The European Dream (22 page)

The public baths were held up to scorn by Protestant Reformers, who worried that open displays of nudity invited licentious behavior. Bathing became a private affair by the eighteenth century in many parts of Europe.

Human urination and defecation were also made private during this period. In the medieval era, men would regularly relieve themselves in public places. Visitors to the Louvre during the reign of King Louis XIV “relieved themselves not only in the courtyard, but also on the balconies, staircases, and behind doors.”
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By the early modern era, the sight and smell of human waste had become a source of embarrassment and disgust, and steps were taken in cities across Europe to move these bodily functions behind closed doors. London was the first city to construct an underground sewer system, in the late nineteenth century, and to introduce flush toilets.
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The disgust over bodily animal smells was also used to create greater distance between the rich and the poor. Well before Marx penned his theory on the class divide, the emerging bourgeoisie was already creating its own self-justification for separating the classes. The urban and rural poor were said to emanate an animal stench, thus reinforcing the idea that they were little removed from brute animals. The emerging middle class began to use the term “the dung man” to refer to the poor. The new olfactory boundaries erected around the poor and laboring people proved far more effective than philosophical treatises in separating the classes and justifying the continued exploitation of the masses by a new business elite. If the poor were no better than brute animals, there was no reason why they couldn’t be exploited in like fashion, with no more concern than one might feel in the yoking of an ox to a cart.
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Changes in table manners, living arrangements, family life, sexual activity, and hygiene probably did more to create the sense of the rational, detached, self-possessed, autonomous individual than all of the scholarly tomes of Enlightenment philosophers. These changes in personal behavior also effected an even more profound change in human consciousness that is not always given sufficient attention, but without which the modern era would have been an impossibility. Although seemingly contradictory, the new bourgeois man and woman who were the products of these fundamental behavioral changes were, at one and the same time, both more individualized and autonomous and yet more tightly integrated into a conformist-oriented culture than any other people in history. How was this feat accomplished?

Periods in history follow a path not too dissimilar from the one that individual human beings follow in their own life journeys. Passages in life are marked by the increasing differentiation of the self from the whole—first the infant’s struggle to claim his or her own identity separate from the mother; later the adolescent’s partial separation from the family; and in early adulthood, the individual’s claim to an independent personhood. Each stage in the differentiation process is accompanied by a new, more complex integration into an ever more expansive set of social and environmental relationships. The passages of life are marked by a sophisticated balancing act between ever increasing individual claims and ever greater social obligations.

The creation of the bourgeois man and woman is a good illustration of the process at work. While differentiation has been part and parcel of human development from the very beginning of our journey, it wasn’t until the modern era that the individual claim to independence became so totalized. The idea of an autonomous individual whose freedom lay in the ability to accumulate wealth and exclude others from his material domain was so extreme that it threatened the dissolution of the social nature of human life and a descent back into Hobbes’s nightmarish war of all against all. While Enlightenment philosophers placed their emphasis on the merits of differentiation, they presented no vision of how such anarchic behavior could be regulated to ensure against a meltdown of the social fabric. Instead, most scholars at the time—Rousseau and his followers excluded—cast their lot with Adam Smith’s glib suggestion that in a market economy, each individual pursues his or her own self-interest and that even though such behavior might appear selfish, it’s only by the maximizing of such self-interest that the general welfare is advanced. A dubious proposition.

The real brilliance of the new bourgeois class was the way it balanced the potential anarchy of individualism with a new, sophisticated understanding of one’s social obligations. The great twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber glimpsed the significance of the new mental acrobatics in his examination of the role that Protestant Reformation theology played in creating the internal controls that allowed unbridled capitalism to flourish without sacrificing the social order.

Recall how the Protestant theologian John Calvin replaced the external order imposed by the Church on each individual with an internally imposed order that was far more strict. Every action at every moment of a believer’s life had to conform to God’s glory. All personal conduct must, therefore, be perfectly controlled and ordered. Lapses, respites, and doubts were all signs of nonelection and therefore to be avoided. Calvin’s doctrine transformed the unsystematic and somewhat casual way of life of medieval Europe into the methodically planned life characteristic of the new bourgeois class. Self-control replaced church control in daily affairs.

The bourgeois man and woman created their own private despotism over personal behavior. They learned to be self-controlled, self-sacrificing, and self-possessed, to be diligent and industrious. At first, these values were a way of living out their faith. Eventually, the religious intent fell by the wayside in Europe, but the values remained and became a critical element in fostering the capitalist ethos. Never before in history had people willingly imposed on themselves such utter restraints. In the past, control over people’s behavior was more often enforced externally by extended family, or by governments and elites, and backed up by coercion and violence. In an era given over to the creation of the autonomous individual, each person now became his or her own ruler, governing his or her own behavior with the kind of fervor that, if imposed by an external political force, would have been considered harsh and heavy-handed. The bourgeois ethos proved effective. Everyone learned to balance his or her newly won autonomy and independence with self-imposed responsibilities to society.

In America, unlike Europe, the integration process continued to remain attached to its religious roots. Convinced that they were indeed the “chosen people,” Americans were far more disposed to balancing their newly won autonomy with a shared obedience to a higher authority rather than a personal responsibility to their fellow human beings. For Americans, self-control, self-sacrifice, and industrious behavior were more likely to be exercised to please God—and self—than to fulfill one’s social obligations. In this sense, many Americans remained true to the Protestant ethic, long after Europeans had passed it by. It was this divergence that set off the American Dream from its European antecedents.

