The inability to mind our own business
John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards (1992), pages: 503-504:
Buddhist societies are horrified by a great deal in the West, but the element which horrifies them most is our obsession with ourselves as a subject of unending interest. By their standards nothing could be unhealthier than a guilt-ridden1, self-obsessed, proselytizing white male or female, selling God or democracy or liberalism or capitalism with insistent superior modesty. It is clear to the Buddhist that this individual understands neither herself nor his place. He is ill at ease in his role; mal dans sa peau; a hypocrite taking out her frustrations on the world.
As for the contemporary liberated Westerner, who thinks of himself relaxed, friendly, open, in tune with himself and eager to be in tune with others – he comes across as even more revolting. He suffers from the same confused superiority as his guilt-ridden predecessor but has further confused himself by pretending that he doesn’t feel superior. While the Westerner does not see or consciously understand this, the outsider sees it immediately. The Westerner’s inability to mind his own business shows a lack of civilization. Among his most unacceptable characteristics is determination to reveal what he thinks of himself – his marriages, divorces and children; his feelings and loves. […] Any man or woman produced by the Judeo-Christian tradition is dying to confess – unasked, if necessary. What the Buddhist seeks in the individual is, first, that he understands he is part of a whole and therefore of limited interest as a part and, second, to the extant that he tries to deal with the problem of his personal existence, he does so in a private manner. The individual who appears to sail upon calm waters is a man of quality. Any storms he battles within are his own business.
Of what, then, does Western individualism consist? There was a vision, in the 19th Century, of the individualist as one who acted alone. He had to do so within the constrains of a well-organized society. Even the the most anti-restraint of thinkers – John Stuart Mill – put it that ‘the liberty of the individual must be thus far limited, he must no make himself a nuisance to other people’.2
But if the constraints of 19th Century Western civilization did put him in danger of causing a nuisance, he could simply go, or be sent to the frontiers of North and South America or to Australasia. […] Rimbaud fled Paris and poetry for an isolated Abyssinian trading post, where his chief business was rifles and slaves. This personal freedom killed him, as it did many others. […] Even without leaving the West, a man eager for individual action could find room for maneuver within the rough structures which stretched beyond the 19C middle-class society. In the slums, hospitals and factories, men from suffocating backgrounds could struggle against evil or good as if they were at war. By the 1920s, the worst of these rough patches were gone and the individual’s scope of action was seriously limited. In a stable, middle-class society, restraint was highly prized. Curiously enough, this meant that, with even the smallest unrestrained act, a man could make a nuisance of himself and thus appear to be an individual. 3
This is one explanation for the rise of artistic individualism – a form of existentialism which did not necessarily mean leaving your country, although it often did involve moving to the margins of society. The prototypes were Byron and Shelley, who fled in marital disorder across Europe, calling for political revolution along the way. Lermontov was another early model – exiled to the Caucasus, where he fought frontier wars, wrote against the central powers he hated and engaged in private duels. Victor Hugo was a later and grander example …4
Footnotes
1. In Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels the A.I. Jill’s analysis of punishment incorporates the thought that guilt is a result of our self-aware modeling, our recognition that we have failed somehow in the mind’s of Others. Jill thinks (p.417): ‘The self-aware individual in a judgment-society experiences guilt as a matter of course; to lack guilt, the individual must be poor at modeling and therefore inefficient in society, perhaps even criminal’. This line of argument is introduced on page 211, with the pseudo-author Bhuwani quote: ‘With self-awareness comes a sharper awareness of one’s place in society, and an awareness of transgression – that is, guilt.’
2. Consider how we live in a culture that makes a currency out of misery and problems, so that you end up talking about them in some social situation or another. How with someone you are likely to start gossiping about another person, their relationships and such, even though it’s none of your business. But, if you catch yourself doing this and want to take the high road and refuse to discuss what’s none of your business, you are more likely to hurt your conversant’s feelings. One needs to trade social information to maintain good relations. Similarly, one gets into discussing one’s problems for similar reasons. Trade your stories of misery so that we know you’re a member of the group, so that the others can feel good trying to help you and live with the illusion that they are either compassionate or not as bad off, and thus a little superior.
But, as above, becoming a nuisance to others by volunteering too much information about oneself is such a frequent occurrence nowadays. As Theodore Dalrymple as written, in this example describing an encounter with a dying man:
There had been no protest, no self-pity, no demand for special attention. He understood that I commiserated with him, though I said nothing except that I was sorry to see that he was unwell, but he understood also that my commiseration was of a degree commensurate with the degree of our acquaintance, and that demanded no extravagant and therefore dishonest expression. By controlling his emotion, and his grief at his own imminent death, so that he should not embarrass me, he maintained his dignity, and self-respect. He retained a sense of social obligation, a vital component of what used to be called character, until the very end of his life. I mention these people not because they were in any way extraordinary – a claim they would never have made for themselves – but because they were so ordinary. They were living up to a cultural ideal that, if not universal, was certainly very widespread (as my [foreign] wife would confirm). It is an ideal that I find admirable, because it entails a quasi-religious awareness of the metaphysical equality of mankind: that I am no more important than you. This was no mere intellectual or theoretical construct; it was an ideal that was lived. Unlike the claim to rights, which is often shrill and is almost so self-regarding that it makes the claimant the center of his own moral universe, the old cultural ideal was other-regarding and social in nature. It imposed demands upon the self, not upon others; it was a discipline rather than a benefit. Oddly enough, it led to a greater and deeper contentment, capacity for genuine personal achievement, and tolerance of eccentricity and nonconformity than our present, more egotistical ideals.
Dalrymple has said [in the CBC Ideas podcast, ‘The Ideas of Theodore Dalrymple’] that we treat emotion as type of pus that we feel must be released or else harm occurs. One ‘has to let one’s hair down’ etc; the abandonment of civilized restraint is popularly believed to be psychologically healthy.
