Event
Date
by Heather Neilson
Presented at MCH conference on Alexis de Tocqueville 2003.
An American friend recently sent me via email a list of alternative bumper stickers. Most were only faintly amusing - too obvious or too cutesy. One, however, stood out. 'FRIENDS HELP YOU MOVE. REAL FRIENDS HELP YOU MOVE BODIES.' When I reflected upon why this particular joke afforded pleasure, I realised that the cause was the piquant sensation aroused by the collision of the familar with the unfamiliar. There are two dissonant value systems at work in the bumper sticker. At first, the speaker self-righteously assumes the authority to pronounce upon the morality of friendship. Immediately, however, he or she then manifests how little human life itself is to be valued. The comfortably comprehensible evocation of friendship in the first sentence swerves vertiginously into evidence that we are confronting an alien mindest - from a world in which abruptly created corpses are merely more cumbersome than furniture. The transition is a sudden one, from television sitcom land to redneck Gothic.
The bumper sticker functions in contemporary Western society as a belated proverb. Like the bumper sticker encountered for the first time, Tocqueville's sardonic aphorisms, his moments of exasperation with the human race, enliven Democracy in America. The following are some of my favourites.
'A false but clear idea always has more power in the world than one which is true but complex.' (Tocqueville, 1988, 164)
' [...] nothing comes more natural than to man than to recognize the superior wisdom of his oppressor.' (436)
'In democratic centuries [...] the darting speed of a quick, superficial mind is at a premium, while slow, deep thought is excessively undervalued.' (461)
'Habitual inattention must be reckoned the great vice of the democratic spirit.' (611)
'There is no sovereign will or national prejudice that can fight for long against cheapness.' (406)
Democracy in America, a hundred and sixty years after its first publication, evokes in the reader the shock of a protracted encounter of the familiar juxtaposed with the alien. It is now something of a challenge to enter that French mind, engaged as Tocqueville was in turn as anthropologist amongst that half familiar, half alien, species - the Anglo-American. Tocqueville asserts in the second volume that all nations and human beings are becoming alike, predicting a homogenized world of the future in what might be regarded as a prescient anticipation of the process of 'globalisation'. [1] In the meantime, however, he enjoys parodying the Anglo-American as an exotic, clearly envisaging primarily a French rather than an American readership.
Let us consider, for example, the chapter in the second volume which is entitled 'Why the Americans are so hard to offend in their own country and so easily offended in ours'. This chapter offers a portrait which is felicitously consistent with that created forty years later by Henry James in his novel, The American. James imaginatively presents his American, Christopher Newman, as he would be perceived by the French aristocracy - perhaps as he would be perceived by Alexis de Tocqueville's own relatives in Paris. It is this chapter which contains one of the loveliest caricatures of Tocqueville's encounter with the 'new man', the representative American.
I have often noticed in the United States that it is not at all easy to make a man understand that his presence is unwelcome. To make that point, roundabout methods are by no means always enough.
