What's So Great About America (19 page)

The philosopher Charles Taylor—whose interpretation of Rousseau I rely on throughout this chapter—expounds Rousseau's
new idea: “There is a way of being human that is
my
way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else's. If I do not, I miss the point of my life. I miss what being human is for
me
.”
¹²
By insisting that each of us has an original way of being human, Rousseau is articulating the idea of individuality. But he is doing a lot more than that. Rousseau insists that in determining the unique course of one's life, the self is sovereign. To the American founders' list of freedoms, Rousseau adds a new one: inner freedom. In its most important manifestation, inner freedom is moral freedom—the freedom to determine what is good. But inner freedom also encompasses the broad range of choices that make one's life richer and more fulfilling. Rousseau argues that in deciding what to become, whom to marry, how to live, I should not go by the dictates of my parents, or my teachers, or my preachers, or even God. I should decide for myself alone.

How should I decide? By digging deep within myself. By consulting my inner compass, what Rousseau calls the “interior guide that never abandons us.”
¹³
For Rousseau, we are beings with inner depths. The principles of truth, he writes, are “engraved in all hearts” and to discover what is right in a given situation, all we have to do is “commune with oneself.”
¹⁴
As the Savoyard Vicar puts it in Rousseau's
Emile,
“I do not derive these rules from the principles of high philosophy, but I find them written by nature in ineffaceable characters at the bottom of my heart.”
¹⁵
Here Rousseau is giving expression to the idea of authenticity, of being true to oneself.

It is a massively important idea. Before Rousseau, no one believed that each human life should follow its own distinctive moral course, nor did anyone think of giving the inner self—the
voice of nature within us—final authority in determining that course. Rousseau's view emerged in resistance to an earlier view, according to which morality was a matter of costs and benefits. For Rousseau, calculation is the ethic of the
bourgeois,
the man of commerce. “Ancient politicians incessantly talked about morals and virtue,” Rousseau writes. “Those of our time talk only of business and money.”
¹⁶

Rousseau's objection to the
bourgeois
is that he is a bit of a low character. His main goals are to improve his financial situation and move to a nicer neighborhood. The
bourgeois
wants to look good, smell clean, and have regular bowel movements. Medical checkups are a big thing with him; he wants to postpone death as long as possible. The
bourgeois
is far more concerned with his portfolio than with his soul. He spends all day doing corporate accounts or selling pest-control products, yet he is satisfied in his work. But how can one derive satisfaction from recording transactions all day, or from killing rats and cockroaches? The b
ourgeois
is a man of limited horizons. However picayune his function, he is proud of his “work ethic.” But as Oscar Wilde once noted, to have to do laborious work like sweeping floors and adding up numbers is depressing enough; to take
pride
in such things is absolutely appalling.

Rousseau's strongest complaint against the
bourgeois
is that he professes to be moral while acting like a mercenary. His virtues are entirely based on selfish calculation: he treats other people well in order to make a bigger profit. The
bourgeois
man doesn't care about being good; he only wants to appear good. His overriding concern is with his reputation. And in his social life, the
bourgeois
is obsessed with foolish vanity. Even his opinion of himself is
derived from how he is perceived by others. His personality is so shaped by convention that he no longer knows who he really is. He is estranged from his own nature. He is a faker and a hypocrite. Even worse, he is not free because all his priorities and indeed his very identity are dependent on others. The conformity of the bourgeois is the mark of his unfreedom. Rousseau's charges are precisely the ones that the young people of the 1960s launched against their parents.

Against the false values of the
bourgeois
—against his artificiality and hypocrisy—Rousseau offered the alternative of primitive man, natural man, of Homo sapiens before the advent of civilization. Rousseau admits that natural man may never have really existed: he is a kind of mental construct, a “hypothesis.” Nevertheless, Rousseau finds it very illuminating to imagine what such a man might be like. He would be a savage, yes, but a noble savage. His selfishness would be confined to meeting his immediate bodily needs. Confronted by suffering on the part of his fellows, natural man would feel pity. Natural man is not virtuous—he doesn't even know what that is—but he does have a basic innocence and goodness. Natural man is without vanity or pretense, the evils that Rousseau believes have been introduced by “civilization.” Rousseau also admires natural man because he is free: he has no prescribed duties, obeys no one, and follows no law other than his own will.

Still, Rousseau is under no illusion that modern people can recover natural man. Having been imbued with civilization, we cannot now return to the forest and live with the bears. But if a return to nature is impossible, Rousseau argues that there is a second option available to us. We can recover the voice of nature
in us. If man's original home cannot be restored as a place, it can be restored as a state of mind. Charles Taylor terms this “self-determining freedom.” In Taylor's words, “I am free when I decide for myself what concerns me, rather than being shaped by external influences. Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves. Self-determining freedom demands that I break the hold of external impositions, and decide for myself alone.”
¹⁷

It is only when the layers of artificiality and convention are removed that one's true self emerges. For Rousseau, the true self is characterized by originality, sincerity, and compassion. He makes virtues out of all three. In his
Confessions
Rousseau writes, “I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence.”
¹⁸
Rousseau proves the point by giving us an autobiography like none that was written before him. Commenting on Rousseau's revelations, Irving Babbit writes, “Never has a man of such undoubted genius shown himself so lacking in humility and decency.”
¹⁹
Rousseau raises the curtain on all kinds of forbidden experiences, including masturbation, adultery, voyeurism, visits to brothels, even incest and sadomasochism. Far from being embarrassed about discussing such topics, Rousseau revels in them.

