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Residential
College
Commencement 2000 Democratic
Individualism
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And home again, for an afternoon, I can’t help picking up where I left off in the early 1990s; so I’m going to be presumptuous enough to give you one more Core lecture – don’t worry, mini-lecture-- this one on those brilliant 19th century classics, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his two most beloved intellectual offspring, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. I want, in particular, to talk about aspects of the Character they each hoped inspire by their Words, I mean the blessed soul of democratic individuality. Emerson had said, speaking in the shadow of Christian prophecy and with more than a little chutzpah, that “the world is young. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly worlds.” It was in response to that clarion provocation that Thoreau called Walden scripture and Whitman called Leaves of Grass his Bible. I want to comment today on these transcendentalist figures, among other reasons, because, of all UNC-Greensboro’s nooks and crannies, I believe that Residential College exhales their spirit, I mean the institution and its people – its students, its staff, and its faculty – incarnate the memorizing, the institutions and practices, and the aspirations, of democratic individuality. Thank you, Residential College, for helping a very great deal, to keep this American hope alive. True life, Emerson said in his profound essay ‘Circles,’ begins in abandonment. It begins when we realize that whatever and wherever and whenever we feel settled, it is probably time to move out and away, at least spiritually speaking. This is a hard lesson, and Emerson knew it, because, as I think most all of us feel, home is where the heart is, or at least home is where the heart begins. But with all due appreciation for the families assembled today, Emerson, recalling another gospel, urged his followers to leave their mothers and fathers, and brothers and sisters, and follow -- not him, or Him, – but their Spirit. This was imperative, he thought, because the genuine spiritual issue in our lives had not as much to do with where our hearts begin, and not as much to do with what our hearts are now. On the contrary, the persistent spiritual issue is what our hearts become. In leaving this dear home which is Residential College at UNC-Greensboro, good people, its graduating students, by embarking, open themselves up to all the adventures – and risks – attending a life that spiritually, is thrown or throws itself into a space betwixt and between past settlement, this settlement now, and more settlements in the future: they open themselves up to becoming, indeed, if you’ll pardon the pun, to becoming even more becoming. You, Residential Collegians, open yourselves up to the opportunities and privileges, and responsibilities and hard work of American democratic individuality. So let me memorialize a little about this character that Residential College has done much to provoke in you. One hundred sixty three years ago, Emerson – Waldo to his friends – gave a speech that accompanied graduation from Harvard – the Residential College of the Northeast. He called that speech “The American Scholar.” And with that talk he raised the bar that future graduation speakers would try to vault over for more than one hundred fifty years. Before the turn into the 20th century, the masterful Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, had called that speech America’s Declaration of Literary Independence. In it, Emerson had waxed prophetic, chiding his charges, and through them, the whole American People, for being too timid, tame, indolent, complaisant, unimaginative, conformist, materialistic and utilitarian in the narrowest sense. He suggested that the time had come “when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill.” So far, he said, “the mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” To be sure, prophets don’t just chide people. They encourage them to become better. They try to distil a vision of national aspiration that will drive the people on to establish the sort of life, alone and together, for which they have become united. Along these lines, Waldo exhorted his graduating seniors and their families and friends in these terms: “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves.” “Who,” he said, “can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, shall one day be the pole star for a thousand years?” America was destined to become a fountain, not just of engineering ingenuity and material abundance, but of intellectual or conceptual or poetic power . I think he went wild with American exceptionalism when he predicted that the graduates had it within them to become the world’s eye and the world’s heart. They could enter, and inspire other people to enter, the world of thought actively, altering states of mind, and the world of action thoughtfully, reconstructing their environments in ways that might accommodate humanity in its most divine assignments, while assimilating themselves to their Mother earth in sensitive and sensible ways. And what was the work that needed to be done?. “One design,” Emerson said, “unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.” “Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit, not to be reckoned one