If I contradict every word an American says to show him that his conversation bores me, he will constantly renew his efforts to convince me. If I remain obstinately silent, he thinks that I am reflecting deeply on the truths he has put to me. If finally I get up abruptly and go, he supposes that I have some urgent business which I have not mentioned. Unless I tell him plainly, the man will not understand that he exasperates me, and I cannot escape from him except by becoming his deadly enemy. (569)
Resonances of Tocqueville abound, of course, in American literature. Parts of the thirteenth and the seventeenth chapters in the second volume of Democracy in America seemed eerily familiar as I read them. (These are the chapters entitled respectively 'Literary Characteristics of Democratic Centuries'nbsp;and 'On Some Sources of Poetic Inspiration in Democracies'.) The gist of the thirteenth chapter is that Americans do not yet have a literature of their own, but are still overly dependent on the European tradition, especially the English. American writers, Tocqueville asserts, 'paint with the borrowed colors of foreign manners, and as they hardly ever portray the country of their birth as it actually is, they are seldom popular there.' (471) In the seventeenth chapter, on the other hand, Tocqueville asserts that 'democracy engenders a sort of instinctive distaste for what is old' (484) and anticipates that the poetry produced from democracy will turn away from traditional subjects and become the poetry of the individual self. Tocqueville can be seen to be figuratively calling upon Americans to produce the sort of poet he envisages:
Among a democratic people poetry will not feed on legends or on traditions and memories of old days. The poet will not try to people the universe again with supernatural beings in whom neither his readers nor himself any longer believes, nor will he coldly personify virtues and vices better seen in their natural state. All these resources fail, but man remains, and the poet needs no more. Human destiny, man himself, not tied to time or place, but face to face with nature and with God, with his passions, his doubts, his unexpected good fortune, and his incomprehensible miseries, will for these peoples be the chief and almost sole subject of poetry. (487)
I have often taught Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself' as Whitman's deliberate answer to Ralph Waldo Emerson's invocation of a hypothetical American poet in his published lecture entitled 'The Poet'. It is resonances of Whitman and Emerson that one hears in these chapters of Democracy in America. Emerson's journal confirms that he was reading Democracy in America on April 21, 1841. Emerson delivered the lecture, 'The Poet', in December 1841 in Boston, as one of a series of eight lectures. A comparative study of the philosophy of both writers - particularly in relation to the shared elements of Romanticism - would appear to be a potentially fruitful project.
As is the case with any text which achieves the status of a classic, Democracy in America has been interpreted or mined from many perspectives. In an essay called 'Of Prophets and Prophecy', Daniel T. Rodgers discusses the posthumous recasting of Tocqueville's reputation as prophet, and the desire of readers in the years since the publication of Democracy in America (indeed, as witnessed by my own allusion to globalisation) to read it as a book about the reader's own times. As he says, 'our preoccupation with the prophetic quality of Democracy in America has induced us over and again to condense the book into those small number of phrases that seem best to prefigure the urgencies of our present moment.' (194-5) In The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, for example, Paul Kennedy alludes five times to Tocqueville - in each case to his prediction at the end of the first volume of Democracy in America that the United States and Russia will become the two pre-eminent powers in the globe.[2] But it is probably Tocqueville's warnings against the 'tyranny of the majority' with which readers - and non-readers - of Democracy in America would be familiar.
My work in American Studies has for some time been mainly focused on another aristocratic aphorist, Gore Vidal. Although Vidal's work is strongly influenced by Tocqueville - amongst many other influences - there are few explicit allusions to Tocqueville where one might expect them. In a collection of interviews with Vidal, published in 1980, there is just one reference to Tocqueville - in an interview with Playboy - and, as we might expect, it pertains to the tyranny of the majority.
De Tocqueville predicted that a society organized like ours would prove to be hostile to the original man. He believed that a terror of public opinion was an essential characteristic of democracy - nor have we entirely fulfilled De Tocqueville's grim prognosis - but no one can say that we are not resourceful in our ways of dealing with dissidents. We turn them into show-business characters, not to be taken seriously. (Stanton and Vidal, 1980, 310-311)
Vidal is, of course, covertly talking about what he perceives to be his own plight. His position in American politics and American letters is a paradoxical one. He is of the ruling class, but enjoys a substantial popular following. Yet he will never be as popular as a rival such as Norman Mailer because of what I choose to term the Coriolanus factor. Vidal's aura is that of a man who will always be too proud to show his wounds to the masses and who will then resent their inability to appreciate his wisdom and benevolence as their aspiring leader.
There are two allusions to Tocqueville in Vidal's collected essays from 1952-92. In an essay on H.L. Mencken, he again refers to Tocqueville's observation of the force of the majority on the individual to conform, asserting that the society that Mencken was describing bore out the truth of Tocqueville's perception.[3] The other allusion occurs in an essay entitled 'Love, Love, Love'.
