The Pragmatist Mandate

Modern individualism, born with the Modern Age, enhanced by the secular nation-state, intertwined with the tenets of pragmatism, is one of the foundations of liberal democracy. Beyond basic humanism, and a faith in the inventive capacities of the human mind, it motivates the individual human being to adhere to a program of self-serving material immediacy, in the physical as much as in the spiritual realm.

The pragmatist mandate of catalytic self-interest proposes the individual pursuit of happiness as a great engine for securing prosperity, learning, mutual understanding, moral decision, and the defense of liberty, all of the elements that maintain a system whereby the rights of the individual are protected. In essence, the unfettered pursuit of happiness protects and establishes the right to the pursuit of happiness. The system serves the individual and expands the possibility of achieving real fulfillment in the transient universe.

This theory, when distilled to its apparent essence, in this way, ignores the combined effects of power, greed, and industry, which can unite to undermine individual liberty in unprecedented ways, translating self-interest into social darwinism. It presupposes a natural balance that will always offset the momentum of the powerful. The effect is that, within the meritocracy set up by modernist individualism, some triumph while others do not. And merit, talent, and dedication, are not the only factors at play.

With the escalation of industrial integration and production beyond early pragmatist imagining, this oversight allows for the creation of a system in which large masses of people are denied the theoretical benefits of individualism and, by extension, democracy. With the advent of revolutionary information-gathering technologies in recent decades, the Information Revolution, the problem is only magnified. We have lived through this particular organizational and economic revolution, so we can understand the shift in consciousness and in breadth of expectation that comes with such periods of change.

At what point did the Industrial Revolution signal the fulfillment of the Modern Age? At what point, and to what extent, did it implement the true principles of Modernity? At what point did it, does it, will it, nudge those principles into irrelevance?

Individualism Before Industry

It has been suggested that the Modern Age began with Descartes, and his most famous meditation: Cogito ergo sum... I think, therefore I am. Essentially, I know that I exist, because I can conceive of my identity. The individual, the unique identity to be cherished, cultivated and protected, is born in the space of that meditation. Of course, the roots of this thinking go far back, past the obvious moral links to Augustine, to Christianity itself, and to Platonic and mythological Greek thought. The tradition of at least a poetic notion of the rights or responsibilities of the individual human being to govern his or her destiny is ancient and universal, but the Modern sense of the individual is said to have its beginning in Descartes' recognition of the inner self not as a soul, per se, but as an ego, more generally.

We are examining now the birth of the individual as the human phenomenon, the experience to define the Age, a philosophical moment. The full-blown Industrial Revolution was much later, and may be a direct descendant of the ideas of early Modernism, which triggered a boom in scientific study of the mechanics of the physical universe. But beyond its potential for liberating individual human beings from some of the drudgery of sustaining life, mechanized industry is not necessarily an originary organ of Modernist culture, however closely its eventuality was linked to Modernist aspirations.

The philosophies that led to the research that led to the Industrial Revolution would have to recognize certain kindred beginnings, and the two historical moments would have to forge a joint path from then on. The conflicts, however, inherent in this conjunction were already evident in the rebellion of the American colonists against the British Crown in the late 18th century. The Industrial Revolution had already arrived, and it had already shown its possible enmity toward the individuals it was meant to serve.

An imperial power was using its technological and economic might to oppress an entire continent, through economic, political and military means. The American Revolution was an attempt to use the founding ideas of the Modern Age together with its new technologies, in order to secure something close to what Enlightenment philosophy called for, i.e. freedom and the right to prosper for every individual. Other revolutions followed, with similar dreams and similar methods, but with varying degrees of success in achieving their stated aspirations.

Even with the Revolution, and its reclaiming of modern individualist ideals, industry would take hold of an ever-greater portion of the average human life. By the middle of the 19th century, the Realist movement in literature had congealed and was devoting its energies to exposing the suffering endured by millions of individuals who lived industrial lives.

Industry, the fruits of industry, and American ideals have been confounded since the beginning, given the extent to which industrial production came to symbolize the economic ingenuity and strength of the new country. But it was the ingenuity that brought us industry, and that was the result of individual pursuit, of more open and liberal education than perhaps anywhere at any time before, of the application of the ideals of modernity to the use of its tools. It was the spirit of individualism that gave us our laws, and industry gave us the armaments to achieve and enforce those laws. Nevertheless, industry has always given power to those who control it, more than to those who make it work.

Vigilance, Mass Culture & Discontent

Individualism, as one of the founding principles of Modernity has had to rally teams of individuals to its defense, to their own defense, against the relentless push inherent in mass industry to shift its resources toward the top. It is so much so that it has become the running joke that one day we might all become 'slaves to the machine', a la 1984, Brave New World, Player Piano, when the system becomes more important than the service it is meant to provide.

