "great being" that was actually humanity itself—says that man is only the product of his environment. No votary of Comte's, the American pragmatist William James told the individual that he stands at the very center of his world, and yet in the end everything in the pragmatic view of man is relative and transitional. How much use the philosopher is in this situation is perfectly summarized by the note found on James's desk after his death: "There is no advice to be given . . . Farewell."
When the surrogate deities fail him, the individual is left alone in an empty and meaningless universe. At that point, existentialism, which is the pragmatism of despair, tells him that he must act and seek out causes even though his very life is absurd.
Ultimately, the individual can see himself only in the eyes of others—and can see himself great or free only in the reflection of the eye of God. All past attempts to assert the worth of the individual without measuring him against a higher cause have failed, have in the end only diminished him. Nietzsche's rhapsodic worship of man's will, of which Hitler was an absurd and gruesome caricature, fits no more into the true Western tradition than does the soul's meek expectation of nirvana or the patient Russian submission to worldly tyranny. "If it were not for the religious element," says Hocking, "individualism would spell chaos."
Philosopher Hocking, 89, is in a more detached position than most Americans to contemplate the problems of the individual. More than 30 years ago, "to get away from the city," he moved to New Hampshire's White Mountains, where he designed and built three houses from materials found on his 670 acres. He grows most of his own food, has his own herd of cattle, and spends much of his day writing (current project: a new book on The Philosophy of Law). The rest of the time, he paints portraits, putters with surveying instruments (he likes maps because "they last for all time"), and receives a stream of visitors. Yet his style of thought owes much less to Thoreau than his style of life. "The tightest of organizations depends on individual creativity," says Hocking. "When that creativity is limited to a few at the top, we have despotism. But organization as such does not crush the individual. Most of us spend time under a master, and if he tells us to do some thing that is morally wrong, we must refuse. Creativity exists as long as the servant has any moral initiative of his own. Individualism grows and spreads with responsibility. You can only make men free when they are inwardly bound by their own sense of responsibility."
There are signs that the U.S. is increasingly recognizing this, particularly among the no-longer-silent younger generation. Their education has ceased to be a kind of finishing school for "life adjustment," and they seem tough-minded, earnest and determined, without being dull.
The West has undoubtedly entered a new phase of its history. Between the Renaissance and the 19th century, its great drive was toward more and more individual autonomy, to make man in the Kantian sense an end rather than a means. In this century the ideal of unity, of ecumenicity, has strongly reappeared. There is no denying that this diminishes the individual's feeling of freedom, his sense of controlling his own destiny. Much has been lost since a simpler, freer day. But no one can turn back. The U.S. cannot break up the organization any more than the 19th century could break the machines, even though the Luddites tried it. Nor is a return possible from much-denounced "mass culture" to the "folk art" of old (which, as it happens, is largely a sentimental invention of later critics). Such individualist yearnings, as David Riesman points out, really imply "that several hundred million people must disappear to make the world less crowded."
None of which means that the individual today should fail to fight; but he must know the right battle. He must start with the present reality of the organization world and make it, and himself in it, free—through courage, imagination and intelligence.
There is a growing, impatient sense that in this situation, a new kind of individuality is needed. But perhaps what is needed is also something of an older kind. Modern man lives in many overlapping groups; in each, he must find his place, must have his say, must leave his mark, if he can. In a way, this requires him to be a politician in the highest meaning of the word. Politics is the real means of mediation between the individual and the group. This was Lincoln's genius. Today's Americans, enmeshed in community, can only wish for Lincoln's qualities—he was politic without being unprincipled, patient without being resigned, flexible without being opportunistic, tough-minded without being brutal, determined without being fanatical, religious without being dogmatic or unworldly, tender without being sentimental, and devoted to man without worshiping him.
These qualities, along with the country that bred them and the civilization that nurtured them, are in a real sense the last, best hope of earth. They are heard in the words Lincoln wrote in a year of approaching victory: "Thanks to all. For the great Republic—for the principle it lives by and keeps alive—for man's vast future—thanks to all."
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1Then the capital of Illinois, moved to Springfield in 1839 largely as a result of Lincoln's own efforts. ♥
Copyright © 1963, 2009 Time, Inc.
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