Tocqueville’s Relevance Today

So here’s what I’ve written so far about Tocqueville for tomorrow’s panel at 8 (just in case you wont be there):

Tocqueville called the effect of democracy on the heart individualism—by which he meant apathetic withdrawal from larger communities into a narrow circle of friends and family.

We democrats believe that love stinks (I wanted to say sucks in honor of Kelly Clarkson and to appeal to young people, but that would be wrong) because it turns us into suckers. Our intention, to enhance our safety and secure our rights, is to have all our connections with other persons be governed by calculation and consent. Otherwise, we’ll surrender to their rule, be subject to their control. The American democrat brags, with his moral doctrine of self-interest rightly understood, that he is so emotionally free that he never allows his heart to trump his mind or clear calculation about his interests.

So we democrats resist losing ourselves or thinking of ourselves of parts of personal wholes—of families, friendships, countries, personal religions, and so forth. And we certainly, in the name of freedom and equality, refuse to submit to personal authority—to politicians, priests, poets, philosophers, professors, and so forth.

The danger, Tocqueville thought, was that our personal isolation would make us too anxious and lonely. Our assertion of freedom is based on the good news that no one is better than ME. But the corresponding bad news is that I’m no better than anyone else. So I have no point of view that trumps the pressures from the huge impersonal forces that surround me.

In my flight from personal authority I end up submitting to impersonal forces—to public opinion (which comes from no one in particular), to popular science (promulgated by people who begin sentences not with “I think” but “studies show”), to technology, and to History. There’s no denying, as Tocqueville says, that impersonal forces explain more and more—and personal choice less and less—about what happens in democratic times.

Apathetic withdrawal leads to self-surrender. And the culmination of self-surrender, Tocqueville feared, would be schoolmarmish, soft administrative despotism, to a providential authority that would take the burden of our personal futures—of being beings totally on our own in a hostile environment—off our hands. So insofar as we can say that being human is all about being personally responsible for one’s own destiny, the culmination of individualism is a kind of lapse into apathetic subhumanity.

For me, good news is that Tocqueville underestimated how radically individualistic apathetic withdrawal would be. And so he didn’t understand that individualism would make soft despotism unsustainable over the long term. The future of humanity is not as threatened by democracy as he sometimes feared.

Tocqueville thought that the self-centered individual would lose all concern with past and future. But he didn’t think he would actually stop thinking of himself as a being to be replaced. The American man he described is very unerotic and not much of a family man, but he still manages to have a wife and kids. And their constant presence in his little house manages to arouse some real love in him. Tocqueville assumed that we’d remain social enough to be parents and children. His worry was the disappearance of active citizens, not the disappearance of children.

But maybe the biggest issue concerning the sustainability of liberal democracies today has to with people becoming so emotionally withdrawn or so self-centered that they quite consciously refuse to think of themselves as beings to be replaced. As Tocqueville would have appreciated, demographic sustainability is not that big an issue in our country yet because of the social, Darwinian behavior of our observant religious believers. But everywhere in the West (and Japan) we can see that people, on average, are living longer and longer and having fewer and fewer children.

From an individual point of view, what we have here is good news. It’s good to live a long time: At the turn of the 20th century, the average American lived until about 49, now that number is about 80. We have a new birth of freedom in a post-reproductive and for women postmenopausal generation that evolutionary theorists have a hard time explaining. And of course for individuals it’s good that various contraceptive inventions have made us so pro-choice when it comes to being tied down by children. But what’s good for the individual might be bad for the species or bad for the country or too not according to nature. Let’s face it, safe sex—or bourgeois sex—just can’t be all that erotic, and we envy the other, more natural species who don’t know about it.

Even with all our whining about those economic regulations, a powerful case can be made that people’s rights are, on balance, better protected than ever. Our libertarians, such as Randy Barnett, really appreciate the expansion of personal liberty narrative of Lawrence v. Texas, and that Lockean tale of liberation might really the most convincing narrative of our nation’s history.

Some lover of human liberty might even cheer, with some perversity, that our success in living longer and more free of children has made our social safety net unsustainable. And there’s nothing even ObamaCare can do about that over the long term. The road to serfdom can’t ever make it to serfdom. Serfdom we can believe in has to be bankrolled by lots of productive young people.

THERE’S MORE, but nothing that will surprise YOU.