The American Paradox: Individualism and Conformity
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Of great significance in a study of individualism is the paradox in the American character, the American’s desire of both wanting to belong and to be independent. This dualism, perhaps best explained in terms of “individualism” and “conformity”, has been a popular subject in the writings of European travelers and journalists as well as native sages. In the process they have stressed the influence of the majority, of numbers, in the shaping of the American. Because in America “the interests of the many are to be preferred to those of the few,” wrote de Tocqueville, public opinion encroaches upon independence of mind. Whereas authority of the king of Europe was purely physical, in America “authority of the majority” was both “physical and moral.” What de Tocqueville defined as “tyranny of the majority,” his contemporary, Harriet Martineau, described as the American’s “worship of opinion.”
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James Fenimore Cooper, whose Leather-Stocking Tales glorified the simplicity of life in nature, in the forests, wrote in ‘The Sea Lions’ that it “is every hour becoming less and less possible for an American to maintain his rights” against the will of the majority. A perceptive critic of society, Cooper warned that the “influence of numbers is increasing in force, and threatens consequences which may set at naught the well-devised schemes of the last generation for the security of the state, and the happiness” of the people. Writing half a century later, Lord James Bryce in The American commonwealth elaborated on the American’s submission to majority opinion. “This tendency to acquiescence,” he argued, “this sense of the insignificance of individual effort,” disinclines individuals to battle for their own opinions. For an individual ever to stand alone, he must have “some special spring of inward strength.”
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Though Americans have always been suspicious of too much regulation and fearful of too much conformity in society, post-World War II sociological studies by David Riesman, William Whyte and C. Wright Mills, among others, revealed the excessive conformist nature of the American. In ‘The Lonely Crowd’ Riesman described urban upper-middle class Americans as other-directed types, unduly influenced by other peoples’ tastes and values. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s description of the peer-oriented person as analogous to a handbag on a counter lucidly illustrates the conformists’ reliance on others for his source of direction. “Like the handbag, one has to be in fashion on the personality market, and in order to be in fashion one has to know what kind of personality is most in demand. This knowledge,” he explained in ‘Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics’ “is transmitted in a general way throughout the whole process of education, from kindergarten to college, and implemented by the family.”
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Rejecting the well-worn paths of behaviour, Americans in the 1960s and 70s reasserted the right of individuals to share in those decisions which determine the quality and direction of their lives. Youths, middle-aged and elderly people, black and white, men and women, gave new life to the idea of individual independence. In the tradition of American Romantics and early twentieth-century. Pragmatists like Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, social critics in the sixties sought to come to grips with life, experience, process, and personal growth. The only test of “probable truth,” William James had written, “is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted.” The attempt on the part of the individual to be whole man alive has also been a central theme in contemporary novels by Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud, and Truman Capote.
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Recent American culture encourages individuals to replace what is routine and habitual with more personally rewarding experiences. “Everywhere,” writes the literary critic Benjamin DeMott in Surviving the 70s “the same themes sound: the will to possess one’s experience rather than to be possessed by it, the longing to live one’s own life rather than be lived by it, the drive for a more various selfhood than men have known before.” People in all walks of life are attempting to live more creatively and imaginatively, voluntarily welcoming more vital experiences in their lives.