Whether Tocqueville's worst fears have come true or not, democracy is too much with us. It has been duly noted how often people say 'I feel' such-and-such to be true rather than 'I think' such-and-such to be true. To make that shift of verb unconsciously is to eschew mind and take cover in the cozier, more democratic world of feeling.[4]
Tocqueville remarked early in Democracy in America that he could think of no other country where 'proportionately to population, there are so few ignorant and so few learned individuals as in America.' (55) Throughout his career, Vidal has been obsessed with the mediocrity of education in the United States. He has hence, through his historical novels, elected to supplement the education of the reading public. The first of his novels in the series about American history is Burr, a revisionist work intended to restore the reputation of Jefferson's disgraced vice-president. The book is set largely in the 1830s, Tocqueville's period of study. Apart from his having killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, Aaron Burr's reputation in history has been blighted by Jefferson's subjection of him to a number of treason trials. Burr was acquitted of having incited the western states to secede from the Union.
When I first read Burr as a fifteen year old, I was struck by Vidal's emphasis on the weakness in the American constitution which essentially allowed the states the right to free themselves from the confederation. Vidal, with typical irony, has Jefferson lament this in conversation with Burr. This alleged weakness in the constitution is also crucial to Vidal's later depiction of Abraham Lincoln as an ambitious tyrant, who would remake the Union in his own image to ensure forever his place in history. Like George Forgie, in his psychological study of Lincoln and his era, entitled Patricide in the House Divided, Vidal makes much of a speech which Lincoln delivered before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield in 1838.[5] In this speech Lincoln warned the audience of a hypothetical ambitious man who would not be content with merely preserving what his precursors had built, but who would be compelled into a destructive role by his own sense of belatedness. This warning Forgie and Vidal - and Edmund Wilson before them - read as Lincoln's figurative warning against himself. As a congressman in 1848, Lincoln had declared that any people anywhere had the right to shake off the existing government and form a new one. This declaration was to cause him embarrassment in light of his eventual shift to the almost mystical conception that the Union must be preserved at any cost.
In the first volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville dwells at some length, though not always consistently, on the weakness in the federal constitution which would allow the states to separate if they so chose.
The confederation was formed by the free will of the states; these, by uniting, did not lose their nationality or become fused in one single nation. If today one of those same states wished to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be hard to prove that it could not do so. In resisting it the federal government would have no obvious source of support either in strength or right. (369)
A little earlier he had hypothesized: 'If today the sovereignty of the Union was to come into conflict with one of the states, one can readily foresee that it would succumb; I even doubt whether such a struggle would ever be seriously undertaken.' (368)
Not being a scholar of the American constitution, or any other constitution for that matter, I was interested to read the response to this of James T. Schleifer in his The Making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America. To summarize, Schleifer's position is essentially that Tocqueville's understanding - that the duration of the American republic depended upon the will of the states - may have been based upon a misconception. He demonstrates Tocqueville's dependence in this matter on William Rawle's book, A View of the Constitution of the United States, published in 1825.[6] This in turn will compel me to return to Burr, and attempt to ascertain exactly whence Gore Vidal derives his interpretation of the relation between the states and the union in the constitution, rather than take that interpretation on trust.
