A Century of Anti-Individualism
Do a search on the word “individual” in the Kindle edition of Jonah Goldberg’s 2008 book Liberal Fascism, and you’ll quickly find a slew of quotes from early 20th century “progressives” who thought that the idea of the sovereign individual was just much primitive bunkum:
[Herbert Croly, the founder of the New Republic magazine] was an unabashed nationalist who craved a “national reformer…in the guise of St. Michael, armed with a flaming sword and winged for flight,” to redeem a decadent America. This secular “imitator of Christ” would bring an end to “devil-take-the-hindmost” individualism in precisely the same manner that the real Jesus closed the Old Testament chapter of human history. “An individual,” Croly wrote, sounding very much like Wilson, “has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed.” Echoing both Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Croly argued that “national life” should be like a “school,” and good schooling frequently demands “severe coercive measures.”
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Croly constructed this worldview out of what he deemed vital necessity. Industrialization, economic upheaval, social “disintegration,” materialistic decadence, and worship of money were tearing America apart, or so he—and the vast majority of progressives—believed. The remedy for the “chaotic individualism of our political and economic organization” was a “regeneration” led by a hero-saint who could overthrow the tired doctrines of liberal democracy in favor of a restored and heroic nation. The similarities with conventional fascist theory should be obvious.
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We should not forget how the demands of war fed the arguments for socialism. [John] Dewey was giddy that the war might force Americans “to give up much of our economic freedom…We shall have to lay by our good-natured individualism and march in step.” If the war went well, it would constrain “the individualistic tradition” and convince Americans of “the supremacy of public need over private possessions.” Another progressive put it more succinctly: “Laissez-faire is dead. Long live social control.”
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[Walter] Lippmann, as he argued later, believed that most citizens were “mentally children or barbarians” and therefore needed to be directed by experts like himself. Individual liberty, while nice, needed to be subordinated to, among other things, “order.”
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For the most part, the progressives looked upon what they had created and said, “This is good.” The “great European war…is striking down individualism and building up collectivism,” rejoiced the Progressive financier and J. P. Morgan partner George Perkins. Grosvenor Clarkson saw things similarly. The [World War I] war effort “is a story of the conversion of a hundred million combatively individualistic people into a vast cooperative effort in which the good of the unit was sacrificed to the good of the whole.” The regimentation of society, the social worker Felix Adler believed, was bringing us closer to creating the “perfect man…a fairer and more beautiful and more righteous type than any…that has yet existed.” The Washington Post was more modest. “In spite of excesses such as lynching,” it editorialized, “it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.”
And so on. Occasionally, these quotes would rebound rather ironically upon the utterer. In the early years of the 1920s, Mies van der Rohe, the pioneering modernist architect and last director of the Bauhaus, the Weimar-era German school for modern artists would write, “The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us.” This in the midst of earning a living designing houses for wealthy individuals and only a decade before the Nazis came to power, who disliked individualism much more than Mies did, shuttered the Bauhaus and eventually forced Mies to flee Germany to teach and practice his profession in Chicago.
A century that revolved around the horrors of collectivism in all its forms doesn’t stop similar talk today. Scientific American reviews a new book titled The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity, and queries:
Although Hood believes the self may be the greatest trick our brain has ever played on us, he concludes that believing in it makes life more fulfilling. The illusion is difficult–if not impossible–to dispel. Even if we could, why deny an experience that enables empathy, storytelling and love?
“To justify fascism,” Smitty, Stacy McCain’s co-blogger tersely responds:
If you want to factor out any theistic concept of a soul or notion of free will in one fell swoop, this sort of materialistic reduction is the way to go.
And it’s cool, too: once we’ve got life reduced to measurable bits of matter, and have nuked the idea of a ‘self’, we can set about the elimination of the individual and manage society through a series of spreadsheets. The molecules made us do it–how could there be a Devil?
This is not an evangelical pleading, though. My secular answer to this discussion is that the self, and freewill, have got to be taken as an assumption. That is, barring clear genetic-level defects like Downs, free moral agency has got to be the default position for the individual. Otherwise, we remain a societal collection of infants, forced into heroin addiction and inter-species romance because we’re, you know, victims.
Or to use the preferred word of Mayor Bloomberg, Jerry Brown and Barack Obama — constituents.
The irony about collectivism is that it tends to be run by a single individual – Hitler in Nazi Germany, Lenin, Stalin, et al in the USSR, Mao in China, the Kim Jong “dynasty” in North Korea, etc, etc – and these individuals are more often than not infinitely sicker, more barbaric and destructive than the individuals collectivism proposed to fix. Manson killed a dozen people, Gacy maybe thirty or so, the Green River Killer maybe forty or so. Hitler, Stalin, Mao each killed MILLIONS. Not to minimize the loss felt by the next of kin of the victims of the serial killers, but if collectivism “civilizes” us then somebody get me a spear and call me “barbarian.”
What you said.
Which explains the Progressive hatred of the auto:
From ‘The Big Change: America Transforms Itself, 1900-1950′ by Frederick Lewis Allen
Just as they achieved collective spirit, the American Dream, American industrial might, gave people, poor people, people of color, freedom and individuality of movement. Although, they did make inroads and achieved government-guided enterprise for a time until their collective wisdom was overrun by reality.
John Dewey was a social planner in education and a still celebrated founder of US public schools:
“Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations (1896).”
“The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society that is coming, where everyone would be interdependent (1899).”
Wow — those are good ones, thanks.
If you can stomach it, Dewey’s “Democracy and Education” is a *horribly*-written tract that is — over 100 years later — *still* the manual for how to run our failing public schools. It’s nearly 500 page of collectivist dreck — and every credentialed teacher in the country has studied it. I’d pity them — if they didn’t keep voting in the union stiffs that insist on this idiocy.
Some of you might be interested in my very short article about causality.
http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/theo/cause3.html
Please share this link with other potential readers. Thank you in advance,
Ludwik Kowalski (see Wikipedia)
Look at the bright side: if you look at the world as a whole, then the last 2 centuries were the most individualistic in human history.
NB: by using the word “history”, I am implicitly excluding barbarian societies.
And btw I am the one who wrote the Conan comment above.
“No one ever waged war on mankind in the name of individualism.”
” 2. JKB
Which explains the Progressive hatred of the auto:”
It also explains their hatred of the Suburbs. All those individuals, sitting there in their own private castles. Escaping the regimentation of the cities. With a car par in the driveway!
“…car parked in the driveway.”