Americans found no contradiction in living in two seemingly contradictory realms at the same time: one characterized by religious zeal and faith in eternal salvation, the other by Enlightenment secularism, rational behavior, and the belief in material progress—the contrary worlds of John Winthrop and Benjamin Franklin. What united both Reformation theology and Enlightenment philosophy was the premium each placed on the autonomy of the individual. Reformation theologians railed against the papal authority of the Church and admonished their fellow Christians that priests were imperfect like all other human beings and therefore could not serve as divine intermediaries. Martin Luther, John Calvin, and their successors argued that the Church’s interpretation of biblical doctrine was no more authoritative than that of every other Christian and that each individual’s relationship to God is ultimately a personal experience. The Protestant Reformation sought to dethrone the Church hierarchy and elevate each believer, making every human being equal in the eyes of the Lord. The Enlightenment philosophers elevated the individual as well, but their reasons for doing so were more bound up in ideas about rational human behavior. The status of the autonomous individual, however, remains to this day the common link between these two great historic streams.

Americans are arguably the most individualistic people on Earth, both because of our deep religious convictions and our materialistic ambitions. That’s why Americans continue to be so anti-authoritarian in nature. We don’t like bosses of any kind and refuse to humble ourselves at the feet of politicians, business potentates, or, for that matter, any higher authority, with the exception of God on high. In America, every person thinks of her- or himself as the equal of every other person.

Although the idea of the autonomous individual allows Americans to be both religious and secular, faith oriented and rationally driven, living in both the Reformation and Enlightenment worlds can play havoc with one’s sense of teleology. While the Reformation side of the American character calls on each individual to experience the suffering of Christ in this world in return for salvation in the next, the Enlightenment side beckons every American to pursue happiness in the here and now in the name of human progress.

Europeans were less schizophrenic in this regard and eventually abandoned their religious zeal, leaving them only their Enlightenment ideology. And even that, in turn, was subsequently compromised by their deep misgivings about man’s perfectibility and the inevitability that unfettered market forces would automatically lead to unlimited material progress for all.

It was Americans, then, who not only became the most enthusiastic disciples of the Protestant Reformation theology and the most ardent supporters of Enlightenment ideology but also the keenest champions of individual autonomy. Europeans, because of their long history of more dense spatial arrangements and paternalistic and communal ways of living, never fully embraced the idea of the lone self to the extent Americans would on the sparsely settled frontiers of a vast new continent. Americans, on the other hand, have, throughout our history, paid homage to the individual in popular myth, literature, and in virtually every human endeavor. The American Dream was never meant to be a shared experience but, rather, was meant to be an individual journey. In a peculiar sense, the American way of life became an extreme caricature of European ideas that sprang forth and enjoyed a period of influence in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, only to be tempered by new countervailing forces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that reflected Europe’s earlier paternalistic and collectivist roots.

The “New World,” then, is a bit of a misnomer. We Americans continue to live out a dream whose roots lie deep in Europe’s past, many of whose central tenets and assumptions no longer hold much sway in a world far removed in space and time from the historical conditions that gave rise to them.

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HE VAST CHANGES in spatial and temporal consciousness and the birth of the rational, autonomous individual transformed European life over a period of several hundred years. There is, however, one other institutional development that emerged alongside all of the other conceptual changes—an institution that gave concrete shape and meaning to the rest and provided the indispensable linchpin for the birth of the capitalist economy and the rise of the nation-state.

The invention and codification of a private property regime in the late medieval to early modern era became the foundation for the pursuit of the Enlightenment utopian vision of unlimited material progress. Private property rights became the essential legal tool for separating the individual from the human collective as well as from the rest of nature. A private property regime institutionalized the new spatial and temporal consciousness and made possible the modern notions of autonomy and mobility as well as the negative idea of freedom as personal independence and self-reliance. Its stormy development, and the equally fierce resistance to it, has continued, until very recently, to be the defining dynamic of European politics and the politics of much of the rest of the world.

The institutionalization of private property certainly would have to be considered one of Europe’s most important contributions. Without a mature, regulated private property regime in place, market capitalism could not exist and the nation-state would never have survived. This last point needs to be emphasized. The very concepts of a modern market and nation-state are inseparably linked to a private property regime. The purpose of markets is to allow for the free exchange of property. The primary function of the state, in turn, is to protect the private property rights of its citizens.

Europe created the idea of the states’ new role, only to have second thoughts about the matter when so many of its destitute population were systematically left out of the new economic arrangement. Americans, however, bought the idea of the states’ new mission from the get-go and never wavered from the view that the primary function of government is to safeguard the private property holdings of the people. Tocqueville took note of Americans’ fierce attachment to private property rights on his short visit to the new country. He asked, rhetorically,

Once again, Americans became the purest advocates of a European idea, later partially abandoned by Europeans themselves, as they begin to rein in private property rights with a commitment to socialist reforms. Knowing, then, how the private property regime emerged and understanding its critical role in the birth of modern capitalist markets and nation-state governance, as well as the different ways it was embraced in the Old World and in America, are essential to coming to grips with the full meaning of the changes now taking place in Europe as it prepares to move beyond both these pillars of the modern age to become the first post-territorial governing region in a network-linked global economy.