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A Peculiar Sickness
John A. Burtka IV on Individualism in America & Its Cure
While reclining at my desk after a day's work, I caught myself singing along to Frank Sinatra's 1969 sensation, "My Way." As I mouthed each line of the song, I realized that many of our contemporary woes—spiritual isolation, social alienation, and cultural fragmentation—have their root, not exclusively in technology, social media, or the millennial generation, but much farther back in our American tradition.
The song, which, I admit, conjures up a sense of mutual triumph in Sinatra's rugged individualism and worldly success, memorializes an egotistical creed:
For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught;
To say the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels;
The record shows I took the blows
And did it my way.
The story of self-referential individuals, refusing to bow to earthly or heavenly authority, has been a hallmark of our American tradition going back from Sinatra to Twain to Emerson, and it reflects two vices prominent in democratic societies: individualism and materialism.
When Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in the 1830s, cataloguing the virtues and vices of American democracy, he warned that "individualism is a sickness peculiar to the human heart in democratic times" (Democracy in America [Liberty Fund, Inc., 2010], p. 881). What's wrong with individualism? According to Tocqueville, it begins as a rather harmless form of isolation and withdrawal rooted in self-interest, but rapidly grows, choking out public and private virtue along the way.
Due to equality of conditions in democratic societies, individuals lose the cultural glue that binds them to their ancestors, descendants, and land. Furthermore, the bonds that united the classes together in an aristocracy and provided for mutual support and shared responsibilities no longer exist. While the benefits of democracy and equality are well known, their vices are subtle and destructive.
The independence of the individual and nuclear family in democratic times creates a state of perpetual agitation and restlessness. In the course of eighty years, each person is responsible for earning an education, finding a spouse, starting a career, saving for a home, rearing children, paying for the children's college tuition and weddings, preparing for retirement, and then rolling the dice on whether he or she will have enough money in the bank to make it to the grave.
Tocqueville calls this movement and worry inquiétude, and it has the effect of turning each person's gaze inward, and consequentially towards "excessive material enjoyments" (745). This "dangerous sickness," materialism, "must be particularly feared among a democratic people because it combines with the vice of the heart most familiar to these people" (957). And when combined with individualism, the pursuit of material well-being unleashes animal-like passions that can degrade mankind and the environment if they are not checked by religious faith and piety. For Tocqueville, Christianity in America serves as the primary instrument capable of lifting people's eyes beyond individualism and materialism, towards eternity and virtue.
The Fearful Seek Order
Before explaining why faith plays such an indispensable role in Democracy in America, I will elaborate on why Tocqueville fears unbelief in a democracy. Virtue is hard and requires that people sacrifice hundreds of fleeting pleasures each day. To be virtuous is to take the long view that restraint in the present will lead to happiness in the future. With few exceptions, people require the eternal rewards and punishments of religion to inspire them toward virtuous action. When the masses abandon religious faith and authority, however, they "are soon frightened by the sight of limitless independence" (745).
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