State vs. individual

I was meaning to write this post today anyway, and now with my recent post on Ayn Rand it seems even more appropriate. Here's a NYT article in which the author, J.M. Bernstein, puts forward an explanation of the Tea Party's seething anger as the disorientation of a jilted lover. In this case the lover is the Tea Party citizenry, which due to recent political and economic events is forced to acknowledge its begrudging dependence on the State for certain aspects of its wellbeing (Social Security, healthcare, roads, etc.). I know, I know, another New York Times analyst bemusedly observing the Tea Party movement as a pathology, proposing fanciful metaphors to explain it away. But I think this article is well done, and I like its bringing to the fore the fact that we live in society, its vindication of the role of collective government in our lives. We are social beings, though our abstracted philosophical discussions in the US often ignore the essential social underpinnings of our life (see my post on Rand, where I touch on the agrarian basis of society that urban intellectuals are often completely unaware of). The pure, independent individual doesn't exist in the 21st-century USA; perhaps it hasn't existed since the dawn of agriculture 10000 years ago, or even before that. And while I don't believe in Hobbes's brutal state of nature except as a theoretical construct (the lawless savages he cites actually lived in pretty highly-structured, cohesive societies), I worry that the anti-State nihilism at the root of Tea Party thought could bring us closer to such a situation of all against all.

Here are some older NYT articles relating to militias and terrorism. Justly or not, I lump the militias and Oklahoma City-type terrorists with Tea Party thought. This could be what the nihilism Bernstein worries about would look like.

Despite my recognition of the role of the State and our social nature as humans, I do like a good fantasy of individualism and living in the wild. Here's an article on people who've decided to live the solitary life. I respect and even romanticize their decision, and I don't attribute it to some antisocial pathology or something. But in the end I know that such a life is not really viable for the world; it's not something that we all can do or should want to do. For me the connection to place is very important, but part of the connection to place is social; a place is the people who live there. So just living by yourself in a place doesn't seem to me to be as enlightening or constructive for the world as living in a place with others. And in fact it seems that for the people interviewed in the article, it's not necessarily a permanent, long-term proposal for how to live. Their living alone in the wild coincides with a particular moment in life. It's not what they've always done, and for many it won't be what they do for the rest of their lives. I think this is reasonable. I can see the attraction of living a solitary, contemplative life for a time, but ultimately I couldn't live with myself if I were only living for myself!