Tocqueville's speculations about whether the union will last are to be found primarily in the lengthy final chapter of the first volume. This is the chapter entitled 'Some Considerations Concerning the Present State and Probable Future of the Three Races that Inhabit the Territory of the United States'. To a late twentieth century Australian reader, Tocqueville's turning his attention to the role and conditions of Indians and Negroes appears too long deferred. In an essay entitled 'On Tocqueville and Jacksonian America', Sean Wilentz critiques Tocqueville's blind spots vis-a-vis the slaves and the free blacks, asserting that 'Where Tocqueville's analysis of democracy fell short was in its failure to probe the deeper paradoxes of slavery and freedom.'[7]
As I am not an historian or a political theorist but a literary critic, I can only comment on the impressions which Tocqueville's words about Native Americans and African Americans convey to me. In relation to the former, I notice ambiguous intimations of that very nineteenth century concept of 'the dying race' in Tocqueville's first chapter. 'The ruin of these peoples began as soon as the Europeans landed on their shores; it has continued ever since and is coming to completion in our own day. Providence, when it placed them amid the riches of the New World, seems to have granted them a short lease only; they were there, in some sense, only waiting.' (30) He is quite specific in the tenth chapter in his prediction that the Indians are 'doomed to perish'. (326)
In the first chapter of Part III of the second volume, Tocqueville ponders the human capacity for empathy. He suggests that, when there is inequality in rank and circumstance, people have historically proven themselves generally incapable of feeling compassion and collegiality in the face of the suffering of their 'inferiors'. I read this as Tocqueville's reflection - whether consciously or sub-consciously intended - upon his own limited capacity for egalitarian feeling. As I read his words on 'Indians' and on 'Negroes' throughout Democracy in America, I conclude that he is far more empathetically involved with the plight of the Native Americans than with that of the African Americans. Although he deplores slavery, for him the blacks are definitely 'other' and the white man assumed to be possessed of 'physical and moral superiority'. (357) Although he represents the Native Americans as perplexing and self-destructive, Tocqueville cedes them considerably more dignity and inherent rights as the original occupants of the land. Yet, in what looks like cognitive dissonance to a late twentieth century Australian reader, he can elsewhere assert that 'America is an empty land'. (277)
I will now go briefly over some of Tocqueville's other observations - some of which seem as true to the American-watcher now as they did to him in the 1930s, and some of which appear to reflect a lost past. Firstly some of Tocqueville's remarks on mores. In his chapter on honor in the second volume, he asserts that:
All those vices which tend to impair the purity of morals and the stability of marriage are treated in America with a severity unknown in the rest of the world. At first sight this seems in strange contrast to their tolerance in other matters. One is surprised to find in one and the same nation a morality so relaxed and so austere. (622)
It is difficult not to think of the relatively recent impeachment trial of President Clinton. I am also reminded by many of Tocqueville's comments on American morality of the sociological study undertaken by Robert Bellah and colleagues in 1985, entitled Habits of the Heart. This is not surprising, of course, since they take their title from a phrase in Democracy in America. It has been a long time since I read Habits of the Heart, and the one thing I clearly recall is the emphasis on each person's freedom to define his or her own moral principles in the United States, the implication of which is ultimately that the country is a moral vacuum. Given the Calvinist heritage of the United States, this moral isolationism is a paradox. Another of Tocqueville's persistent themes, which is not unrelated to that paradox, is the desire to accumulate wealth and material possessions as the dominant motivation of Americans. This too seems consistent with contemporary consumer culture.
Tocqueville's observations about the political system warrant some remark. In the first volume, in a brief passage on corruption in the political system, Tocqueville remarks that 'Perhaps there are just as many men for sale in democracies [as in aristocracies], but there are hardly any buyers; besides, one would have to buy too many men at the same time to attain one's end.' (220) Clearly he can't be expected to have foreseen the power of corporations in the United States in the twentieth century, nor the amounts of money necessary to secure a seat in a state senate, let alone in federal politics. Certainly, Tocqueville's summary comment on American foreign policy no longer obtains. 'American policy towards the world at large is simple; one might almost say that no one needs them, and they do not need anybody.' (131) I have written elsewhere about the speeches of Madeleine Albright, specifically about the contexts of her repeated use of the phrase 'the world's indispensable nation'. (Neilson, 1998) It is true that the world does now need the United States, but it is also true - if one reads beneath the official rhetoric - that the United States, in the persons of its rulers - is anxious to be needed.
