Will has a good response to Jamelle’s reaction to The Office. Both posts got me thinking. Jamelle mentions ambition, and being “an ambitious guy” in his post. That’s key. Will mentions being a little older and realizing that life is full of little trade-offs. That’s key also.

In many ways, The Office is a show about power and ambition and it is a show about trade-offs.  A lot of people think it’s a show about despair, and for a while there in the third season, it was a show about despair, but that’s not what it is now.  As Mark notes in the comments to Jamelle’s post:

In some ways, though, that despair captured in The Office is exactly what makes it so appealing. It’s relatable in a way that the average uplifting sitcom can never be. It may be extraordinarily depressing for someone just getting started, but for most of us, it simply reflects how we’ve learned to live – and laugh at – our daily lives. We can’t all be President, we can’t all be firefighters, we can’t even all achieve middle management, much less upper management. What we can, however, do is laugh, which is what Jim and Pam do (or at least used to do), or we can find a sort of contentment in recognizing that our jobs do not define who we are, like Stanley (my personal favorite character in the show) and maintain our personal character above all else.

This is a very important point. Many shows, and much of the message coming out of popular American culture, is that we are all destined for greatness. We are all destined to do a job we not only like, but love. We are, in spite of any statistics to the contrary, bound to fall into a perfect, passionate love. We will all be powerful and unique, especially if we go to college.

Of course, just like most of us don’t have the body types of movie-stars, most of us will also not be millionaires or celebrities. Most of us will only ever achieve moderate financial success. Most of us will only be content with our work. We will dislike many of our bosses and co-workers and will have to learn to live with them as best we can, just like we learn to live with our imperfect families. Are we all just under-achievers then? [Read more →]

I have been rather harsh in my treatment of the “rugged individual” in these pages, and yet have come to an essentially libertarian position on most economic issues.  At the heart of libertarian philosophy is at least some degree of faith in the individual to make the best, or at least the most rational or most predictable, decision.  (Faith may be the wrong word….)  Still, I believe my social critique of the “rugged individual” is compatible with classical liberal economics (as opposed to economic populism, socialism, or distributism etc. etc.)

Individualism, properly understood, is a different animal altogether than the “rugged individual” of American myth – and even further distant from the entitled individual born into our own senseless era of wealth and purposelessness, severed from our communities and our history and our culture.  Individualism means more than what it has come to mean in either of these senses.

The “rugged individual” has been mythologized as the bootstrapper – the American business mogul who pulled himself up from humble beginnings into a position of power and wealth.  The entitled individual is spoiled, shallow, skeptical of the value of hard work, more interested in selfish pursuits than in helping others, detached from consequence, and possessed of an odd expectation that they deserve a great job, great pay, lots of toys – all for simply existing.  Both are examples of the so-called American Dream – one its myth, and one the consequence, perhaps, of that myth. [Read more →]

The discussion surrounding community, individualism, materialism, and the current economic and political crisis is anything but a discussion of perfect definitions or easy answers, and much of it is lodged only in vague theoretical hypothesis, or couched in moral arguments rather than arguments of cold, hard reason or data.  Essentially, where I argue against the emphasis always on the individual, I argue from a moral standpoint.  Mark’s response to my piece also argued from a moral standpoint, and in many senses the two opposing pieces agree as much as they disagree on the value of the individual.

One important thing to note about my argument against emphasizing the “rugged individual” over the community in which they exist is that I am arguing against a type of individualism, not against individualism itself.  As Wendell Berry notes in his aptly titled essay, Rugged Individualism:

The career of rugged individualism in America has run mostly to absurdity, tragic or comic.  But it also has done us a certain amount of good.  There was a streak of it in Thoreau, who went alone to jail in protest against the Mexican War.  And that streak has continued in his successors who have suffered penalties for civil disobedience because of their perception that the law and the government were not always or necessarily right.  This is individualism of a kind rugged enough, and it has been authenticated typically by its identification with a communal good.

