Mark Twain once said, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
History, that is, appears to run in cycles, with a pendulum effect. Yet, as Twain’s quote suggests, each age adds a new twist.
Ever since the West decided truth could be obtained without God, each age has suffered from unrealizable expectations. That’s because we human beings are created to seek perfection, God-given perfection. But without a transcendent God on whom we may rely, history, by default, is tasked as the only viable alternative.
As each age eventually exhausts itself, along with its inherent weaknesses and contradictions, another comes along to correct its errors. This, in and of itself, is mostly a good thing. The problem is that each successive age assumes too much, that somehow this time we’ll get it right.
Which is to say that we place all our eggs in the basket called “the present tense.” Its job is nothing short of building a utopia, despite its impossibility.
One can see an odd dynamic running throughout the course of human history – the constant push-and-pull of two powerful opposites: order and chaos. Each age, it seems, promises to resolve the excesses of one or the other.
Above is a photograph of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s tombstone, the famed Unitarian minister, writer, and transcendentalist, who lived from 1803-1882. It is situated in Authors Ridge, part of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery just a few hundred feet from the center of Concord, Massachusetts, a town famous not only for “the shot heard ‘round the world” (which effectively started the Revolutionary War), but for several of its other famous residents: Henry David Thoreau, Bronson and Emily Alcott, and sometime resident Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose former house was Emerson’s boyhood home.
What is extraordinary about Emerson’s tombstone, as you can see, is its incongruous size and shape. It is meant to represent the things for which Emerson fought: untrammeled individuality, unconstrained nature, and rejection of the bourgeois conformism and artificiality of settled village life.
As Wilfred McClay puts it, “Emerson’s boulder looks a little out of place, like a grizzly bear at a Junior League luncheon.” Notably, however, surrounding Emerson are the “tidy lots and meticulously carved Yankee tombstones” of not only his wife, children, and extended family, but of the various villagers upon whom his life was intertwined. In death is betrayed a lifetime dependence of the sort his writings implicitly deny.
Around the time of Emerson’s first writings, Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in America (1831). He was confronted with the strange phenomenon of antebellum America and its newborn democracy, a source of intense curiosity and confusion in his native France, as elsewhere in Europe.
His two-volume book, Democracy in America, assesses the results of his in-depth investigations. Overall, his impressions of Jacksonian America were remarkably positive. However, he was troubled by what he saw as a potential problem with its unique brand of individualism.
Overall, he found America’s individualism refreshing, particularly in contrast to the Old World’s sclerotic and oppressive kingdoms. In this New World individualism was grounded and guided morally and spiritually by willing participation in local communities, voluntary associations, and, last but not least, churches. Combined, these institutions tended to direct the free individual toward socially beneficial ends.
Emerson, however, took the idea of individualism to a new level. His untrammeled individualism eschewed such societal associations and looked instead to truths hidden in the self’s exploration of nature’s mystical and unruly forms.
For Emerson, society merely inhibits the free expression of the unfettered Self through the imposition of manmade, bourgeois rules and regulations. Only the weak, or those eager to exploit the weak, desire such an artificial order.
The “true” self must unshackle itself and pursue the courageous journey outside society’s bounds. (It is instructive that the young Friedrich Nietzsche was deeply influenced by Emerson’s writings.)
Emerson’s utopian dream, however, crystalized Tocqueville’s fear. For Tocqueville saw that unfettered individualism could lead ultimately to isolation of the self from the rest of humanity and, ironically, to a new kind of conformity.
Wilfred McClay offers the image of spokes shooting forth from a hub without a circular wheel to enclose them. The spokes thus branch out in all directions into infinity without anything to encircle them or hold them together.
Walt Whitman is perhaps the perfect embodiment of this sort of romantic alienation. He had embraced Emerson’s challenge of radical self-reliance and self-exploration. However, this eventually led Whitman to a profound and debilitating crisis of isolation and loneliness.
His alienation was only partially resolved as the Civil War broke out. In war he found a tangible connection to his fellow human beings. It was the centralizing, consolidating, centripetal power of the unified war effort that gave him a sense of meaning, as well as a sense of belonging.
As I say, this betrays Tocqueville’s fears. Because a misplaced individualism invariably leads to isolation and alienation, the “cure,” Tocqueville feared, might lead to the creation of the all-enveloping leviathan state or a nihilistic immersion in some featureless natural “ground of being.” The undifferentiated self is thus absorbed into an indistinct whole. In an irony of ironies, what results is the total loss of individuality!
As McClay points out in his book, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, the Civil War produced the very first impetus in democratic, egalitarian America for the very absorption upon which Whitman eventually came to rely.
The selfless sacrifices and unified purposes required by the war effort brought a largely disparate people together in a wholly new way. Focused selflessly on a righteous cause, working side by side, each marshalling his or her gifts and energies toward a common goal, was to bring not only victory but the promise of so much more.
The impetus for greater consolidation and greater centralization took hold. Disencumbered of individualism’s inherent selfishness, the now unified nation could move forward to tackle its greatest challenges. The idea was to transfer the force of the “war footing” required for military action toward attacking social problems and needs. With enlightened, unified action, there was no telling how much could be accomplished.
Thus, in and through the radicalization and distortion of a once healthy individualism, individualism itself was at risk of being sacrificed to a new, emergent uniformity.
This set the stage for the reform movements of the 20th century, but also, it must be said, the century’s totalitarian nationalist impulses. In many respects, both were a direct reaction to the excesses of an earlier, overly expansive romanticism, which in turn was a reaction to the excesses of the conformist rigidities of 18th century rationalism.
Fast-forwarding to today, one might well view the current post-modern individualism as itself a reaction against the overweening consolidation and centralization of the era immediately preceding it. Emersonian redux, if you will.
In the end, without God we invariably approach each era as if it were the sole corrective to what came before it. This means the present is required not only to fix every problem but, as such, to be undertaken with the same utopianism as that of the zealot.
Within the Christian tradition, on the other hand, one holds to truths that stand alone, above and beyond the ever-changing vagaries of the present, freeing its adherents to avoid the frenetic whiplash of the insistent “now,” the relentless zig-zag of the historical imperative – in this or any age.