character; -- not to yield that peculiar fruit which each [person] was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south?” “Not so,” he concluded, “we will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall no longer be a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of [humankind] and the love of [humankind] shall be a wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men [and women] will for the first time exist, because each believes [himself or herself] inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all [people].” For Emerson, as any student of ‘the core’ at Residential College knows, divinity took the side of individuals and flowed through them; deity became incarnate in individuals representative enough of what he called unifying “Soul,” or of “the Flying Perfect,” to contribute their unique gifts or talents or genius, not only for their own sake, but for the sake of our democratic life together. “The American Scholar” marked Emerson as the champion of self-reliance, of positive individuality, of that self-making person who was to become eponymous with American culture. If not unique, at least he, more than most, inspired us to go our own ways, cut our own trails, open our own roads, turn our own spades, wheel our own chairs, so long as we’re able! And that, surely, is part of what we faculty hope you graduates take away with you as you pass across the [now almost entirely imaginary] boundary-line distinguishing UNC-Greensboro from the workaday world. Make your mark, good people! Not only for you and yours but for we who have preceded you, and for those of us who sojourn with you, as well as those of us who, still unborn, will succeed you, when you each become shades, when you all will be remembered for what – over your scores of years – you will have accomplished or meant or continue to mean. But Emerson did not simply encourage each one of us to make her, or his, mark. That might suffice for a culture of people bent on aristocracy, or for people who thought of themselves as individuals who could rise out of the masses and above the herd. The whole point of Emerson’s work was to celebrate the excellence of people, and a people of peoples, in an equitable society, where the very idea of ‘the masses,’ along with its complement, ‘their betters,’ was abandoned, or would be, or should be. What he called his gospel message was democratic: to honor the dignity of each and all of the people living out an equitable life together. That involved taking responsibility for oneself. Dignity was to reside in being a person of one’s own making, being some body who had the courage to live deliberately with her own hands and feet and mind, so as not to discover, when she died, that she had not lived. Here Whitman celebrated the aspiration of every person to cast off embarrassment and feelings of self-rejection in order to emerge more fully as the being that he or she could become. In Democratic Vistas he says that “it remains to bring forward and to modify everything else with the idea of that Something a man is (last precious consolation of the drudging poor), standing apart from all else, divine in his own right, and a woman in her’s, sole and untouchable by any canons of authority, or any rule derived from precedent, state safety, the acts of legislatures, or even from what is called religion, modesty, or art.” For this sort of new democratic individual to become an actuality, two other elements had to be added to positive individuality or the ability of each of us to make and leave a mark. Emerson had tipped his hand in this regard, by noting that democratic individuality is characterized not only by self-reliance but also only by finding or making that “wreath of joy” embodied in sorts of affection for people, and then again by that “wall of defense” constructed out of the dread of people. One of the extra elements of individuality called for by democracy is what George Kateb, a teacher of mine, has called “negative individuality,” which, in part at any rate, emerges out of the dread of possible tyrannies of the majority. Negative individuality involves the capacity to drop archaic customs and resist vicious habits, to topple worn out conventions, and to disobey and reject bad laws, on the basis of a rigorous moral self-scrutiny or self-examination. We American democratic individualists not only encourage one another to leave our distinctive marks; we figure out ways to say ‘no’ to what we judge to be immoral. We try to inspire one another not to lend ourselves, our power, to wrongdoing, harm, cruelty, or atrocity; indeed we find ways to restrict one another from doing what I call ‘uggy’ things. We continually remind ourselves that we shall overcome poverty and injustice and demeaning prejudice some day, and we know such days will only unfold as we make ourselves oppose all the banal, if socially acceptable, ways in which we are party to brutalizing life. That, in part, was the message of Emerson’s intellectual offspring, Henry David Thoreau in his classic essays ‘On Civil Disobedience,’ and ‘Slavery in Massachusetts,” and in his ‘Eulogy on John Brown’. It was in such pieces, written in the 1840s and 50s, that Thoreau pointed to the irony that our most prevalent moral errors required the most disinterested virtues to sustain them. It was the duty-driven sinner, the person loyal to the government perpetrating slavery, or executing the forced removal of