It would be interesting to know if Kierkegaard had read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, because in that book too we find a counterintuitive connection between the ideal of standing alone and the tendency to regard oneself as a “representative.” Tocqueville was struck by the observation that as hyper-Protestants who reject anything that looks like clerical authority, Americans are expected to be self-sufficient in forming their own judgments about everything. This isn’t understood as a rare accomplishment, or a capacity that one grows into in the course of a life. It is a moral imperative from the get-go, taught in elementary school.
But of course we run into a problem: we are not competent to judge everything for ourselves. We know this; we feel it. We cannot look to custom or established authority, so we look around to see what everyone else thinks. The demand to be an individual makes us feel anxious, and the remedy for this, ironically enough, is conformity. We become more deferential to public opinion.
Here is an example that seems to fit Tocqueville’s insight. The Kinsey Reports on Americans’ sexual practices became objects of intense popular interest, maybe because they arrived (in 1948 and 1953) just as the received norms and mores were loosing their grip. Everyone was left to his or her own devices. People wanted to know if they were “normal,” where the only norms available, the only ones not discredited as “repression” by the pop Freudianism that swept America after the war, were now quantitative. How often do other couples have sex? What’s the average? Is oral sex something that is done by most people? I like to be tied up—am I sick? The normative center of gravity now resides in the middle of a distribution, rather than coming from a religious interdiction or parental guidance, on the one hand, or from a cultivated, proudly antinomian sense of oneself as a pervert and sinner, on the other. This seems to fit Kierkegaard’s rubric of “the death of rebellion,” which is a corollary of the death of reverence and obedience. One takes one’s bearings from the “representative,” in the sense statisticians give to that word.
THE AVERAGED AMERICAN
The birth of social surveys is a fascinating story told by Sarah Igo in The Averaged American.1 Though she doesn’t mention Tocqueville or Kierkegaard, Igo offers a precise and detailed account of the paradoxical cultural logic whereby the ideal of autonomy prepares the way for massification.
The arrival of the first Kinsey Report was a very big deal in 1948. It was “a revolution in the facts Americans knew about one another,” as one commenter put it. The status of these revelations as social scientific facts depended on Kinsey’s assertions of the representativeness of his sample, and likewise, challenges to the report from various quarters, some of them quite alarmed, often took aim at precisely this assertion. On all sides, there was great emotional investment in the question of how representative the respondents in Kinsey’s study were.
Kinsey himself was an interesting character. He had previously been an entomologist, and relied on this fact to present himself as a man of science who just happened to have turned his disinterested gaze from beetles to human sexuality. But in fact Kinsey, a respectable professor in the Midwest, had sexual tastes that weren’t very conventional, and his reports appear to have been motivated by a desire to reconcile these two facts. The psychic force driving his efforts came from his hatred of “hypocrisy,” and a desire to liberate the world sexually. Liberation apparently required sincerity, bringing every hidden thing out into the light.
After the first report was published, people were eager to enroll themselves as subjects for the second study; there was a long waiting list. Igo writes that “within Kinsey’s vast correspondence can be found thousands of individuals seeking and finding statistical reassurance.” The psychic benefit sought, and apparently found, by participating in these surveys, Igo writes, was “membership in a community of potentially similar, though anonymous, others.” The reports thus served a “mass psychotherapeutic function,” and Kinsey embraced his unofficial role as therapist. The format of the survey structured a respondent’s identification with these anonymous others by way of categories such as black, professional, upper-class, educated (to list the tags chosen by a woman who wrote in Ebony about her experience of being interviewed by Kinsey’s team). Igo writes that “individuals were coming to view themselves through the social scientific categories [Kinsey] and others had made available.”
This new mode of self-understanding was made poignantly clear by the many instances in which participants would write to Kinsey later to follow up, update, elaborate, and correct the sexual histories and behaviors they had presented during their interview (which nominally lasted two hours, but often stretched far longer). Igo suggests many participants came to view their Kinsey interview as their “real” history—as the truth about themselves, which was otherwise elusive—and therefore they wanted the record to be complete. There was apparently a certain freedom in narrating oneself that came from knowing that, as one participant reported, “you are not making an impression, only a statistic.” That is, you are not registering as an individual, and are therefore relieved of the embarrassment that might be natural to a conversation with a stranger about your sexual behavior. Another participant said that in being interviewed by Kinsey, “it seems, after a while, like you’re talking about someone else instead of yourself.”