At one point Tocqueville states that his chief aim in writing Democracy in America is to combat the widespread apathy as regards political involvement which he perceives as one of the dangers of democracy. (671) Gore Vidal shares this preoccupation with him, along with a magisterially world-weary nonchalance of style. Through his essays and novels Vidal has attempted for decades to persuade his compatriots to critique their conditioning, which leads vast numbers on the one hand to believe that the United States is the best place on earth, and as many others to believe that it is pointless to vote in elections. Vidal in his pessimistic mode ends this paper. The following is from his 'alternative''State of the Union' address, 1980.
The time has come to hold another constitutional convention. Those conservatives known as liberals have always found this notion terrifying because they are convinced that the powers of darkness will see to it that the Bill of Rights is abolished. This is always a possibility, but sometimes it's best to know the worst all at once rather than to allow those rights to be slowly taken away from us by, let us say, the present majority of the Supreme Court [...]
In the development of a new Constitution, serious attention should be paid to the Swiss political arrangement.Its cantonal system is something that might work for us. The United States could be divided into autonomous regions: northern California, Oregon and Washington would make a fine social Democratic society, while the combined states of Texas, Arizona, and Oklahoma could bring back slavery and the minstrel show. There ought to be something for everybody to choose from in the United States, rather than the current homogenized overcentralized state that the Bank has saddled us with.[8]
The last word is from Vidal's essay entitled 'Patriotism', published in 1991.
Certainly, it is very hard for most Americans to be patriotic when there is no agreed-upon country to cherish, only warring tribes and, over all, a National Security State to keep the lid on - $300 billion a year for law and order. There is one nation for a black, one for a boat-person, a third for a Cherokee, and milk and honey for that one-fifth of the population with money. What we are now witnessing is not so much the disintegration of the United States (less dramatic than that of the Soviet Union but no less inexorable) as the brand-new realization that we are never going to integrate in order to form a more perfect nation-state of the sort that Bismarck and Lincoln dreamed of. There is a flight from the center everywhere. Simultaneously, there is a centripetal movement toward the creation of a single world state in order to preserve, protect and defend the human race - from itself.[9]
Heather Neilson is currently (2003) a Senior Lecturer in English in the school of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW@ADFA. She has previously taught at the universities of Melbourne, Sydney and Western Australia. She obtained a D. Phil from the University of Oxford, on the subject of Gore Vidal's use of history in his fiction.
Works Consulted
Bellah, Robert, et al. 1985. Habits of the Heart. California: Berkeley.
De Tocqueville, Alexis, 1988. Democracy in America. Trans. from the French by George Lawrence. Ed. J.P. Mayer. New York: Harper Perennial.
Eisenstadt, Abraham S. (ed.). 1988. Reconsidering Tocqueville's Democracy in America. London: Rutgers UP.
Forgie, George. 1979. Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age. New York: W.W. Norton.
Kennedy, Paul. 1987, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York: Random House.
Neilson, Heather. 1998. 'Big Words: Issues in American Self-Representation'. The Australasian Journal of American Studies. Vol. 17, No.1: 3-21.
Schleifer, James T. 1980. The Making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Stanton, Robert J. and Vidal, Gore (eds.) 1980. Views From a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart.
Vidal, Gore. 1973. Burr. New York: Random House.
Vidal, Gore. 1984. Lincoln. London: Heinemann.
Vidal, Gore. 1993. United States: Essays 1952-1992. London: Andre Deutsch.
Von Frank, Albert J. 1994. An Emerson Chronology. New York: G.K. Hall & Co.
[1]See Chapter 17 of Part III of Volume 2, entitled 'How the Aspect of Society in the United States is at Once Agitated and Monotonous'.
[2] Pages 95, 178, 195, 343, 365.
[3] 'H.L. Mencken the Journalist.' (Vidal, 1993, 750-767), 753.
[4] (Vidal, 1993, 58-66), 59.
[5]See in particular Forgie's Chapters 2 and 7.
[6] See Schleifer's seventh chapter.
[7] In Eisenstadt (207-228), 222.
[8] (Vidal, 1993, 938-951), 942-943.
[9] (Vidal, 1993, 1045-1047).