the New Pantagruel

The American Individual Today

by Peter Augustine Lawler

This is the introduction from Stuck With Virtue: The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future in the Religion and Contemporary Culture series, forthcoming from ISI Books in October 2005.

tuck With Virtue (Religion and Contemporary Culture)

by Peter Augustine Lawler

The guiding premise of this book is that we tend to think of ourselves today as individuals—as opposed to parents, children, friends, citizens, or creatures. I have a very particular definition of the individual in mind: To think of oneself as an individual is to think in the first person, or to think that everything exists for me. To be an individual is to be a free agent, unencumbered by church, country, family, friendship, love, or any other form of social or communal duty. The individual—as individual—is the center of the universe. Nothing existed before me, and when I am gone, all is gone. Every moment of my life should be determined by calculation concerning what is best for me, and so all my human connections should be the product of conscious and selfish consent. I surrender my freedom as soon as I think of myself as part of a whole greater than myself or lose my mind in love with someone else.

We individuals believe, in fact, that we live freely and truthfully only when we live in the first person. That’s why as our famous French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, says in Democracy in America, “Americans are pleased to explain almost all the actions of their life with the aid of self-interest rightly understood” (volume 2, part 2, chapters 8-9). A free and enlightened individual, we take pleasure in bragging, “resists instinct in all encounters and reasons coldly about all the acts of his life.” Rather than “blindly yielding” to love or any other passionate enthusiasm, the individual as individual has the habitual capacity for “sacrificing without effort the pleasure of the moment to the permanent interests of his whole life.” Individual sacrifices of momentary passion or enjoyment are not really blind, because they are not really sacrifices at all: They only defer gratification with the intention of maximizing and prolonging it. Genuine sacrifice is for suckers, for bees, ants, ignorant and superstitious monks, and the other mindlessly communal animals.

The individual, the product of theorizing by liberal philosophers such as John Locke, is an abstract being without many of the natural social qualities characteristic of real human beings. When he or she boasts, Tocqueville notes, the individual exaggerates the freedom or ability to govern himself or herself (that is, not to be governed by other human beings, nature, or God) with his or her individualistic “philosophy.” And our Constitution is largely based on this individualistic, Lockean philosophy of self-government. We Americans consent to be governed as individuals. Sovereign individuals, from this view, are like sovereign states, and therefore government is nothing more than a treaty or compact among sovereigns. Just as sovereign states, in fact, can withdraw from treaties without being invaded, sovereign individuals can withdraw from any or all of the social ties to which they have consented to be bound when those ties no longer serve their self-interest. As the unionist Orestes Brownson complained in The American Republic (1865), Lockean theory could provide no argument against the Southern states’ assertion of “the right of secession” that was the cause of the Civil War—and the Lockean argument used by the Confederate states was destructive not only of government but of all social life. The theory of the individual, in fact, has no argument against the individual’s assertion of a “right of secession” from whatever binds him to other human beings or to God. Brownson, almost a century and a half ago, saw clearly what Lockean theory could do to marriage, the family, friendship, and churches, not to mention nations and citizens. He saw that the theory of the individual gives no adequate account of the citizen’s loyalty to his country, no adequate account of human loyalty or responsibility at all. That is why Brownson attempted to explain why the Lockean theory of our framers could not really account adequately for the enduring Constitution they had created. They must have built better than they knew, or thought they knew. In truth, of course, our founders were more than Lockean theorists, and more than sovereign individuals.

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