The tragic version of rugged individualism is in the presumptive “right” of individuals to do as they please, as if there were no God, no legitimate government, no community, no neighbors, and no posterity.  This is most frequently understood as the right to do whatever one pleases with one’s property.

Property cuts to the heart of many localist arguments, but I’d like to set it aside for the time being.  We’ll pick it back up later, but for now let’s focus on the two individualisms that Berry is speaking about in the passage above.  There is the individualism of “communal good” that he attributes to such beacons of enlightenment as Henry David Thoreau, or in Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose praise of the individual forms the pillar of Mark’s piece.

Mark writes:

Emerson, writing in 1841, is critiquing the very idea of “growth for the sake of growth” and materialism that E.D. lays at the feet of individualism.  In other words, Emerson argued that individualism was the antidote to materialism whereas E.D. and several other commentators whom I respect now claim that individualism is in fact the cause of materialism.

Now, here is where we come to the “tragic” individualism – or, perhaps we should call it “individualism apart.”  Thus we have “individualism within” and “individualism apart” and while the twain shall indeed meet, nevertheless the distinction is important.   I want to expand upon Berry’s “property” argument and cast this sort of individualism as a brand unique, perhaps, to our day and age.  The modern individual is not an individual in the sense that one may have once considered a man or woman to be – they are not unique in thought, nor defined by some exemplary vision or aptitude.  Today’s “rugged individual” is defined by entitlement and detachment.  They are members, for lack of a better term, of the atomized herd.  The irony of the modern individual is that they exist so utterly apart from their community, and yet also in such complete lockstep with the larger national culture.  This is an effect of national television, national pop culture, the internet, suburbs, etc.  The more we are atomized by our technology, our consumerism, our political policies, and our urban sprawl, the less like a classical individual we become.  We are driven into our own tiny pockets of existence, apart from our locality, and even to the detriment of many of the things traditional communities hold dear.  [Read more →]

The modern conservative movement is built upon a paradox.  Indeed, both Parties in the United States system – and there are functionally only two – have long preached basically the same message.  Means are almost the only thing separating Democrats from Republicans; certainly their ends remain nearly indistinguishable from one another; that is, to build wealth and prosperity and promote liberty – and for conservatives especially, to do all of this by means of the Gospel of Rugged Individualism.

Individualism ties in well with the Republican Party’s superficial promise of small government through lower taxation.  Democrats, on the other hand, believe that to some degree the State needs to intervene, to provide social safety nets in a society that obviously merits them.  They have more faith in the power and beneficence of the government.  Republicans are equally bound to the State, but believe in a broader partnership between it and private institutions.  Both place an enormous amount of faith and emphasis on the individual.  The irony, of course, is that individualism and the size of the State are bound inextricably, the one to the other.  The more Americans become boxed into their “liberating” roles as individuals, the more detached we become from our communities and families.  These antiquated institutions become accidentally irrelevant.  Once upon a time, our family was our social safety net, and the community an even broader one.  Yet, as we’ve been increasingly driven into our roles as individuals – through political and economic policies as well as through rapid technological development – and as our faith in community and family has dwindled, we have become ever more reliant on the State to provide for our needs.

Often you will hear Republicans decrying reliance on the State as a very bad thing. Often you might hear them rattling off superficial lines about family values or talking points morality.  But in the end, the economic policies of the conservative movement – free trade, supply side economics, globalization – have led directly to this dependence on the state.  We were not composed to exist merely as individuals.  We are communal beings.  Atomization is not in our DNA.  Economic policies that focus on wealth rather than humanity are essentially demoralizing and destructive – perhaps not to our superficial standards of living; perhaps not to our culture of material prosperity; but to our core values as people living on Earth, they are detrimental.  This is a system doomed to failure because its central claims are false: that we are nothing more than individuals who consume, and that liberty is our birthright, and that the natural extension of liberty is consumerism – essentially that choice trumps all, and in its purest form manifests in our ability to choose to buy lots and lots of things. [Read more →]