Yet there is nothing cheap or sordid about Rousseau. He deals with intimate experiences with such passion, tenderness, and seriousness that the overall effect is to heighten our fascination. Generations of critics have denounced Rousseau as self-indulgent, disgusting, and perverted. They have noted that he fathered several children out of wedlock and then abandoned them to an orphanage; Rousseau can be seen as the original deadbeat dad.
But none of these criticisms has diminished Rousseau's appeal. Rousseau's answer to them is something like the following: If I am not worth as much as you are, at least I am different. I may not be as virtuous, but I am my own person. You may not like my self-description, but you have to credit me with giving an honest account of myself. You may find me unappealing, but at least I am sincere. Finally, if I have not lived an irreproachable life, I am a well-meaning and good person, and I care. The reader may recognize in this portrait the moral code of a certain American ex-president.

T
o understand why Rousseau's ideas are so controversial, to see why their consolidation in the 1960s and 1970s continues to torment and divide Americans, it is helpful to contrast Rousseau's
Confessions
with another book of the same title: the
Confessions
of St. Augustine. Augustine, of course, was one of the early church fathers, and at first glance his account of morality seems to be quite similar to that of Rousseau. “I entered into the depths of my soul,” Augustine writes, “and with the eye of my soul I saw the Light that never changes casting its rays over me.”
²⁰
In Augustine's view, God is not to be found “out there” but within our hearts. God is the interior light that powers our souls.

Both Augustine and Rousseau counsel inwardness as the means to truth. Rousseau's innovation is to cut off this quest from any external source of authority, including that of God. For Rousseau the self
defines
what is good; the inner light is the final arbiter of how I should live my life. Augustine, by contrast, presumed
that the inward journey is merely the pathway to the Creator. The inner light is controlled by an outer source, and that is God. Another way to put it is that Augustine presumes that there is a moral order in the universe that is separate from us and that makes claims on us. The existence of such an order was taken for granted by virtually all the great thinkers of the ancient world—Christian and non-Christian, Western and non-Western, believers as well as atheists.
²¹
Its laws were considered no less valid than, say, the laws governing the motion of the tides and the planets.

In America, of course, the moral order was represented by Christianity. Intellectuals have been rebelling against the Christian order for several centuries. But I think it is fair to say that until the 1950s—the era of the “greatest generation”—the Christian paradigm held firm in America. It had been modified over time to take into account the multiplicity of Christian denominations, as well as the presence of Jews—hence the attempt at forging a Judeo-Christian synthesis. Despite these accommodations, the vast majority of Americans in the 1950s believed that, for human beings in general, there was a “right way” to live and a “wrong way” to live, and they were pretty confident that they knew the difference between the two. There was a whole moral framework that this group took for granted.

What changed in the 1960s in America is the collapse of this framework, the erosion of belief in this external order. For the first time many people, especially young people, began to find the external rules arbitrary, senseless, and oppressive. The counterculture did not reject morality; it was passionately concerned with morality. But it substituted Rousseau's conception of the inner compass for the old rules of obligation. Getting in touch
with one's feelings and being true to oneself were now more important than conforming to the preexisting moral consensus of society. By embracing the new morality, the children of the 1960s became incomprehensible to their parents. And as this new generation inherited the reins of power, its ethos entered the mainstream. As a consequence of this change, America became a different country.

The magnitude of the change is evident when we consider the philosophical presuppositions of the “old morality” and the “new morality.” The old morality was based on the premise that human nature is flawed. Since human beings are inclined to do bad things, consulting the inner self becomes a very misguided thing to do. The self is the enemy; the self is under the sway of the passions; the self must be overcome. The wayward passions must be ruled by the mind or brought to submission by the will. Through reason or revelation, human beings acquire knowledge of the external order. Conformity to that order is the measure of how good a person you are. And the institutions of society should be devised in such a way as to steer flawed or sinful human beings away from temptation and to keep them on the straight path.

Rousseau turns this paradigm upside down. For him, human nature is basically good. It is society that corrupts man. The means of this corruption is reason, which is deployed to enable one man to advance above another, to accumulate more than the other, to appear good in the eyes of everybody. Since reason has become an instrument of sordid calculation, it is the enemy of morality and truth. In order to discover what is good and true, we must set aside reason and be in touch with our feelings. This is the romantic element in Rousseau. According to him, feelings never
lie because they speak with the voice of nature itself. By listening to that inner voice, and following it, we can rise above the corruptions and compromises that society seeks from us, and we can recover our natural goodness.

The triumph of Rousseau's worldview gives rise to a new set of problems that could not have arisen under the old order. In earlier eras people didn't have “identity crises” because their moral identity was supplied by the ethical framework that they all took for granted. This ethical framework might emphasize different virtues in different times or places—thus one society emphasizes the warrior ethic, another the ascetic life, a third the life of production and the family. The challenge that people faced was one of living up to the moral order. The Spartan soldier might have wondered whether he was courageous enough not to retreat in the face of certain death. The medieval Christian monk might have doubted his ability to live by the Benedictine Rule. Undoubtedly there were members of the “greatest generation” who struggled to conform to the demands imposed on them by the regnant code: to remain faithful to their wives, go to church on Sunday, show up for battle when drafted, and so on. But in each case some external framework remained in place and provided an unquestioned standard by which human action was judged.