Igo suggests that in having us talk about ourselves in this way, social surveys played an educative role. They prompted Americans to take an “objective” stance toward their own lives; to view their experiences “like specimens, using the social scientist’s words instead of their own to tell themselves who they were.” Such a “neutral vocabulary,” as the pollster George Gallup called it, encouraged those who adopted it to become third parties to themselves, to use Kierkegaard’s formula.
One transvestite wrote to Kinsey to offer his sexual history with the preamble “You will find my case history somewhat typical.” Presumably this was an attempt to appear sophisticated when writing to the famous social scientist. What sophistication consists in here is not being overly impressed with a sense of your own singularity.
The story of survey research begins in the 1920s and 1930s with George Gallup and Elmo Roper, names still familiar to us from the reports that continue to issue from their firms. Polling was presented by its champions as a means of “constructing rational citizens,” Igo writes, and of making democracy more democratic. As Europe slid into fascism and communism, Gallup in particular was very energetic in publicizing his faith in the people to make good decisions. Igo writes that “pollsters’ democratic rhetoric relied on a notion of individuals able to speak and know their own minds.” But to speak and know their own minds, people first have to be removed from their social setting (just as in the Lockean thought experiment about a “state of nature” that we considered in the Interlude: a state where there is no such thing as authority and one obeys only the dictates of one’s own reason).
Gallup and Roper forged “a purely statistical public from groups of randomly selected strangers.” This aggregation of isolated strangers was something new, very different from any actual community. Igo writes that the pollsters “employed scientific sampling to better hear ‘the man in the street’ but instead created an averaged-out and abstracted public opinion that severed attitudes from their source.”
The “rational” citizen is apparently a decontextualized citizen, precisely the opposite of the situated self. The pollsters’ educative program matches Kant’s exhortations to view oneself as a representative of the generic category “rational being.” The anthropology that is tacit in polling also resonated with cultural currents first identified by Tocqueville, for example Americans’ readiness to pick up and move to someplace far away, where they don’t know anybody. In an influential 1991 study, social psychologists who study differences across cultures note the “abstract, situation-free self-descriptions that form the core of the American, independent self-concept,” as compared with the Japanese, for example.2
In the somewhat self-aggrandizing rhetoric of the pollsters, their work of helping respondents to know their own minds by eliciting their views in a setting free of social pressures empowered Americans against the rise of various would-be authoritarians of the left and right. This note of democratic valor resounded in Kinsey’s project too, where the authoritarians in question were various species of sexual moralists. But this liberation from the kind of cultural authority that operates in actual communities—in religions, in locales, in families—seems to lead to a feeling of isolation, which can be alleviated only by discovering that one is “normal.” And so the expert of normalcy becomes the new priest, salving our souls with the offer of statistical communion.
An especially perceptive contemporary commenter on the Kinsey Reports, Lionel Trilling, suggested that they established “the community of sexuality,” a community that we discover in the numbers. “We must assure ourselves by statistical science that the solitude is imaginary,” Trilling wrote. The numbers offer solace.
THE STACKABLE SELF
But now the story of surveys takes an interesting twist. They didn’t simply have a homogenizing effect; through abstraction and reaggregation they could also have a differentiating effect. In doing marketing research, Igo writes, polling firms eventually discovered that “their object was nothing so vague as ‘the public,’ but … more focused demographic groups.” Likewise, social statistics “prompted some to imagine themselves into new collectives or forge a minority consciousness.” We might call these the first virtual communities, composed of individuals who are spatially separated and do not know one another. For example, Kinsey’s data on the prevalence of homosexuality became a tool in the movement for gay rights, and a sort of epistemic foundation for gay identity politics. Igo writes that social scientific data “created novel possibilities for community and self-assertion even as they placed new constraints on self-fashioning.” Those new constraints on self-fashioning arose from the fact that, in their maturity, social surveys became the educative basis not for a mass society, but rather for a society in which people were assigned to various boxes. This encouraged “new links between strangers even as it eroded older bonds of family, religion, and locale.”3 As the inhabitant of a family, religion, or locale, a gay person was likely to stay in the closet. With the rise of identity politics, one jumped out of the closet and into the box.
The stackable self is evidently one that is especially receptive to the categories of self-understanding offered by social science, which may or may not be more confining than the communal ones they displace. To assume that they are in every case less distorting of a person’s lived experience is to make an assumption that is worth revisiting in light of the arguments developed in this book: that settled forms of social authority act only as impediments to the authentic self. This assumption tends to be accompanied by another: that science is inherently liberating, and therefore in the service of this authentic self.
