Alexis de Tocqueville travelled to America in 1831 to initially examine our penal systems. His observations quickly expanded to include the distinctive nature of the American character in contrast to Europeans. He described an American as more rambunctious, independent, and more likely to accept risk. Using sailing ships to illustrate the point, even though the seamanship and vessels were quite similar, American ships got to Canton for a load of tea with one stop at port in a two-year voyage while European voyages consisted of multiple stops. Needless to say, Americans had a higher return-on-investment.
As he writes, “… the European navigator is cautious about venturing onto the high seas. He sets sail only when the weather is inviting.” An American “sets sail while the storm still rages” and “often ends in shipwreck, yet no one else plies the seas as rapidly as he does.” Further, highlighting self-reliance, “Americans are taught from birth that they must overcome life’s woes and impediments on their own.”
Are we the same people as our ancestors? I wonder. Some have concluded that we have been “feminized”, meaning that we increasingly dread risk in the same manner as a mother is apoplectic about the most minimal discomfort to her baby. We might be about as far removed from our 19th century predecessors as the domestic dog (Canis familiaris) is from its gray wolf ancestor (Canis lupus), about 14,000 years, for good or for ill.
Take for instance the ready submission to the wearing of masks in regards to COVID-19. One pundit referred to the compunction for mask wearing as “walking billboards of fear”. She’s right! Many of these people are strolling advertisements of gripping phobias.
The docility doesn’t stop there. It extends to the willing acceptance without questioning of authoritarian decrees for lockdowns, six-foot social distancing, an end to common worship, etc. The meek may inherit the earth, but our inheritance will resemble an existence in a padded cell overseen by a cadre of wardens and guards.
The economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote of the indispensable role of the entrepreneur as economic adventurer. Everyone else rides in his or her wake, not everyone being so compose by temperament or ability. These economic adventurers aren’t mommies but swashbucklers of risk and innovation. We still produce them but they are easily counterbalanced by a growing army of power-hungry “experts” and a growing national population inured and dependent on the credentialed with political power.
The ground has been prepared for a new public ethos. It’s a mental state among a critical mass of the population that hovers between three semi-mystical orders: the cults of safety, the “expert”, and the state who embodies them. Combine the longing for a zero-risk utopia, a class of certified shamans with the hidden gnosis, and an authority with the power to make it happen and you have a society more at home in the World State of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than the Federalist Papers. Safety and little tolerance for risk surpasses every other consideration and the public timidly goes along.
We have a population riddled with the submissive and the dependent, a dependency on the state and its credentialed overseers. The situation cultivates a population in paralysis when the promised services disappear because state and local authorities reneged on their civic responsibility in places like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, New York City, Atlanta, Los Angeles, etc., etc., etc. Few citizens are willing, able, and emotionally ready to stop the annihilation of their communities. They have boxed themselves into a corner with the only recourse being the scramble to flee. Popular docility means that we go from the acceptance of authoritarian decrees to a bewilderment in the face of mobs who rampage with the quiet endorsement of the powerful.
This is not meant to be a piece against the wearing of masks. The use of masks should be, like all mitigations, conditional, conditional, conditional. It should not be a papal bull emanating out of the state capitol or DC. And if it does, there will be moments when the surviving residue of self-reliance and personal responsibility will have to rear its head to check an overweening state.
Can we recover from the stupor inculcated by the modern, progressive state? I don’t know. We are becoming a different breed of citizen. Indeed, are we more subject than citizen?
I hope, I pray that I’m wrong.
RogerG