American Individualism and American Culture

 I think I have found an idea for "Chasing Ashes" in Matthew B. Crawford’s Why Individualism Fails to Create Individuals.

In the Lockean or Cartesian dispensation that Americans tacitly adopt, tradition is subject to a hermeneutic of suspicion. Our default is to think that inherited wisdom does little more than perpetuate forms of oppression, offered in bad faith as so-called knowledge. But cutting ourselves off from the past in this way, out of a determination not to be duped, we find that we have little ground to stand on to resist the tyranny of the majority. Intellectually, we find ourselves trapped in the present. This amounts to a kind of anti-culture, if we understand the word culture to imply something that grows over time; and witnessing such a cultural deficiency in America led Tocqueville to worry that Americans would be prone to a creeping “soft despotism.”

This seems contradicted by Trump's MAGA. That I think MAGA wants a return to a mythical past does not mean its adherents do not think it was real. 

It also feels congruent with Gore Vidal's view of Americans having historical amnesia. 

One needs to know the rules before one can break them. Teachers can teach us the rules, and, hopefully, encourage critical thinking. If nothing else, they can point the way to critical thinking.

One variation on this is the insistence that all values are merely subjective anyway: There is nothing truly higher that stands in judgment of my own character and capacities. This is to collapse the vertical dimension of reality in order to protect a fragile self-image. This seems to be the upshot of a thoroughly democratic education, and we witness its fruits in the steady erosion of competence.

Liberal democracy, as distinguished from democracy simpliciter, is a mixed regime that includes aristocratic elements. It needs to protect the zones of intellectual and moral formation—in particular, the family, the school and the university—the must rely upon rank and authority if they are to do the work of creating citizens capable of self-government.

Self-government must include critical thinking - how else can we avoid being the dupes of demagogues?

Oh, a quick bit about teachers - I mean to limit them to those employed in our schools. I recommend Henry David Thoreau as a possible teacher.

sch 10/13