Freddie DeBoer, Progressivism, and Modernity

In a post this morning on gadgetry, Freddie DeBoer makes a broader point:

There’s a great insecurity underneath the snark and smug superiority that attends to most enforcement of gadget worship, which is part of a larger tendency on the Internet: people who so desperately need to have their choices validated that they must deny that other choices exist. What’s clear to me is that, more and more often, people are so insecure, so lacking in self-possession and so toweringly solipsistic, that they need not only to be flattered by media that tells them they are correct in what they choose (whether it’s products or services or media), but that they need to undermine the very idea that other rational, thinking people could make their own adult decisions and make other choices.
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What makes this so frustrating is that a huge part of the point of progress in capitalism is more to choose with how you spend your money.

You know how this goes: “What? You don’t have a [Blackberry/iPhone/Kindle/Hip Bike/Prius/Fill in the Blank/You See How This Works]?!? How do you survive? How do you justify yourself? Don’t you know that [dumbphones/paper books/pickup trucks] aren’t as convenient or as ethical or as fast or as ____!?!”

Let’s all go ahead and admit it, also: We don’t only recognize this in others. Whether it’s our new gadget or favorite brand of PC or neighborhood or favorite Ethiopian joint, we all fall into this cadence sometimes. If we’re being honest, this should feel a bit like looking in the mirror…no matter how much we each profess to love diversity.

As DeBoer notes, it’s not really a gadget-based thing. We can be snarky and smug about damn near anything. I have a few thoughts on this: one about the sociology of the Internet, one about the nature of American progressivism, and a final one on the implications for modernity (They bleed into each other, though. The distinction’s only for organizational purposes).

First of all, it’s an incontrovertible fact that (for many) the Internet exacerbates the human love of homogeneity and solidarity and choice validation. This is always my first thought when I hear pols stomping on about net neutrality and internet freedom. In a certain sense, there’s nothing inherently liberating about the Internet. It makes it possible for individuals to find more like-minded individuals than they would have otherwise; in that same sense, it dulls diversity.

As I’ve noted before, Alexis de Tocqueville argued that American political institutions were great because they required individuals to sit down in community meetings, and on school boards, etc, with whoever else happened to have an interest in the issues at hand. This meant sitting down with your wild-eyed radical neighbors, whether or not you agreed with them. Tocqueville thought that this bred tolerance. In other words, in the real, diverse world of political experience, there’s no Daily Kos message board rallying point. So your neighbor doesn’t have a Kindle? She doesn’t water her lawn? He worships a tree in the backyard? Tough. You still have to find enough common ground to live together. You can’t burn your (literal and figurative) bridges in the face of diversity or disagreement. You’ve got to foster a long-term relationship, because you’ll be living near these same neighbors in the months and years to come. This isn’t always intuitively pleasant, but it’s necessary, and it brings out a respect for individuals that is unique. Tolerance is one of liberalism’s greatest contributions to human political (and social, etc) life.

But the Internet, as you know if you’ve ever read the comments section on any blog/newspaper site/etc, doesn’t work that way. Anonymity is readily available, and there are limited consequences if you start every disagreement at DEFCON 1. You’ll never “see” or “interact” with your opponent ever again. My mother once called internet commenters “emotional drive-by shooters.” Years later, I don’t have a better phrase.

Second, DeBoer’s link between progress and individual freedom suggests something brilliant about American progressivism, something that I’m writing a lot about in both my academic and journalistic pursuits: American progressivism has ALWAYS been about individual self-determination and opportunity FIRST, and community goods SECOND. Conservatives love to point out the early links between American progressivism and democratic socialists, and our current crop of progressive leaders usually responds with vague (if forceful) paeans to the free market. They don’t know their own history.

Look at Dewey’s Individualism Old and New. Look at his pedagogy. Look at Justice Holmes’ opinions on contract law. Progressivism has always been about freeing individuals to make their own choices (There’s a long, detailed, and ultimately incomplete discussion of modern progressives’ failure to make this clear here).

Please note that I’m not claiming that this is The Way Things Should Be or The Right Answer or that progressivism “beats” socialism because of this difference. I’m only pointing out that American progressivism is intellectually and dispositionally different from a socialist approach to politics. It shouldn’t have to answer for socialism’s record or its vices or any such thing (just as it doesn’t benefit from some of socialism’s virtues).

Third (just a brief and mostly-technical footnote), modernity’s metaphysically-untethered political world can get lonely. Without a Church or a Leviathan to set the rules or provide a regime that makes sense of things for humans and breeds a strong unity amongst others, ethics and religion and pretty much everything fractures. All of a sudden, individuals have a litany of choices that they weren’t aware of having before.

A host of political thinkers in the 19th-century recognized this as a constitutive part of modernity. Tocqueville worried that most humans would fall into the same trap that DeBoer identifies: they’d fall prey to their insecurities and solipsistic yearnings, and either isolate themselves entirely from public life OR search for political movements that could restore the pre-modern unity (Cf. these guys). Hegel, meanwhile, thought that modern individualism was the logical consequence of the always-and-already existent human yearning for recognition. He argued that humans are reason-giving creatures that want above all to be understood and taken seriously and recognized as rational (and reasonable) by their peers. For thousands of years, countless political regimes have tried to realize and institute a stable response to this fundamental yearning, but each collapses in anticipation of modern institutions, which alone can satisfy the need. Modernity works because it makes free choice central to its political narrative.

The question, which Tocqueville sees and asks and frets over, is whether or not we enjoy freedom more than the affirmation of others who share our choices. I’m not sure, but I worry.