Ostensibly, technology empowers the individual, gives voice to the voiceless, 'levels the playing field', but not in every way, and not inevitably. There is always the risk that too much blind faith in mass culture will allow for the individual perspectives within the culture, which are the source of cultural wealth, resilience, and purpose, to disappear, to hold no weight, to lose 'relevance'. After all, millions of young people already can't understand why they shouldn't be allowed to record their favorite music for free... many have actually become hostile toward the complaints put forth by their own favorite artists that they deserve payment for their creative work. Federal and international copyright law dictates as much. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 27, provides that the right to such compensation is a precondition of civilized existence.

The mass culture, the common outcry of millions of misinformed individuals, in this case, works to undermine the individual. There may one day be a way of providing free access to recorded music, but it might be littered with soundbite commercial inclusions, corrupting the message or the creative integrity of the artist.

Industry, technology, because its end is convenience, can have the effect of reducing the length and breadth of individual vision, despite its being designed to empower the user. The resulting meiopic tunnel-vision then serves to undermine individual liberty, because the comfortable individual often sees no reason for vigilance.

Life, in the 21st century is more 'convenient' than ever, and yet there is more emotional dissatisfaction than at any time in which we have recorded such data. The proliferation of anti-depressant drugs, tranquilizers, drug use, increased frequency in career change, political disengagement, and most lamentably, global terror, are but some indicators of this problem. Have we instituted the principles of individualism in such a way that they fail to provide the actual fulfillment of individual lives?

Meaningful Exclusions

A lack of knowledge, a lack of understanding, is a contraint on freedom, for everyone. One has far less power over the machinery of one's destiny if one has no knowledge of the functioning of that machinery. The machinery of the social sphere is primarily a function of the relationships between individuals, groups and large powers. And so, if one lives in close contact with a population that is afforded little study or understanding of the truth of the system in which they interact, one is in fact living with a greater degree of chaos, disunity and discontent.

The solution cannot be to program the masses; emotion, as a staple of human experience, would never allow for an enlightened, stable, civil society, which is also programmatically uniform. The nature of the individual is that the human mind constructs itself, mounts its own vision of the universe, and must follow the rigors of its own programming. It is education, the offering and cultivating of information, discourse and understanding, that civilizes the individual and allows for the possibility of a fulfilling life.

But, it is not a universal system of education, with open and tolerant standards for what is included in the curricula, for dynamic discussion and for social mobility, that spurs the advance of modern society forward. It is forward motion itself, inertia as manifest in technological progress, as pursued by a market culture that demands innovation, which is required for speculative profit. It is not a conspiracy; it is not a crime; it is an oversight. There is something exluded from the formula for commercial promotion of the individual in our time.

The exclusion comes with a failure of imagination. The failure of imagination comes with a simplistic understanding of economics, which leads to a flawed definition of the individual. The individual (according the predominant economic theory by which all profit can be measured in tangible resources or prospective gains emerging from those tangible resources) is the consumer is the money spent. This theory actually prefers a certain level of ignorance for the individual, because it allows for manipulation of the more amorphous mind by advertising.

Commonly, the right to choose among products, or to maintain a given material standard of living is portrayed as being equal to the right to an individual pursuit of happiness. Therefore, it is the interests of the powers that create those particular phenomena which are served, in order to protect the rights of the individual to choose and to live comfortably. That in itself is not a problem, except that it tends to replace actual basic protections of the rights of the individual. What passes for a defense of the rights and interests of the individual may be something else entirely.

It its meaningful that in our understanding of the individual, and in the sphere of commercial reasoning, the feelings, the emotional fulfillment, the educational success and the creative opportunities for the individual are not considered as having any real weight or, for that matter, commercial significance.

The Big Question

Is it the responsibility of commercial and political forces to ensure the emotional stability of their constituent individuals? Yes and no. No, because there is no convincing way to ensure such a thing, and an explicit directive to achieve such a goal would likely lead to absurd consqeuences and embarrassing failure. Yes, because although no guarantee of fulfillment in general exists, a basic precondition for the pursuit of happiness is a fair start, and a fair start benefits everyone.

Are the principles of democracy unassailable? If so, are they unassailable as a condition of their existing, or as a condition of our right to enjoy them? Are we modern enough, not truly modern, beyond modernity? Is our engagement with the founding principles of our system of thought and of government authentic enough to achieve the goals we commonly acknowledge as fundamental to the success of our system, i.e. equality, freedom, and prosperity?

It may be the case that by enabling the average individual to be more creative, more involved in the function of the world, more responsible for the direction of government and the use of personal liberty, would produce a more productive, more imaginative, more engaged and more fulfilled society. It will always be an abstract calculation, an indirect effect, a measurement of intangibles, but attention to this fundamental problem of postmodern malaise is a necessary part of civil society in the Information Age.

© 2002 Joseph Robertson