Cherokees and Choctaws along the wretched Trail of Tears , or, as he put it, barbecuing Mexicans in order to steal Texas, who was the object of his wrath, precisely because such a person perverted the great goods of loyalty and patriotism by having them enlisted in the service of evils. The genuinely virtuous person must be prepared to disobey; and that could well involve being prepared to engage in heresy, dissent, unorthodoxy, even sacrilegiousness. Self-definition must proceed, in part, by way of refusal. But the motive here, Thoreau argued, is not like Pontius Pilate’s – ritualistically washing our hands of guilt while standing by, letting cruelty go on. The real motive, Thoreau thought, was to take a stand in order to encourage others to do so as well. Encourage ourselves and others to do what? Among other things, to get off the backs and shoulders of others whom we burden in life-denying ways before and while we whistle our own tunes. This part of democratic individuality, this being counted on to reject bad norms, will always be a part of an American character, because the public commission of cruelty will never go away. But just as important, if not more, was
a third element of democratic individuality that was neither positive nor
negative but impersonal [See Kateb]. The break from authority, from
external regulation, when these things are found stultifying, or intrusive
of private rights, or demeaning to some of us, is not only
motivated by caring for our own – our own family, our own town, our own
nation, our own church, our own god or god[s] – it is also motivated by
compassion for others, including others who are different – and different
in more ways than Emerson or Thoreau or Whitman could imagine. This
is why individualism must be democratic. And this aspect of democratic
individuality, this virtue, is not news from nowhere. It takes a lot of
practice. It doesn’t spring up full blown from the head of Horatio Alger,
or from the heads of the Transcendentalists. To get enough distance
on your self and your own to have compassion for others among ‘We
the people,’ and then again, among peoples in the world outside our country
– people from other families, from other towns, from other nations,
from other states and kinds of states, from other religious institutions,
with other gods or none. You need to have learned the arts of impersonation,
so as to gain some notion, indeed some feel, not only for how other people
see things, but what orientation they have, what angles they take, what
motivations drive them to do what they do and to try becoming the people
they aim to be. This, good friends, is perhaps the most important task
of the liberal arts, which are the imaginative skills we require to liberate
ourselves from egocentrism, from ethnocentrism, from xenophobia, from Emerson’s
own American Exceptionalism, to a grasp of the integrity of those
who take stands with which we differ, or about which we are indifferent;
to an appreciation of the claims and the obligations residing
in each of us. The liberal arts lure us beyond current conventions,
not to the nonconventional, but to the newly conventional, the newly humanizing.
To reach for this kinship and for this excess of spirit is to undergo something
like new birth; it is to acquire a new relationship with all experience.
To believe in the possibility of this transformation is to be glad that
the world exists; and to be glad to exercise our responsiveness
to the world as it exists.
To be sure, empathy cannot abolish distance; another’s ecstasies and agonies are not one’s own. This is one of the reasons why democracy must remain individualistic. But Whitman’s overdramatizations encourage us each to observe his or her own suffering and joy as from a distance, and to extend democratic individuality as much as possible beyond the sorts of individuality that are sickly self-interested and blindly ambitious. The democratic individual is at his or her most graceful when he or she is most impersonally gracious, most magnanimous. This faith in ourselves and in one another is not a doctrine of spiritual elitism; and it need not be exceptionalist the way the American Transcendentalists tended to be ; it does not defend a way of life in which some must serve so that others may prosper; it promotes a way of life in which each of us who can work do, and in which each of us who can’t can and will get a hand. It makes it possible for each and all of us to go beyond ourselves. As long as misery is absent, all may aspire to that such transcendence; it is up to us, however, to dump overboard as much misery as we can; it is up to us to make this democratic republic come true. To experience new and renewed creation as individuals and in the aggregate is not the privilege of a few, any more than it should be strictly a consolation for the wretched. To experience spiritual transcendence of this democratic republican sort, to experience it in our ordinary lives alone and together, permits and fosters e pluribus unum, one out of many, our nation’s motto. This is still our aspiration; a hope that, as Benjamin Paul Blood once put it, is “ever not quite,” inevitably in the making, never finished, yet to be accomplished. It’ll take as much of our hearts and souls and might as we have to offer, and then more. So get to work, graduates! Good cheer, families and friends! And take care! HSL
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