3. Curiously enough, this meant that, with even the smallest unrestrained act, a man could make a nuisance of himself and thus appear to be an individual. Consider how at the 15th minute of Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan bio-documentary, No Direction Home (Part I) we get the interviews with Manchester’s 1966 youth, who are critical of Dylan’s turn to electric guitars and the apparent abandonment of his previous acoustic folk singing. The young men are thoughtful in their answers, but one says he thinks Dylan’s gone commercial, that he thinks ‘he’s prostituting himself’. ‘Prostituting himself’ is said as it comes to mind, said strongly into the camera’s lens, and when finished this boy smiles slightly, proud of his act of strong words. This is soon followed by a young man whose thoughts on it are equally considered but at 15:41 he says, ‘this I just can’t stick,’ and then catches himself with sudden upraised eyebrows and a muttered ‘excuse [me]’, as if we was expecting a whack upside the head from a schoolmaster for his indiscretion.
Of course, in today’s world, such young men (and women) would be inarticulate and full of (probably drunken) swagger, wearing some fucking t-shirt with a message printed across it and saying whatever came to mind, and if it needed bleeping, so be it.
4. Of the likes of Byron: the so called romantic figure, the romantic genius. Richard Rorty, (an excerpt from an audio interview, played on Australian ABC’s Philosopher’s Zone in their tribute program after his death) said:
I think individual romantic figures like Coleridge, Emerson, Whitman, Nietzsche, Derrida, are people who are engaged in romantic projects of self-creation, and this means, in the case of thinkers and poets, finding words that have never been spoken before, words that have no public currency, no public resonance, though they may become the literal meanings, the common coin of future generations.
And in an interview conducted for the RU Sirius program in August 2005, Rorty said,
Novels certainly suggest new ways of doing things. Revolutionary political manifestos, poems, religious prophecies, they all stimulate the youth to make themselves different from their parents and thus produce a human future different from the human past.
He had made similar points before, and this can be found in his 1989 book, Contigency, Irony, and Solidarity (on page 7):
What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than reason, is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. What the political utopians since the French Revolution have sensed is not that an enduring, substratal human nature has been suppressed or repressed by ‘unnatural’ or ‘irrational’ social institutions but rather that changing languages and other social practices may produce beings of a sort that had never before existed.
The previous pages had this:
Europe did not decide to accept the idiom of Romantic poetry, or of socialist politics, or of Galilean mechanics. That sort of shift was no more an act of will than it was a result of argument. Rather, Europe lost the habit of using certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using others. As Kuhn argues in The Copernican Revolution, we did not decide on the basis of some telescopic observations … that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, that macroscopic behavior could be explained on the basis of microstructural motion, and that prediction and control should be the principal aim of scientific theorizing. Rather, after a hundred years of inconclusive muddle, the Europeans found themselves speaking in a way which took these interlocked theses for granted.
In other words, the contributions made by the 19th Century ‘romantic figures of self-creation’ was to add new, inspirational language to the discussion, through their novels, plays, and poems. In the case of Rimbaud, the package of consists in adding to the language and then the example of abandonment.
To be engaged in such a project, of discovering for oneself both a language and life, required defiance, and it created the contemporary social condition that John Ralston Saul describes in the chapter from which I took the excerpt above. JRS’ point is to say that the conditions of defiance in the 19th Century is far different from that of the late 20th and early 21st. This is because, as Rorty says on page 55 of the Contingency book:
The creation of a new form of cultural life, a new vocabulary, will have its utility explained only retrospectively. We cannot see Christianity or Newtonianism or the Romantic movement or political liberalism as a tool while we are still in the course of figuring out how to use it. For there are as yet no clearly formulatable ends to which it is a means. But once we figure out how to use the vocabularies of these movements, we can tell a story of progress, showing how the literalization of certain metaphors served the purpose of making possible all the good things that have recently happened. Further, we can now view all these good things as particular instances of some more general good, the overall end which the movement served. […] Christianity did not know that its purpose was the alleviation of cruelty, Newton did not know that his purpose was modern technology, the Romantic poets did not know that their purpose was to contribute to the development of an ethical consciousness suitable for the culture of political liberalism. But we now know these things, for we latecomers can tell the kind of story of progress which those who are actually making progress cannot. We can view these people as toolmakers rather than discoverers because we have a clear sense of the product which the use of those tools produced. The product is us – our conscience, our culture, our form of life. Those who made us possible could not have envisaged what they were making possible, and so could not have described the ends to which their work was a means. But we can.
JRS’ point in this chapter is to critique how our culture which supposedly privileges romantic rebellion, is in fact conformist. As he says, closing the section from which the excerpt is taken: ‘Today’s individualism can’t really be compared to all this existential activity. Is there a relationship between frontiersman and the self-pampering modern dentist? Between the French Legionnaire and the downhill-skiing Porsche driver? Between the responsible citizen of a secular democracy and the executive cocaine sniffer? All these people were and are engaged in a form of defiance. But there does not appear to be much room for comparison. The phenomena belong to separate worlds.’
The world that we belong to has been created by the example of the 19th Century Romantics, but we do not carry on their legacy. Rather (as a society) we’ve found new ways to conform, ways which we aren’t fully conscious, or understanding of. In the process, we have now generally become more obnoxious, since our defiance has become normalized. We’ve become nuisances to one another, without having experienced the peace of mind that comes from minding our own business. Within this circumstance their is still a need for individuals-who-wish-to-do-so to act out in ‘romantic projects of self-creation’ yet one hopes that they strive to create a new language, rather than learn to speak an already established one.
Therefore hipsters, shave your mustaches.