Igo notes that Kinsey “sought to uncover how ordinary Americans actually behaved in their sexual lives so as to liberate them from social conventions, but one of the key consequences of his Sexual Behavior studies, and the national discussion surrounding them, was the public shaping of ‘normal’ private selves.”4 Kinsey sought to remove the stigma from sexual practices thought to be deviant by showing their prevalence. The effect of this publicity was to make no place safe from the idea of normalcy.5
INDIVIDUALITY IS PASSÉ
Merely to raise concern about the fate of individuality in contemporary culture is probably to appear old-fashioned. It would seem to be a 1950s through 1970s sort of preoccupation, the stuff of The Catcher in the Rye or the cigarette and hi-fi advertisements in your dad’s old Playboys. “Conformity” was the great worry of half a century ago.
Now we are fascinated with “the wisdom of crowds” and “the hive mind.” We are told that there is a superior global intelligence arising in the Web itself. This collective mind is more meta, more synoptic and synthetic, than any one of us, and aren’t these the defining features of intelligence? Of course all this crowd-loving lines up pretty well with Silicon Valley’s distaste for the concept of intellectual property, and with the fact that there is a lot more money to be made as an aggregator of “content” than as a producer of it. (It is the aggregator who controls advertisers’ access to consumers’ eyeballs.)
“Ideology” could be taken (somewhat narrowly) to mean an idea that happens to line up with the material interests of those who espouse it. The alignment gives added psychic force to the idea, all the more so if the champions of the idea remain unself-conscious about this connection. Their enthusiasm tends to reverberate outward, and is adopted by others who have no interests at stake and therefore look naive for adopting it.
I sometimes go to the library at a well-regarded local university to write. Like most universities these days, this one is very diligent about locating itself at the cutting edge of every trend. When you get a cup of coffee, it comes with a sleeve. On this sleeve, the university takes the opportunity to profile student success stories. Recently I got a sleeve with a picture of a student in the continuing studies program. The caption read, “A master’s degree allowed her to progress from writer to content expert.” Apparently the young woman “progressed” from being a writer to someone who aggregates bits of other people’s writing. To me that sounds more like defeat. In countless little ways, any single one of which seems trivial, this liberal arts college is unthinkingly repeating bits of Silicon Valley ideology that would seem to undermine the rationale for studying the liberal arts. The university has become “the brilliant ally of its own gravediggers,” to borrow a phrase from Milan Kundera.6
Jaron Lanier criticizes what he calls “digital Maoism,” a “new online collectivism” that shows up, for example, in the way Wikipedia is regarded and used, and is the guiding spirit of firms such as Google as well. The analogy with Maoism is quite apt and precise. The ideologists of the Web have always been antielitists, eager to brush the “gatekeepers” of knowledge into the dustbin of history. Let a thousand flowers bloom. The problem, of course, is that it’s hard for these leaders of the people to make money off scattered flowers. Better to “have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force,” Lanier writes.7 The Party must be strong for the People to be strong.
Writing about the Web in 2006, Lanier said that “in the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle.” He was referring to “consensus Web filters” that assemble material from other sites that are themselves aggregators of other sites. “We are now reading what a collectivity algorithm derives from what other collectivity algorithms derived from what collectives chose from what a population of mostly amateur writers wrote anonymously.”
Lanier points out that these developments aren’t confined to online culture. The elevation of the collective through the fetish of aggregation is “having a profound influence on how decisions are made in America,” in government agencies, corporate planning departments, and universities. He reports that, as a consultant, he used to be asked to “test an idea or propose a new one to solve a problem. In the last couple years I’ve been asked to work quite differently. You might find me and the other consultants filling out survey forms or tweaking edits to a collective essay.”
Lanier suggests there are institutional reasons for the appeal of collectivism in large organizations: “If the principle is correct, then individuals should not be required to take on risks or responsibilities.” This is especially attractive given that “we live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member. Every individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta aggregation ritual.”
In his own participation in such rituals, Lanier reports that “what I’ve seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions, and an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an institution.”
Let’s put this development in a larger context, the better to see its continuity with the cultural logic we have identified in other settings. With the Reagan/Thatcher revolution of the 1980s, the figure of the entrepreneur came to be central to our economic self-image. Individual initiative was the measure of personal value, and the hierarchical business firm came to be derided as hidebound in any number of business bestsellers. The new ideal was that every employee, from top to bottom, should have the entrepreneurial spirit, and display the virtues of autonomous behavior. Of course, employees now faced the hazards of entrepreneurship as well: heightened competition with one another, and indeed with workers in distant countries. The concept of loyalty was replaced with mobility. The expectation of continuity—of having a career, based on the steady accumulation of experience and expertise—was revealed as nothing more than cowardice. The narrative arc of work was dissolved into the isolated moments of an eternal present, each equally fraught with opportunity and insecurity.
