Individualism - to invent your own life
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The Montreal Review, October 2010
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Society, social ideals and education have been modeling our personality since childhood. This is inevitable and we do not think much about the forces behind our "personal progress." We prefer not to think about the bureaucratic rules and regulations that are constantly channelling our lives; we avoid asking the question whether we are heading towards a career and existence that is really good for us.
Who invents our life?
The world pushes us to specialization and refinement of special skills; it makes us, by its own will, obidient participants of the social organism. If we do not follow rules and requirements, if we refuse exams and educations and all bureaucratic procedures, we will drop out from the social fabric; we would be threatened with exclusion, loneliness, and perhaps poverty. These are our fears. Few have the nerves to oppose the gravity of social models. And in the same time, we continue to think about ourselves as individuals. We do this while we are becoming more and more, with the advance of the time and age, brainless and irresolute rings in the elusive social chain.
This is not a problem, many would say. The society seems well functioning; society, like the invisible hand of the market, thinks instead of us. It is comfortable to follow the models and feel secure, why should we run behind dreams. We don't want to be an object of jokes, or called naive...
But who is the society? What is the society? Is it a careful mother or a cruel tyrant? Rousseau answered this question in 1750 with his "Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences." Surprisingly, for this essay he received the prize of the French Academy of Sciences for best responding to the question: "Do the Sciences and the Arts contribute to the corrupting or to improving morals?" Rousseau condemned the "civilized" society as a cruel tyrant suffocating in mother's hug the newborn free man.
Today, Rousseau has followers. One of them, William Deresiewicz, a professor and a regular contributor for The Nation and The New Republic, said recently in an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "as you get deeper and deeper into the funnel, into the tunnel [of specialization and social modulation], it becomes increasingly difficult to remember who you once were... The 19-year-old who could do so many things, and was interested in so many things, has become a 40-year-old who thinks about only one thing. That's why older people are so boring. "Hey, my dad's a smart guy, but all he talks about is money and livers..."
Deresiewicz, who is popular in the academic circles with his rebellious spirit, advises the young people to stop following the "flow". They should stop caring about the artificial rewards of the social system, and learn the art of self-esteem, which means learn the way of becoming independent persons. "It means figuring out what you want for yourself, not what your parents want, or your peers want, or your school wants, or your society wants. Originating your own values... Not simply accepting the life that you've been handed. Not simply accepting the choices you've been handed."
Deresiewicz is frank. And responsible. To ask young people be independent in their thinking and actions would be irresponsible if they are not prepared in advance about the costs and dangers of freedom. "If you're going to invent your own life, Deresiewicz writes, if you're going to be truly autonomous, you also need courage: moral courage. The courage to act on your values in the face of what everyone's going to say and do to try to make you change your mind. Because they're not going to like it. Morally courageous individuals tend to make the people around them very uncomfortable. They don't fit in with everybody else's ideas about the way the world is supposed to work, and still worse, they make them feel insecure about the choices that they themselves have made-or failed to make."
You might be wonder why was Socrates forced to swallow the poison. He was convicted, presumably, for demoralization of youngsters. Reading Deresiewicz I wonder if Socrates spoke the same words to his young friends: "Resist the seductions of the cowardly values our society has come to prize so highly: comfort, convenience, security, predictability, control. These, too, are nets. Above all, resist the fear of failure... I say, don't shy away from the challenging parts of yourself. Don't deny the desires and curiosities, the doubts and dissatisfactions, the joy and the darkness, that might knock you off the path that you have set for yourself..."
--T.S.Tsonchev
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William Deresiewicz's book "A Jane Austen Education" will be published in 2011 by Penguin Press. The quoted article What Are You Going to Do With That? is published in the last October (2010) issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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