This atomization of workers in the eighties through the aughts likely prepared the way for the new collectivism that Lanier has identified. Of course, this sounds paradoxical. But it is a paradox that lies at the very heart of individualism, identified by Tocqueville long ago as he traveled around America.
One thing that Tocqueville saw when he came to America was high levels of mobility and opportunity. This is part of what he called the “democratic social condition,” which we considered earlier. For all its benefits, it brings with it insecurity: you can fall as well as rise. In the relatively rigid social systems of Europe, there wasn’t much prospect of one’s fortunes altering in any decisive way. This offered a certain amount of freedom from the need to manage appearances. Appearances didn’t have to be generated anew each day by performing one’s social value, or voicing the correct opinions. In Europe Tocqueville saw greater freedom of thought, a greater diversity of human types, and, for all the limitations imposed on the press, less prudish self-censorship among writers.
Our concept of a self that is mobile because not situated or limited in any decisive way by its current circumstances—the decontextualized “rational citizen” idealized by the polling firms, and by Locke and Kant—is tied to a certain picture of human agency: action “has no other source than the agent who accomplishes it and who takes sole responsibility for it,” as Ehrenberg put it. This individualist view of action is hard to square with the experience of, say, working as a middle manager at the corporate headquarters of Best Buy. In such a setting, the chain of cause and effect is likely to be fairly opaque to you; there are issues in play and decisions being made that you are clueless about, because they are dealt with higher up in the food chain. In Shop Class as Soulcraft I reported the sociological finding that workers in such a position find ingenious ways to avoid taking responsibility—mainly, by making their language as vague and empty as possible, so as to preserve for themselves a maximum flexibility to reinterpret their utterances retroactively, should the circumstances demand it. Apparently, the new strategy is to hide behind “a wiki or some other Meta aggregation ritual,” as Lanier says. And indeed it makes good sense to shy from offering up, and standing behind, your thoughts and utterances as your own if doing so could result in having something pinned on you. Instead one mouths the currently prevailing view of things while putting on the necessary dramatic performance—of individual initiative.
Note how well these developments fit with Tocqueville’s idea that the massification of the American mind is a direct response to the burden of individual responsibility; to the feeling that you have been cut off from identifiable, responsible sources of authority outside yourself and must stand alone without guidance or support. Under this condition you take shelter wherever you can, and there is safety in numbers. But now you find that you have become subject to an amorphous form of authority: a gray fog that emanates from the collective, which nobody takes responsibility for.
It is hard to see where this fog is coming from. It is hard to avoid it, and hard to take issue with it. Kind of like the music coming out of speakers in the ceiling.
LOOKING PAST THE PRESENT
When the sovereignty of the self requires that the inheritance of the past be disqualified as a guide to action and meaning, we confine ourselves in an eternal present. If subjectivism works against the coalescing of communities and traditions in which genuine individuals can arise, does the opposite follow? Do communities that look to established forms for the meanings of things somehow cultivate individuality? This is the theme of the next section.
But here we come up against a methodological problem. On the one hand, to speak about “community” in general is to be led almost necessarily into idealistic blather. This would not be very informative, and would also tend to alarm some people: those who maintain the enlightener’s vigilance against the threat that communal authority poses to individual self-fashioning. It would be easy to trigger this defensive reflex while also tickling a contrary sentimental reflex among those who long for “lost community.” But I don’t want merely to press PLAY on a dusty old culture war cassette.
On the other hand, to avoid generalities and go deep into the particulars of some community of skilled practice requires getting very technical, because it is precisely the details that the members themselves care about, and we are trying to understand what moves them. The problem is that I can assume in the reader only so much tolerance for the history and technical details of Baroque pipe organs. Organ making is not a topic that I had the least interest in myself before stumbling upon a group of people who happen to have made these instruments the focus of their working lives.
In the pages that follow I have tried to manage this dilemma, on the assumption that the reader is interested in the ways an inheritance can situate the self, and facilitate the development of an earned independence of judgment. Whether the following account avoids the pitfalls of “nostalgia” you will have to judge yourself. In any case, the sentimentalism that any depiction of craftwork naturally evokes is, I believe, only the most superficial layer of what is appealing in the scenes I have tried to capture.